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    • Tarik Skubal loves to troll opponents, and his teammates love it
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    Tarik Skubal loves to troll opponents, and his teammates love it

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    CLEVELAND — It’s not just the things that make Tarik Skubal the best starting pitcher in baseball. While it helps to tickle 100 mph as a lefty, you can follow that with an annoying changeup, throwing in a slider that’s as fast as mortals with fastballs.

    It’s what he does for the Detroit Tigers when he’s on the mound, and in the dugout and, most memorably, walking from the mound to the dugout. But ask him to recount his increasingly meme-worthy moments of competitive howling and gesturing, and the Tigers ace draws a blank.

    “Yeah, that was…” he began Monday night after throwing the game of his life to help his club tie the Guardians in the ALDS. “I don’t really know where I was in those situations.”

    For the very best of us, the distance between reality and euphoria is as great as the distance to Mars, and when the world’s most competitive athletes are asked to remember a detail in that space, they can’t.

    For example, they are used up. Mostly of the journey that so few of us ever take.

    Skubal is the frontrunner for the American League’s Cy Young Award, and he got to this place and stage because he combines an arm from heaven with an accountant’s eye for detail and a sergeant’s drive for routine. This way he can retell a pitch series from a month ago.

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    Or the last at-bat he had against a speedy third baseman, as he did Monday night when he talked about how well the Guardians’ José Ramírez hit him.

    But those are the details stored in the left hemisphere of the brain, where math merges with science and logic, and where the strategy of attacking hitters is stored. The right side controls the fist pumps, so to speak, and the guttural sounds and beginnings of humanity’s screams that indicate relief.

    Or elation.

    Or both.

    There is power in that sound, and in the energy it takes to create it. Skubal’s teammates definitely hear it.

    “It’s unbelievable,” said Kerry Carpenter, who might have used the same word to describe his series-changing, two-out, two-strike, three-run home run in the top of the ninth inning. “His emotion… he is our leader. Every inning he goes out there – even when he got in trouble – no one in our dugout thought he wasn’t going to get out.

    The escapes unleash Skubal’s most epic primal scream. Or his most devilish reactions to opposing crowds. Not since Bill Laimbeer has a Detroit athlete walked off the playing field with so much crackling – and cackling – contempt.

    After escaping the runners on the corners with one out in the sixth, Skubal walked — no, at walking pace — toward the dugout with his head high, his arms outstretched and his hands gesticulating. “Come on!”

    As in: Give it to me. Everything you have. I will taunt you, absorb jeering and contempt… and use it as fuel.

    If skill and work give players a chance in the big leagues, confidence and composure give them a chance to stick around, and then make hay and make history, not that Skubal broke any records Monday night. Rather, his imprint is ethereal, a sharp mind, and his teammates embrace it.

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    “The way he lights our team up and the way he goes out there and executes and gets ground balls when he needs to, gets strikeouts when he needs to, it’s fun to watch,” Carpenter said, “ and I’m glad he’s on my team and he’s my leader.”

    You hear that to a man in the Tigers’ clubhouse, especially in a corner manned by the Tigers’ manager.

    “When you watch,” AJ Hinch said, “you wonder, ‘When’s the big moment?’ “When’s the big strikeout?” ‘When is the big field?’ ‘How playful will he be with the crowd, especially on the road?’”

    Playful?

    That’s probably not a word the audience would use, but it’s hard to know what’s going on in Skubal’s brain as he does that. Especially because he doesn’t know it himself.

    “I’ll be honest,” he said, laughing, as he spoke about the movement to the crowd. ‘I don’t know what that was. I don’t know what that was. I’ve never done that before in my life.”

    Skubal turned sheepish when asked what he was thinking – and what he thinks in general – as he leaves the mound after breaking out of a traffic jam in a high-pressure moment.

    “I probably shouldn’t say bad words with cameras pointed at me with kids watching, but it was just emotion, raw emotion,” he said.

    As for the environment at Progressive Field, with all that was at stake?

    “It was great,” he said. “I think Cleveland fans found this environment incredible to play in, hostile, all those things you dream about as a kid playing and pitching for.”

    He threw like that. This was easy to see. And easily felt by everyone on the Tigers, and by those of us who view pitchers as solo performers, Skubal is forcing a reconsideration. He may not be a one-man show, but this team is different when he’s part of the action, in both big and small ways.

    “He wants to lead this team and he does,” Hinch said.

    Where does this lead? On to the next match, for now. Skubal made sure of that, even if he can’t remember every exciting and poignant moment of how his outing unfolded.

    Contact Shawn Windsor: [email protected]. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

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