April 19, 2020

By J.P. Antonacci

Canadian Baseball Network

Six weeks ago, Liberty Flames pitcher Noah Skirrow was playing in some of the most picturesque stadiums in Division I. Now he’s playing in a barn.

Albeit one with a 50-foot indoor cage, a raised mound, and a hay loft with a turf floor.

“I’m in a barn, but it’s a pretty sweet barn,” Skirrow said with a chuckle.

The big righthander from Stoney Creek, Ont. is riding out the pandemic in rural Pennsylvania with his girlfriend’s family, who have invited their unexpected guest to make himself at home.

“Her family’s a big baseball family,” Skirrow said. “They have a family farm that they converted into a baseball facility, so I’ve got everything I need. They’ve thankfully let me use it whenever I like.”

Bereft of a batterymate, he throws into a net, recording video of every bullpen session to send to his coaches.

“At this point, you’re so limited with what you can do anywhere you are,” Skirrow said. “We’re just doing our best to follow the rules and hope this thing ends soon.”

Skirrow had been in the midst of a stellar junior season at Liberty University in Virginia when the NCAA cancelled all Division I sports in mid-March because of the risk posed by COVID-19.

The 21-year-old is ranked 244th on Baseball America’s Top 400 draft list and still hopes to turn pro this spring. But like many collegiate athletes, he’s in wait-and-see mode until details of the revamped June draft are worked out.

“There’s still a lot of things up in the air,” Skirrow said. “That’s going to affect more than just me.”

Baseball America described Skirrow, who checks in at 6’3 and 215 lbs, as a “big and physical righty with a fastball into the mid-90s and a solid curveball and changeup.”

BA’s scouting report noted Skirrow’s 98 strikeouts in 76 2/3 innings as a sophomore, a big jump from his freshman season and a sign of a young pitcher rounding into form.

“I was definitely really looking forward to this season as a whole as the next step in my career,” Skirrow said of his truncated junior year.

Last summer he’d excelled with the Orleans Firebirds of the Cape Cod Baseball League, pitching to a 2.76 ERA in 29 1/3 innings. He was named Orleans pitcher of the year and made the all-star team, racking up 40 strikeouts against 14 walks.

The analysts at ProspectsLive.com deemed Skirrow to be the 36th-best prospect in the league, highlighting his “deep arsenal” of plus pitches with movement, “highlighted by two distinct breaking balls with above-average to plus spin rates.”

Skirrow’s success in Cape Cod confirmed that he could compete at the top level of college ball.

“That just gave me an unbelievable sense of confidence in myself and my ability,” he said.

That confidence showed right away at Liberty, where Skirrow was dominant out of the gate. In eight appearances – four starts – before the season’s abrupt end, he put up a 1.96 ERA across 23 innings, striking out 20 and walking 13. Opposing batters hit a paltry .179.

“I was just getting ramped up and things were starting to click,” Skirrow said.

His strangest game of the season was a combined no-hitter against Marist College on February 29, a game the Flames won by the unlikely score of 6-4.

Skirrow started and didn’t allow a hit over 5 1/3 innings, but he also gave up four runs (two earned) on six walks and a hit batter. Not exactly the line you’d expect from a no-hitter.

“Yup,” he laughed. “That was the most brutal day to play baseball. It was just awfully cold.”

With temperatures hovering around 2 degrees Celsius, pitchers for both clubs had trouble finding the plate.

“It was a terrible day to throw strikes, as you can see with the walk totals on both sides,” said Skirrow. “Since we gave up four runs, it never for a minute crossed our minds that we had a no-hitter going. We were just trying to win the game, because we were losing twice.”

Some in the dugout were joking with him that as a Canadian he should be used to the near-freezing temperatures, but Skirrow wasn’t having it.

“In Canada, we respect the cold. We go inside,” he said. “I had never pitched in anything that cold.”

The Flames successfully battled the elements and the Red Foxes, recording Liberty’s first combined no-hitter in 20 years.

“But how we got there was very unorthodox,” Skirrow said. “It was kinda hard to be really excited in the moment, but it was a fun day nonetheless.”

On paper, his best game this season was against Seton Hall on February 22, when he allowed three hits and an unearned run over 6 1/3 innings to pick up the win. He struck out six and walked two.

It was a warm day, Skirrow remembers, and all his pitches were working.

“It was the day that it kind of clicked, or as close as it can get to clicking,” he said.

But his most valuable start from a development perspective was against Kent State on March 7, which ended up being his last appearance of the year.

Working with what he described as “B-minus, C stuff,” Skirrow battled through 5 1/3 innings, allowing two runs on five hits, with six strikeouts and three walks.

The Flames piled on runs in the late innings to win 7-2.

“Just the battles I had to go through to get as deep into that game as I did,” Skirrow said of his main takeaway. “I just really had to fight through it and battle for every out I got.”

After the game, Liberty coach Scott Jackson told Skirrow that were he a freshman struggling with his command, he’d have been pulled in the third or fourth. But Skirrow proved his maturation as a pitcher by working into the sixth and keeping the game close.

“Just trying to slow the game down and not let the situation get bigger than it is,” Skirrow said of his evolution on the mound.

“It’s a bunch of cliches, but it’s buying into them. Forget the last one and take it one pitch at a time. Not just saying it, but actually doing it.

“By no means do I have it figured out, but I have it more figured out than I did two years ago, you could say.”

MIXING PITCHES

It’s been a continuous education for Skirrow ever since he graduated from Cardinal Newman Secondary School in Stoney Creek and made the move to Virginia. But he almost ended up a Tar Heel instead.

While in high school, Skirrow reached out to Liberty but didn’t hear back. At the time, Coach Jackson was recruiting coordinator and assistant baseball coach at the University of North Carolina, and he was lobbying the young pitcher to join him in Chapel Hill. A longtime UNC fan, Skirrow was interested.

Then Jackson took the head coaching job at Liberty and called Skirrow with a new offer.

“He said, if you want to, you can follow me here. I don’t want to play against you,” Skirrow said. “He just changed the name of the school but kept recruiting me.”

Three years later, Skirrow said, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. The opportunity I got as a freshman to go out there and not have a short leash, as many do, to know what it is to fail and get better, I probably wouldn’t have got that a bigger school.”

Skirrow said he also benefited from working with Jackson and the coaching staff to rebuild each of his pitches to some degree.

He came up with the Great Lakes Canadians and Hamilton Cardinals, honing his craft as a member of the Ontario Blue Jays travel team and graduating from Cardinal Newman with four pitches.

“They were good high school pitches, but they weren’t great college pitches,” Skirrow said.

With the Flames, his already lively fastball got faster. As a sophomore, he added a curveball that has become his go-to offspeed pitch, and his junior season was dedicated to simplifying his mechanics and being more consistent.

“How to move my body more efficiently and how to use my strength, especially in the lower half, to not only throw harder but to throw harder longer,” Skirrow explained.

He spent the past two years turning a decent slider into a tight, hard-breaking cutter.

“I wanted a third go-to that a little movement to it, to keep hitters honest,” he said.

He was working on a changeup at Cape Cod and was going to make that pitch a bigger part of his arsenal this season.

Skirrow has always been a strikeout pitcher, as evidenced by his ASUN Conference-leading 11.5 K/9 rate in 2019, but becoming a student of pitching has made him even more confident.

In the past, he said, “a strikeout pitch could be whatever pitch I threw with two strikes. But understanding how to pitch now, I’d say it’s the curveball based on how I use it.”

Skirrow said he has enjoyed delving into the finer points of pitching, helped by analytics tools like Rapsodo.

“We really dove into that and looked into what helps me and hurts me from a spin (rate) perspective,” he said.

“It’s cool. There’s so much you don’t know that you don’t know. You figure out some other aspect and it opens up a whole world you didn’t know was there.”

‘JUST GO HAVE FUN’

Of all the lessons he’s learned playing Division I baseball, how to fail is the first thing Skirrow mentions. He said high school players are often quick to talk about how well they handle failure.

“I was one of them,” he said. “But they’ve never really failed at the level they are at. They’ve never experienced a true failure at their sport.”

He’s had more good days than bad on the mound at Liberty, but the rough outings were the more valuable teachers.

“It really put baseball in perspective for me. It’s just a game. It’s the same every day. Don’t be so hard on myself,” he said.

Skirrow likens success and failure to a piece of bubble gum: “You get something out of it and then you spit it out.”

Whatever the result, he said the key to moving forward is “not to get too hung up on it” so he can go out next time and “play free.”

He hopes that wisdom will help when he takes the next step in his career, with all the scrutiny and pressure that will bring.

“It will get more intense, so just to try and keep everything in perspective and understand it’s the same game. Just go have fun. Sometimes you can give it all you’ve got and it doesn’t work out,” he said.

“Some people would see it as ‘he doesn’t care,’ but that’s not what I’m trying to say at all.”

LOOKING TO DRAFT DAY

The Flames played West Virginia on the road on Wednesday, March 11, and were driving to Ohio State for a three-game series that Friday. That’s when the players started seeing the news that the NBA had cancelled its season due to a COVID-19 outbreak and MLB spring training was postponed.

“We said, if they’re cancelling this kind of stuff, what’s to stop them from cancelling ours?” Skirrow said.

An hour outside Columbus, the bus pulled into a rest stop. Then the coaches broke the news from the NCAA that their season was over.

“It was tough,” Skirrow recalled.

“You immediately start thinking of the seniors and the guys that aren’t coming back for various reasons, and all the work they put in. Some guys had injuries and worked their tail off to get back.

“It’s not fair when you start thinking about it, but sometimes things are out of your control and you have to make the most of it.”

This week, Liberty confirmed that seniors Trey McDyre and Cam Locklear would be back next season. As for Skirrow, he hopes to be in the minor leagues by then.

“That’s still the goal,” he said of getting drafted in June.

If that’s not in the cards this year, he’ll go back to Liberty and continue his baseball education.

“It’s a great fallback if (getting drafted) doesn’t happen,” Skirrow said. “I’m not complaining.”