Ryan HockensmithAug 28, 2024, 09:00 AM ET
CloseRyan Hockensmith is a Penn State graduate who joined ESPN in 2001. He is a survivor of bacterial meningitis, which caused him to have multiple amputation surgeries on his feet. He is a proud advocate for those with disabilities and addiction issues. He covers everything from the NFL and UFC to pizza-chucking and analysis of Tom Cruise’s running ability.
PAUL SKENES IS TRYING to sleep. But he’s too tall for his Air Force bed, so his feet dangle into a sink in his dorm room, just a few feet from two other people who are also trying to sleep.
He’s at basic training in June 2021, exhausted in his room alongside a randomly assigned fellow “doolie” and a randomly assigned Korean exchange student. Every cadet is given a standard-issue 7-foot bed inside a standard-issue cramped dorm room.
Skenes is 6-foot-5, 225 pounds — on his way to 6-6, 250 — and he has grown so fast that his body seems a little foreign to him.
The tale of this period of his life is almost too tall to believe. During those two years — 2021 and 2022 — Skenes began an unheard-of rise from an unknown Division I catcher to a transcendent baseball pitching phenom in about 1,000 days. There has been almost nothing in recent baseball history like his ascension, and it’s hard to imagine a sequel coming along any time soon.
Skenes was 5-10 and 150 pounds as a high school sophomore, then gained 57 pounds in one year once he learned how to lift and eat like the Division I athlete he wanted to be. And he just kept growing.
Basic training is a blur. For six intense weeks, Skenes gets up at 5 a.m. to the sound of “Reveille” and has 10 minutes to brush his teeth, get in uniform, shave and make his bed before breakfast. He and his two roommates can’t believe how hard it is to complete that last part, and eventually call in bed-making ringers to assist.
“We were so slow,” Skenes says now. “We always had to get other people to run into our room to help us.”
At breakfast, he has 15 minutes to eat whatever is put in front of him, then hustles down to the baseball diamond for an hour of some light throwing and hitting off a machine. There are no coaches around so calling these sessions practices would be an insult to practices.
The rest of the day is even blurrier. Classes on how the Air Force operates. Chow. Classes on how to stand, how to study, military history, important historical quotes. Chow again. At 9 p.m., sometimes with a pair of his giant dogs in the sink, “Retreat” plays and lights go out. Rinse and repeat. This was his daily routine for most of the summer.
Skenes quietly goes about his business. Cadets are required to wear masks at all times, and he’s never been a loud person. He connects with another cadet, Aerik Joe, and they start making plans to live together when boot camp is over. Joe is a fast, 5-10, 180-pound shortstop and scrappy top-of-the-order guy. He’s neat and driven, just like his new friend.
Once the normal Air Force Academy fall semester kicks off, Joe and Skenes move in together. After long days, they collapse in their room. Joe pulls Skenes in on one of his hobbies, meal prep and cooking, and the two may or may not have allegedly skirted a rule about running a bootleg kitchen in their room. Skenes, in turn, introduces Joe to one of his favorite things, firing up some George Strait and other old-school country music. They’d eat and sing along until “Retreat” retired them for the day.
At some point early in the fall, Skenes says, “You know, I pitch a little, too.” Joe is surprised. A Luka Doncic-sized catcher and pitcher? That’s not a thing, he thinks. And besides, Skenes has emerged as the team’s best hitter and starting catcher. Coaches are talking about batting him leadoff just to get him more at-bats. What’s he going to do, catch one day, pitch the next, then catch again? Who does that?
But teammates also get to know Skenes enough to understand how driven the big man is. Skenes doesn’t have to be here. He narrowed his list to Air Force and Navy instead of Stanford and UCLA because he wanted to serve. Wanted the grind of academy life. To fly jets and play baseball. He’s a different kind of motivated, and his teammates all see it right away.
Fall practice sessions are slightly more organized, but mostly the guys just hit off a batting machine. As Skenes blasts towering BP home runs, his teammates marvel at the way the ball comes off his bat. When Skenes talks about pitching, too, everybody just kind of shrugs. He’s already become such a stoic figure that the idea of the team’s best catcher being a pitcher, too, seems both patently absurd and perfectly reasonable.
Then one day during an intrasquad game, Skenes finally takes the mound. His first pitch is a 94 mph thwack that raises about 60 eyebrows. Maybe Skenes isn’t playing around when he talks about pitching.
Skenes has so much ambition that coaches aren’t quite sure how to quench it. Skenes is an incredibly gifted catcher — renowned baseball trainer Eugene Bleecker says if Skenes caught five games in MLB right now he’d be among the league leaders in receiving metrics — and he expresses interest in playing every game except for the day he would start on the mound. And Skenes doesn’t just want any day on the mound: He tells coaches he sees himself as “the Friday night guy,” which is sacred in college baseball. Really good pitchers start on Saturday. Solid starters go on Sunday. Friday is for aces.
As the season approaches in winter 2021, coaches come up with a patently absurd but reasonable middle ground with Skenes — he would be the team’s everyday catcher … and its closer.
“Paul’s getting better every game. If you watch the sequences of pitches, he is getting better almost every pitch,” says Eugene Bleecker, the renowned baseball trainer. “You can’t put a ceiling on him — nothing that he might accomplish will surprise me.” Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire
FIVE YEARS AGO, Paul Skenes was a decent Southern California Division I catching prospect, with soft hands and a gawky body that somehow still generated power. To this day, his coaches shake their heads that he even ended up in central Colorado.
Yes, he wanted to serve and would have heavily considered the academy. But Skenes had spent 2017 and 2018 working on his pitching with Bleecker, who’d emphasized catching when he first met Skenes in 2015. When they spent the next two offseasons focused on his pitching development, Skenes’ fastball went from the mid-80s to 90, to low 90s so quickly, without heavy work, that Bleeker began to see Skenes as a potential college pitcher — maybe even a Friday starter.
He could wind his body up and power down through his lead foot in such a fluid but forceful way that his velocity seemed like it could go up another 5-10 mph. “His delivery was Mozart, Mozart, then Metallica,” Bleecker says. He emphasizes the “Metallica” to capture how metal Skenes’ delivery had become.
Skenes was getting scary good at both positions. The coaches and kids at Bleecker’s training facility started giving him nicknames, such as Big Hoss, Big Country and Shohei Paultani. It’s worth noting that Skenes is exhibit A for the generation of young baseball players who grew up in the age of Ohtani and reset their dreams in a way that made some seemingly impossible ideas — like being a catcher and closer — seem possible.
But just when Skenes was about to NASA launch into Power 5 college offers and potential first-day draft consideration as a pitcher, COVID shut down his senior season.
Air Force pitching coach Ryan Forrest had begun hearing rumbles that Skenes — the academy’s blue-chip catching prospect — was generating chatter among MLB scouts and Division I coaches as a pitcher. Then the world went into quarantine before he truly lifted off. “If COVID didn’t happen, I don’t think Paul Skenes makes it to our campus,” Forrest says. “I think he’s been pitching in the big leagues for two or three years by now.”
Skenes pushes back on that idea, saying he would have been able to resist the MLB draft if he had blown up as a senior. “You know why I wouldn’t have changed my mind?” he asks. “Because I was committed to Air Force. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was an easy decision.”
But even the Air Force didn’t yet see him as a pitching recruit in the same way that Skenes saw himself. Falcons coaches loved how his big body and hands seemed to comfort pitchers in such a way that they felt like they were throwing to the side of a barn instead of a person. He got so good at framing pitches that between innings once during his freshman year, an ump told Air Force assistant coach Jimmy Roesinger, “Hey, if you don’t see me again, it’s been fun.”
“What do you mean?” Roesinger asked.
“Your catcher has the quickest hands I’ve ever seen,” the ump said. “So I’m probably going to get fired because I keep calling strikes that aren’t strikes.”
His pitchers loved his attitude, too. Skenes could certainly bark at a struggling pitcher to jolt him out of a funk. But he was mostly soothing, with a habit of raising one fist every time a pitcher got to two strikes. “He would get after your ass if he needed to,” says his friend, Doyle Gehring, a starting pitcher from the same recruiting class. “But he would sometimes tell you to take a deep breath and that you’d be OK, and you believed him. He always knew which attitude to have.”
Gehring’s favorite memory is from a chippy game against Nevada his first year, where he gave up such an obvious home run that he never even turned around to see if it went over the fence. He just waited for a new ball and stared in at the plate, where Skenes’ body language indicated the ball was about 400 feet away.
But Skenes’ body language also indicated something else: silent scorn. The batter took his good old time getting out of the box, tossing the bat, celebrating toward the dugout, dragging out the home run for 10, 15, 30 seconds. By the time he got to first base, Gehring was smiling at observing Skenes’ fury.
“Start running!” Skenes yelled. “Run!”
Skenes went to home plate and was standing over it, giving a death stare to the hitter as the theatrics continued around the bases. Gehring saw the plate ump had noticed that Skenes was blocking the plate.
“Move back a little,” the ump told Skenes.Skenes just stood there.”Move back,” the ump said.
Skenes ignored him, or he didn’t even hear him through the fog of irritation.
The runner rounded third and everybody waited for the looming confrontation at home plate. But the hitter was wise enough to slow down as he approached, then he came to a near stop and snuck the tip of his cleat between the legs of Skenes to complete the home run. Skenes never moved and never stopped staring.
There was no more Nevada hotdogging the rest of the game, even though the Wolfpack won 14-7.
For most of the season, Skenes had an unorthodox arrangement that most fans, players and coaches had never seen before. He’d catch eight innings, then hustle down to the bullpen for a few warmups before the ninth inning so he could close out the game. As rare as a catcher and closer might have been for Air Force players and coaches at first, opposing teams were completely befuddled.
His very first college pitching outing happens to come against, of all schools, LSU, his future transfer destination. The moment became an indelible image for Skenes and his Air Force family: him heading to the mound with a 6-4 lead as teammates wait to see if their catcher actually could do double duty. There is a genuine sense of nerves in the Air Force dugout — LSU is No. 7 in the country, and nobody had any idea if this might be an ugly flameout for Skenes against one of the nastiest hitting lineups in the country.
The Baton Rouge crowd, meanwhile, is giddy. Tigers fans behind the Air Force dugout laugh when Skenes drops his gear and starts to warm up. He is sweaty, dirty and moves like someone who’s been catching for two hours. “They’re out of pitchers!” fans say loud enough that the Air Force bench can hear it.
In his warmup tosses, Skenes dials up low-90s heat and looks sharp enough to rile up his teammates. What a sight — their Adley Rutschman ditching the gear to become their Craig Kimbrel. He’d be facing 9-1-2 in the LSU order, which included freshman Dylan Crews (now a consensus top-five MLB prospect) and potentially thumper Tre Morgan (now a promising Rockies minor leaguer) if anybody got on base.
His first pitch is a two-seam thwacker that hits 97 mph. The fans aren’t giggling anymore, and his teammates start oohing and aahing. Skenes strikes out the first guy swinging and goes up 0-1 on Crews.
But Crews turns on a fastball and lifts it beyond the outfield wall. Suddenly LSU is within 6-5, with the heart of the order coming up. Skenes gets the next hitter to ground out, then digs in for a showdown with Morgan, a future third-round pick in the 2023 draft. Morgan battles from 1-2 to 3-2, and Skenes stands on the mound for a make-or-break pitch.
He’s still standing on the rubber when Morgan steps out of the box and stares at the barrel of his bat. Morgan takes his time, inhaling a few deep breaths, staring at his bat again, and Air Force coaches notice that Skenes hasn’t moved. He’s a statue, ready to throw, as Morgan dilly-dallies outside the box. It’s eerie how still Skenes remains, as if somebody hit the pause button on him the same way Gehring described him standing at home plate. He’d begun to grow into his frame.
It’s getting downright concerning how stuck Skenes is when Morgan finally steps back into the box. As if somebody just hit the unpause button, Skenes launches right into his windup and dials up a 98 mph fastball on the money pitch.
Metallica. Thwack. Swing and a miss.
Skenes celebrates in a very subdued, Air Force kind of way with his teammates in front of their dugout in Baton Rouge. It’s the ninth inning of a Sunday afternoon game, not the first inning of a Friday game. But it feels significant, and there’s a vibe in the stadium that people had just seen something they’d never seen before, a catcher and a closer living within the same body.
Now that vibe feels like a piece of baseball history, one of those moments that 2,572 fans saw. But don’t be surprised if, oh, 100,000 people someday claim to have been there that day when the astonishing pitching career of Paul Skenes began.
When Skenes eventually retires, he wants to return to the Air Force as a coach: “I feel like I owe it to the Air Force Academy because of what it did for me and what the coaching staff did for me.” Matt Dirksen/AP Photo
AS MUCH AS the Air Force impacted Skenes as a baseball player, he says the academy changed him as a human being even more. He studied biochemistry and started every baseball game as a freshman, with a hilarious stat line unlikely to ever be reproduced in major college baseball: 3.0 GPA while tutoring other freshmen in math and science courses, with team bests of 11 home runs, .410 BA, 43 RBIs, 131 total bases and 11 saves. And yet he still had one goal crystallized in his brain: He told coaches he saw himself as the Friday night guy.
He stuck around for a chunk of time that summer to cram in more coursework, and so did his roommate, Aerik Joe. They’re both achievers (Joe is now an Air Force combat rescue officer, the branch’s equivalent of a Navy SEAL), so the idea of a nearly empty campus sounded delightful to them, not daunting. They hung out, listened to country, cooked in the room (allegedly) and studied.
In their free time over the summer, they’d hang out at one of their coaches’ houses. Almost all of their coaches were older, with kids, and yet Skenes and Joe liked being around them. Skenes would play with the kids like a big kid himself — pitching coach Ryan Forrest’s son still remembers being a 3-year-old who asked for (and got) “the heat” from Skenes in whiffle ball. “Paul would blow it by him with no regret whatsoever,” Forrest says.
But mostly Skenes was a 19-year-old going on 29. He had a vision for himself, and it didn’t include most of the stuff other college underclassmen were grappling with on weekends. Brushing back a 3-year-old and eating a steak with his baseball coach was about the wildest party scene that Skenes liked to engage with.
Skenes eventually went home to California for a few weeks in midsummer. But then it was back to business on campus, and he took a class in Air Force standardizations and evaluations. Part of the class entailed him participating in something like a nightmarish merging of an RA with a hall monitor, charged with enforcing rules and regulations across campus. Skenes was supposed to keep tabs on his peers for things such as compliant uniform wear, room cleanliness, length of hair and, of all things, proper shaving.
Let’s just say he understood the assignment. One piece of Skenes lore is an anecdote about how he was at the baseball field one day and observed two people not following academy protocol. The clock had struck 4:45 p.m. and, like it did every single day of life at Air Force, “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play over the academy’s giant speaker system. Air Force rules require everybody to turn and salute the flag at that time, and these two guys in a golf cart — they were cadet managers with the football team — kept moving. “No hesitation, when the anthem was over, Paul went up and got on the guys,” Gehring says.
The issue wasn’t necessarily about the song or gesture itself, though he does treat the anthem with great seriousness. Skenes is the kind of guy who, if the academy had asked cadets to stand at attention every day at 8:29 a.m. and sing “What Does The Fox Say?” he would have been in your grill to start making animal noises.
Another time, Skenes had been assigned to do room checks on fellow cadets during lunch period, which is a little like giving out parking tickets to your friends. But Skenes was relentless about it, going so far as to give a senior basketball player’s room a 30 (out of 100). He was so disgusted that he even grabbed Aerik Joe and took him to the room. “Look at this atrocity,” Skenes said.
The irritated cadet eventually saw that his room had failed inspection. So he reached out on Instagram to plead for Skenes to give him a passing grade. Skenes’ response: “Clean your room.”
Skenes says the guy’s lucky he even got a 30. “It was a bad room,” he says, and he immediately recounts that in addition to being a mess, the room hadn’t been locked properly and the cadet had a Chicago Bulls flag that hadn’t been authorized. “If I put my name on that room, that’s my name. I can’t do that. I probably graded it too fairly. I could have been more harsh. You’ve got to be on top of your stuff.”
His teammates and fellow cadets grew to respect his stickler ways, though. The same way he refused to yield Air Force cleaning standards for rooms, he also held himself to a high standard. Joe would always be hustling to clean up or study late at night with the 9 p.m. buzzer lurking, and Skenes would be talking about recovery time for his body and living clean and overcoming caloric deficits, a common issue for cadets constantly on the go. Skenes usually already had handled his business for the day as Joe hustled to close the gaps.
Skenes is also a compartmentalizer, which means he blocked out time for his cadet duties, his baseball duties and his fun and friendship duties. On tough days that can break many cadets, Skenes would sit and listen to Joe as he worked through whatever struggles he was going through. Skenes wouldn’t say much. He’d just listen and nod his head. Somehow, even with a mask on, his eyes conveyed that he understood.
And yes, he also made space for fun, but it was planned fun. Skenes wasn’t so Type A that he scheduled out laugh sessions. But he did find pockets that were reserved for fun — whiffle ball heaters, for example — and tried to maximize those time slots. Joe still is amused when he thinks about how Skenes would fire up a clip or two from the movie “The Other Guys,” the goofy Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg police buddy comedy from 2010. He also loved throwing out some Ferrell quotes from “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers,” two other Skenes favorites.
Teammates goofed on Skenes a bit when he received two incentive plane rides, a reward for handling his business. Skenes rode in an F-15 once and an F-16 another time, and his buddies loved seeing him mashed into the cockpit with his legs curled up and his upper body vised on both sides. The only thing missing was a sink for his feet.
As the spring semester kicked off in 2022, Skenes had emerged in the offseason as his obvious final form — he was hitting 98 mph with ease in intrasquad games, which meant Air Force coaches would have been derelict in their duties if they didn’t focus on him as a pitcher.
The only question remaining: What day would he be starting?
“If you waste time, if you’re not on top of things, you’re going to drown,” Skenes says of the Air Force Academy. “There are so many benefits to your work ethic, time management, everything.” AP Photo/Matt Dirksen
AS THE 2022 SEASON approached, Skenes seemed to have been seized by what he now believed to be his calling. It wasn’t catching, and it wasn’t pitching, either. It was both.
He’d begun telling coaches that he wanted to be a starting pitcher and play catcher or DH in every other game. In his mind, his world should now revolve around him throwing a complete game on one day — a very specific day, ahem — and then he’d play every inning of the next two. But even in an era of Ohtani, coaches were torn between his dramatic improvement as a pitcher, and his remarkable skill set as a catcher and hitter. Doing both seemed like too much, too soon, even for Shohei Paultani.
“I’m the Friday guy,” he’d say. “I’m starting on Fridays.””You’re so valuable to the team in several roles,” his pitching coach, Forrest, would say. “So I can’t guarantee it.”Then Skenes would always stare at Forrest the way he stared at that celebrating home run hitter from his freshman year.”I’m a Friday guy,” he’d insist.
Eventually, the coaches couldn’t fight him off. Skenes was hitting mid-90s, with a solid breaking ball, and he’d been named a team captain, a rare honor for a true sophomore at Air Force.
Then he found out the news he’d been waiting for: He’d start the opener and be the team’s “Friday guy,” and coaches would try to get him in the lineup as much as possible on the other days. They had a rough outline of him pitching on Fridays, DHing on Saturdays and catching on most Sundays. The 2021-22 season opened against a tough Iowa team that eventually finished as the Big Ten runner-up that year.
His first college start was also among his worst. Skenes got bounced around by Iowa on Feb. 18, 2022, giving up four runs in 3⅓ innings in a 12-2 blowout loss. It’s not like he stopped wowing people seeing him for the first time, though. In what would be a regular occurrence that year, Skenes hit for himself, and against Iowa, he clubbed his first of 13 home runs. He didn’t have the gear on anymore, but he was still doing a bang-up job of replicating Shohei Paultani from the year before.
Skenes settled into a schedule that made him perhaps the busiest major college athlete in the country. He played every game that year and was often the best player on the field, regardless of what position he was playing. He’d become a Paul Bunyan figure to his teammates, always capable of doing something to make them shake their heads in disbelief. “Paul Skenes was the most unbelievable thing most people have ever witnessed during a baseball game,” says his hitting coach, Roesinger.
On the mound, he wins four of his next five starts and looks better each game. His growth is so fast that even the coaching staff feels like there are vapor trails behind him. At the plate, he’s the team’s best hitter, batting .283 with three home runs and 11 RBIs in 18 games.
But the rocket ship had a scary moment on April 8, 2022, against Cal Baptist. Skenes is dealing on the mound, cruising into the sixth inning with nine strikeouts and one run allowed. With one out in the sixth, he’s still throwing 95-plus mph when he uncorks a fastball that a Cal Baptist hitter connects hard with. The ball is right up the middle, going north of 100 mph, and coaches still remember the thump of the ball bouncing off Skenes’ face.
Skenes collapses backward and lies there for a second as coaches and teammates sprint toward the mound. “I thought the worst …” Roesinger says. He decides not to finish the sentence, other than to wait a few seconds and say, “A big tree falls hard.”
When Roesinger and the other coaches reach the mound, Skenes stands up and moves around as blood poured out of his face. He seems cognizant even though everybody can already see bruising form around his eyes.
“All right, let’s get you off the field,” an athletic trainer tells Skenes.
Skenes is taken out but ends up getting the win. He does seem fine when he is out of the game, and he passes every medical check afterward. So believe it or not, the following day Skenes shows up and DHs even though he looks like he just lost a five-round 50-45 UFC decision. His eyes are both puffed and purpled up, but he looks good in batting practice and is insistent on playing.
He goes 0-for-4 and Air Force gets drubbed 21-5. The Falcons are now a disappointing 14-16 and feel like they should be 20-10, especially with Skenes finding his footing as an ace. But they can’t string together wins and panic is beginning to set in. They needed the Sunday game if they had any hopes of achieving what had been a realistic preseason goal — to make their first NCAA baseball regional since 1969.
The coaching staff decided to let Skenes catch on Sunday, even though his eyes had gotten worse overnight. But he could see and felt fine, sounded fine, caught fine.
Cal Baptist jumped to a 5-0 lead in the third inning of that crucial game, and desperation began to seep into the Air Force dugout. Another blowout loss would crush morale and put another loss on a record that needed W’s to maintain postseason hopes. Skenes settled down starter Seungmin Shim, who gave up only one more unearned run as Air Force battled back. At the plate, Skenes went 3-for-5 with three RBIs, including a two-run homer, as Air Force roared to a potentially season-saving 12-7 win.
The team didn’t exactly go on a heater after that. But there were signs of life, and it’s because Skenes began to morph into his sorta-final form. Air Force posted a 12-11 record down the stretch, with Skenes going 7-0 in his starts. He gave up 11 runs in his starts and hit 10 home runs in the games he didn’t pitch. He was especially ridiculous against No. 1 Texas, where he didn’t pitch but went 5-for-9 with two home runs and five RBIs in an impressive — and necessary — two-game split in Austin.
Air Force eventually ran through the Mountain West tournament, going 3-0 behind a Skenes masterpiece in the title game (7 shutout innings, 10 strikeouts) to lock up the school’s first regional berth. The Falcons were overmatched there, though, going 2-2 with both losses to Texas.
On the field afterward, the entire team was somber but proud of the late-season push. A few coaches and players seemed downright distraught, though, and that included Skenes. He had told the staff that the team’s final game would be his final game with the team — he was going to transfer.
He essentially had no choice. If he had returned to the Air Force for his junior year, he could have been drafted but would have been locked into spending his senior year completing schooling at the academy. That one-year mandatory sit-out would have been bad for everybody involved. His head coach, Mike Kazlausky, worked with the academy to ask for an exemption. But the Pentagon eventually said it wouldn’t be able to bend the rule — Skenes had to either transfer to another school or stay at Air Force for two more years.
Skenes still wrestled with the choice. He loved the Air Force. Loved everything about it. He still says he wants to go back someday and finish his training. But in Kazlausky’s office, through tears, he explained why he thought he had to leave. Kazlausky, to his enormous credit, gave Skenes no choice. “You have to go,” he told Skenes. That was the permission Skenes needed to move on.
The two hugged and tears were shed, and then Kazlausky had his assistants come to his office. When they walked in and saw Skenes and the misty eyes, they all started crying too. “We knew,” Forrest says.
So when they got knocked out by Texas, that core group of coaches felt especially somber. Skenes had become college baseball’s Shohei Paultani, winning the John Olerud Award as the best two-position player in the country.
On the field after the last Texas loss, quite a few Air Force players lingered as the Longhorns celebrated the win. They just milled around, taking their time, talking about what a bittersweet but historic season they had. The vibe was a little weird — as if the players kind of knew deep down that this moment was one they’d want to hang on to forever.
During that time, Skenes pulled his roommate, Joe, aside and told him he was transferring. They both cried and hugged. Joe looked at Skenes and couldn’t even believe how much he’d changed as a baseball player and yet was the same guy who slept with his feet in the sink and may or may not have cooked lots of food during basic.
Joe thinks he and Skenes walked around on the field for 30 or 45 sweet-and-sour minutes after the game. It was one of those beautiful nights for young people where everybody knew the end was near and that it was going to hurt. “I told him I loved him the same no matter what, that I understood this was something he had to do,” Joe says. “I think he saw his best opportunity to play professional baseball was to leave the academy.”
As soon as the team got back to Colorado, Skenes announced to everybody else that he wouldn’t be back. “This has been an honor,” he said. “I wish I could stay. But I have to go.”
Then he fell apart, and so did about 40 other guys. “There were a lot of dudes with tears in their eyes,” Gehring says. “Everybody loved the guy. Nobody held it against him. It was the right decision.”
Not long after, Skenes picked LSU, where he’d unite with the team he caught and pitched against in one of his first college games. But the days of throwing off the gear and hustling out to the bullpen for a few quick warmup pitches were in the rearview mirror ever since he started hitting 100 mph on the radar gun.
Skenes was going to LSU as a pitcher — a starting pitcher — and there was no doubt when he’d be pitching: He’d become the ultimate Friday guy.
“He’s doing great things at the big league level with the mustache — so it’s working,” says former Air Force pitching coach Ryan Forrest, before he takes a long pause. “But it’s still terrible. He needs to shave it.” David Banks-USA TODAY Sports
THE NEXT YEAR was all Paul Bunyan, no Paultani. As a pure pitcher at LSU, Skenes was breathtaking. He became the clear No. 1 pick during a dream season (13-2, 1.69 ERA and a ridiculous 209 strikeouts in 122⅔ innings) that ended with him as the NCAA pitcher of the year, the NCAA player of the year, the most outstanding player at the Men’s College World Series for the national champ Tigers. He won everything you could win. The Pittsburgh Pirates had no choice but to take him.
The only sad memory for his old Air Force coaches and teammates is that Skenes never got a chance to chase a career as a catcher. His recruiter from the Air Force, C.J. Gillman, is now the hitting instructor for the Mariners’ minor league teams. Before the 2024 draft, he sent the team’s lead catching evaluator footage of Skenes at Air Force behind the plate.
“I hope we’re going to draft this kid?” the guy responded.”I don’t think we can get him,” Gillman joked, “because he’s starting the All-Star Game for the National League as a pitcher.”
Skenes has nothing but fond memories himself. When he’s asked what the Air Force did for him, he says he doesn’t even know how to answer the question. “It’s easier to answer, what didn’t it do for me?” he says. “You can’t get away with anything at the academy. If you waste time, if you’re not on top of things, you’re going to drown. There are so many benefits to your work ethic, time management, everything.”
Many of his former teammates and coaches regularly catch up with him, and the Air Force is talked about as the foundation for everything that has happened since his cadet days. So the academy isn’t in his rearview mirror; it’s on the dashboard.
When his old friend, Doyle Gehring, heard chatter in 2023 that maybe Skenes had started dating Olivia Dunne, the LSU gymnast and mega-influencer, he asked him point blank, “Are you talking to Livvy Dunne?”
“Well …” Skenes said. He never finished the sentence. He didn’t have to.
The rumors were true. A friend of Skenes’ was dating LSU gymnast Elena Arenas, who introduced Skenes to her roommate, Dunne. He can’t remember exactly what they did as a first date — it was either sushi or ice cream, or maybe both? He just remembers they realized that they had to go out in the quietest possible way.
“If we had been spotted, it would have made waves in Baton Rouge,” he says.
They’ve been together for a little more than a year now, and his friends all say she has been the perfect partner during Skenes’ meteoric ascent to the top of baseball. She has been famous for years and knows how to manage celebrity and all its trappings, and Skenes is a newbie. “She knows how to deal with it, and I know how to deal with it now, too,” he says. “She’s been so good for me.”
That fame is only going to increase, though. Skenes is one of those star rookies who crosses over into phenom territory like he is in the EZ Pass lane for A-list sports status. He has all the ingredients: He’s 6-foot-7, throws 100 mph, is dating one of the most famous college athletes ever and even has an awesome mustache.
However, the mustache drives some of his old Air Force buddies up the wall. It began so innocently at LSU when he ran out of razor blades on a road trip to Ole Miss. As the mustache came in, Skenes let it grow. “I decided, screw it, I’m keeping the mustache,” he says.
When Kazlausky saw him at the All-Star Game, he said, “Your mustache is a stupid-ass mustache.” Then he turned to Dunne and implored her to tell Skenes to shave it off. “And make him get a haircut, too,” Kazlausky said.
Skenes just grins when Kazlausky needles him. He knows that Air Force standardizations and evaluations officer Paul Skenes would agree with Kazlausky about Paul Skenes, a Pirates pitcher with a Doc Holliday ‘stache.
But other than the mustache, it’s hard not to spot the Air Force when you look at Skenes. Roesinger had on a West Virginia baseball shirt, repping his current employers, and went to Skenes’ start against the Reds in July. Skenes got him a spot in a section of family and friends of Pirates players. About 50 feet away, Roesinger clocked Dunne right away but didn’t approach her. After the game — a 4-1 victory for Skenes — Roesinger was supposed to go down to the clubhouse and he ended up near Dunne, who also was headed down.
He started to introduce himself. “Hi, I’m Jimmy, one of Paul’s coaches from …” he began.”From Air Force!” she interjected. “I kept looking for you but I was expecting to see you in Air Force blue. So nice to meet you.”
Roesinger was struck by how warm and kind Dunne was, but also by how much Skenes carries Air Force with him. He spent a few minutes chitchatting with her, and the way she asked questions about the Air Force made him feel like the academy was a part of their relationship.
Of all the possible favorite moments to choose from, though, Skenes’ old head coach, Kazlausky, makes a surprising choice. Kazlausky went to the All-Star Game as a VIP guest of Skenes’ and watched him pitch a scoreless inning against the AL’s top of the order. Yet he says he’ll never forget when he watched Skenes on the field for the national anthem in Arlington, Texas, that night.
No surprise, Kazlausky is a big-time rah-rah anthem guy. But he was especially proud to see how Skenes stood at attention, right hand on his heart, left hand firm against his side, his feet touching at the heels and spread out in a perfect 45-degree V shape.
The Air Force way. Just without the sink this time.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/41015025/paul-skenes-pittsburgh-pirates-pitcher-air-force
