SEATTLE – If you want to truly understand somebody.

If you want to see a different side.

All you have to do is follow them home.

So on Tuesday morning, I followed Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal to the place where his life completely changed.

Past the city limits of Seattle. Across a floating bridge. Over Lake Washington and into Bellevue, the affluent city where Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.

To Bannerwood Stadium, a small baseball field with an artificial turf infield but the outfield grass can get so wet and soggy that a fly ball has been known to shoot into the muck, get buried and disappear. It is the home field of Seattle University – the place where Skubal pitched in college and his life transformed.

The sky was grey, the air nippy when Skubal appeared in the dugout. He bro-hugged Donny Harrel, his old baseball coach at Seattle.

“My favorite part when he walks in here is that big cheesy smile,” Harrel said of Skubal. “Where he’s just home for a little bit.”

Skubal was scheduled to pitch for the Detroit Tigers against the Seattle Mariners on Wednesday, so he got permission to spend time with his old college team on Tuesday. Just hanging out.

“Can we cover some stuff with the pitchers?” Harrel asked.

“Yeah,” Skubal said.

Skubal – the reigning American League Cy Young award winner – stood on the side and watched a college pitcher finish a bullpen and then gave a relaxed talk to the pitchers. Skubal talked about everything: how he approaches a bullpen – stressing process over results – to how important it is for teammates to hold each other accountable, to how he conditions and prepares.

“The day before is an important day,” he said.

He didn’t always take it seriously and “I’d almost always come out sluggish,” he said.

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But now he does. “The day before, I eat a lot,” he said. “Nutrition is such an undervalued thing. I have a PB&J an hour before every game. It’s something that sits well in my stomach and won’t make me nauseous. The day before, I eat a lot. My dinner is usually pretty big, some sort of steak, some sort of potato. I don’t care for vegetables.”

A few players smiled and laughed.

The Cy Young award winner doesn’t like veggies!

“He just seems human,” Ryan Morrison, a Seattle pitcher, said. “We look at these people like they’re bigger and better, which you know he is, but he’s just a dude. He’s got to eat like us, sleep like us, and that was kind of the biggest takeaway for me. Just seeing that he still has to go through the same sort of stuff that college guys have to go through.”

Skubal walked onto the field and stood on the mound for a picture. “Turf mound baby,” Skubal said.

And he invited the Redhawks to Wednesday’s game. “If Donnie bangs practice,” Skubal said, “I’ll get you guys tickets.”

Yes, Skubal kinda set up his coach.

Then, Skubal went behind home plate for more pictures – to a spot that is incredibly important to his story, back when he was struggling with the pressure.

“One day, I took him behind home plate, and I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing this for, really?’” Harrel remembered. “And he goes, ‘well, you know, I want to take care of my family; and I’ve always wanted to be a big leaguer; and people expect me now that I’ve had some attention to make it; and so that’s what I want to do it for.’”

Harrel spotted a problem.

“How about if you do it just for you,” Harrel told Skubal. “And there was like a cleansing to an extent. We shared some emotion and stuff, and it was wonderful. It just kind of released the pressures and the expectations. As soon as he did that, he went on a run the rest of the year.”

And now?

There’s a giant Skubal banner that hangs above the concession stand at the stadium.

A banner that’s even bigger than the one for the coach. “He’s won bigger awards,” Harrel quipped.

Skubal is beloved by the university, not to mention the baseball program, because he’s so generous with his time and support.

Seattle has a pitcher expected to be drafted, and he was having a hard time dealing with the attention. So a few weeks ago, Skubal got on the phone with him and gave him advice.

“He never says no,” Harrel said.

A few years ago, when the program had several pitchers recovering from Tommy John surgery, Skubal gave them advice on how to cope with it.

“He just told those guys, ‘OK, here’s, what’s going to happen. There’s going to be a time when there’s a fear for you to really cut it loose, because I had that, too,” Harrel said.

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A wave of nostalgia

A few hours later, Skubal was in the clubhouse at T-Mobile Park and he sounded nostalgic about his trip back to his old ballpark.

“I spent a lot of time at that stadium,” he said. “Fall practices were six hours long, seven hours long. And then seasons – a lot of trips out there. It’s off campus, so you’re vanning over there every day, or jumping in guy’s cars, whoever’s leaving. It was fun though, I enjoyed those days.”

And he feels indebted to Seattle University.

“I go back because I owe that program a lot,” Skubal said.

A night of honor and respect

Before the Tigers played the Mariners on Tuesday night, Seattle University held a private event on the third deck at T-Mobile Park, overlooking the field. About 80 athletic administrators, alumni and friends of the program gathered to celebrate Skubal.

Then, something happened that was so cool. Skubal left the clubhouse with a Tigers security guy and went up an elevator with normal fans, wearing his uniform pants and Tigers sweatshirt and cap.

At first, the looks on Seattle fans seemed to say: OK, man, the superfan outfit is a bit much.

And then as Skubal walked it registered to some: hey, that’s Skubal! 

When Skubal spotted seven of his former teammates at the gathering, there were huge smiles and bro hugs.

“He’s still the same guy,” one former teammate gushed.

Skubal signed autographs and posed for pictures, and Seattle vice president of athletics Shaney Fink presented him with a framed proclamation from the school’s board of trustees. The school is only about a 15-minute walk from T-Mobile Park – but the incredible trip from that place to this moment could be seen in all their faces.

There was a wash of pride everywhere you looked. They are just so proud of what Skubal has accomplished, and he is so proud to have come from this school.

 “Our board of trustees put together this resolution just to show our appreciation and respect and appreciation for everything Tarik has done and who he is, not just being a Cy Young winner and all of his success on the field, but just who he is as a Redhawk,” Fink said. “We are so proud and so grateful for all that you’ve done and who you are. So thank you.”

She presented a proclamation to Skubal.

“Thank you for everyone that showed up,” Skubal said, genuinely touched.

He looked at his former teammates. “It means a lot to me that relationships that we built, the support doesn’t go unnoticed,” he said.

“Seattle holds a special place in my heart, he said. “Thank you so much. I can’t say thank you enough.”

It’s impossible to describe how important he is to Seattle University, not just for what he’s accomplished but for how he’s supports the institution. For being so humble and genuine.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” Skubal said.

He was back home. Back with friends and teammates.

Back where it all started.

And he couldn’t stop smiling.

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Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on X @seideljeff.

Last night’s ugly loss to the Tigers had a few redeeming moments, although mostly on the offensive side of the ball, as will be the case when the pitching uncharacteristically gives up 18 hits and nine runs. But there was one bright spot on the mound: pitcher Carlos Vargas announced himself to Mariners fans in a big way, with a heroic nearly 3.2-inning effort where he allowed one inherited runner to score and had one run score on a combination of tough-luck hits (ground ball single, parachute single that should have been caught, ground ball single well off third base that Polanco couldn’t make a play on).

“Vargy, that was huge last night, being able to give us as many innings as he did” said Mariners manager Dan Wilson. “He had so many quick innings because he was attacking the zone and his ball was moving and they weren’t able to square it up, so that really gave us some much-needed length in the game.”

Mariners fans might not know Vargas as well, but Tacoma Rainiers fans are well acquainted with the slender hurler, who was acquired in the Eugenio Suárez trade-slash-salary dump with the Diamondbacks prior to the 2024 season. While trade-mate Seby Zavala got the most big-league playing time of the two that season, Vargas was the most interesting piece in that deal, with a sinker that even outdueled Andrés Muñoz’s in heat and an equally spicy four-seamer, both of which zipped in around 98-99. The caveat, because of course teams don’t give away these kinds of relievers for free, is that Vargas struggled to command that big stuff, a primary reason why the pitching-savvy Guardians, who originally signed Vargas as an IFA in 2016, flipped him to Arizona in a minor-league deal in the first place.

Vargas spent all of 2024 with Tacoma Rainiers, working on dialing in his command. Command is famously one of the hardest things to fix, but the Mariners pitching lab saw tantalizing stuff from Vargas, whose Stuff+ grades out very well, and a possibility to coax him into a more zone-focused mentality. Mariners pitching development preaches that pitchers should trust their stuff, throw their best pitches the most often, and not be afraid to throw in the zone. Vargas took those lessons to heart; he cut his walk rate in Tacoma literally in half from where it was in Arizona, the first single-digit walk rate of his career since he was at Low-A.

“Here they teach you, attack the strike zone,” said Vargas through translator Freddy Llanos, describing the changes he’s made in Seattle not as mechanical, but in mentality. “Always get ahead in the count, go out there and compete.”

Along with the walks, Vargas’s strikeouts also dropped, as he dialed back his highest-octane stuff. His sinker now comes in at a more modest 96 vs. 99. Between the upped sinker usage in lieu of his four-seamer from his Arizona days and the scaling back of his velocity, his profile is now firmly that of a groundball specialist in lieu of a strikeout maven. Contrast the two sinkers, first from Vargas in 2023 during his big league debut season, with a firm, running fastball that has almost purely arm-side movement and minimal drop:

Take that against one of his better sinkers from his Monday night outing against Detroit, which now features a significantly more drop-focused movement profile (and a more useful visual angle, thank you ROOT):

He still throws a hard cutter, at 92, which is his primary whiff-getting pitch, with sharp late downward break. He rounds out the arsenal with two secondaries he throws almost exclusively in two-strike or favorable counts: a changeup for weak-contact outs at the bottom of the zone; and a slider with has plus drop that he’ll throw up in the zone for whiffs and flyouts (and, in one regrettable instance, a Luis Urías home run).

While some organizations tinker with pitchers’ mechanics, encouraging them to change arm angles or change their position on the pitching rubber, Mariners pitching coach Pete Woodworth said that’s not at all a part of Seattle’s pitching development, which hammers home attacking the zone and trusting your stuff. “We show them what happens in two-strike counts” he said. “It’s just that easy. No one wants to believe it, but it is.”

In fact, he says the next step for Vargas—as it is for several of his pitchers—is getting him to expand the zone low with two strikes, and getting him off the plate.

For Vargas, he’s embraced the bigger-picture mentality.

“I’m just trying to be focused all the time” he said through Llanos. “Focused on intent, and how I can stay here, and how I can help the team. And I feel like every step I take, it’s with a purpose.”

That focus was on display last night as Vargas kept the Mariners in a game that looked to be a runaway blowout early on. His efforts saved the rest of the bullpen, and demonstrated his newfound zone-focused mentality and sense of intention, as he competed with every pitch, seemingly without regard for the scoreboard.

“Player of the game,” said Wodworth. “Maybe player of the week.”