Don’t flip out, Livvy Dunne. Apologies, bayou moms. Paul Skenes may have an LSU girlfriend and an LSU baseball card. He’s still, deep down, a Zoomie at heart.
“Anything that I can do, or any of us can do, to bring eyes to the Air Force Academy is good,” Skenes, the Pittsburgh Pirates pitching phenom and former AFA baseball star told a crowded circle of reporters earlier this weekend at Coors Field, where he was supposed to pitch against the Rockies, but won’t.
“Especially with how much it affected me. But I owe them that much.
“So I want to keep that going as long as I can because the tough part is, for me, I get labeled as ‘The LSU Guy,’ because obviously I got drafted out of there. But I’m just as much an Air Force guy as I am an LSU guy.”
Skenes found out last week that his scheduled spot in the rotation, Father’s Day at Coors Field, some 90 minutes — if traffic’s kind — up the road from the Academy, was being shifted from Sunday to Monday.
So he went back to his old AFA haunts on Friday morning. He took some Bucs teammates with him, including rotation mate Jared Jones, to see the old stomping grounds. They caught up with AFA baseball coach Mike Kazlausky. They saw his cousin, who’s now a glider instructor at the Academy. (Jones tried the virtual reality glider and landed successfully, Coach Kaz told me.) They walked around the Terrazzo. Mitchell Hall. The War Memorial.
It was like dancing with a long lost love. While the cameras circled Skenes, who’s sporting a 3-0 record, a 2.43 ERA, drawing comparisons to Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg along the way, the 6-foot-6 man-mountain with the rocket right arm almost got misty-eyed while talking about his Colorado Springs days. And what could’ve been.
“Definitely, as soon as you drive down there, there were some memories that popped up,” said Skenes, who played at Air Force as a freshman and sophomore (’21 and ’22) before transferring to LSU, the way station to becoming the No. 1 pick in the 2023 MLB Draft.
“Pretty cool, though, to get to go back now as a major-league player and think, ‘Wow, this is where it all started for me.’ Yeah, I was thinking about how I could’ve just graduated from there.’”
He might’ve, if the wingtips in Washington could ever figure out a consistent strike zone when it comes to service academies and pro sports. Last fall, the national defense bill that eventually passed a divided Congress included a provision that said any “agreement by a cadet or midshipman to play professional sport(s) constitutes a breach of service obligation.” In layman’s terms, that translates to two years of active duty, minimum, before the clock starts on a potential athletic career. Although the whole two-years-of-service-first thing has shifted back and forth at least a half-dozen times — required, then not required, then required again — over the last eight years or so.
Knowing that a junior year could be a mess, Kazlausky planned ahead. After Skenes hit .410, posted a 1.183 OPS and recorded 11 saves as a freshman catcher-closer with the Falcons, Coach Kaz pleaded to then-AFA superintendent Richard Clark to defer the required service time.
“I said, General Clark, this is the David Robinson of Air Force,” Kazlausky recalled. “‘This is the greatest athlete to ever come through our school … And unfortunately, the answer was going to be, ‘No.’”
Skenes, whose uncles served in the Coast Guard and Navy, didn’t ever want to flee the Wild Blue Yonder. Coach Kaz told him to go with his head on this one. Not his heart.
“He’s an old soul,” Kazlausky said. “He’s been put on God’s green earth to make a difference. And I’m not just talking about baseball.”
The big righty wound up with the Tigers, where he won the Dick Howser Award, was named the Most Outstanding Player of the College World Series and landed a $9.2-million signing bonus from Pittsburgh, the largest in MLB draft history.
“It shows you the type of coach that Coach Kaz is, to encourage him to pursue that journey and that experience,” Aerik Joe, his old AFA roommate, told me by phone from Japan on Saturday. “As well as what it says about Paul.”
Skenes stories are the stuff of legend now. When big Paul saw an opposing Mountain West women’s soccer player kneeling during the national anthem, he allegedly ran into the baseball locker room, grabbed the Stars & Stripes and brought it out to the field, waving it proudly during the match.
In 2021, after an attack in Afghanistan had taken the lives of 13 U.S. service members, at 4:45 p.m. the national anthem was played and the flag brought down. Skenes and his baseball teammates stood at attention. Meanwhile, up a nearby hill, Skenes could see two football managers in a video booth slightly slouched, distracted, eyes off the flag. When the anthem was finished, Skene went over and berated the managers for slacking.
“The kid’s an American patriot,” offered Ryan Rutter, Skenes’ commanding officer back in the day. “I don’t know any other way to say it. At a young age, he showed his colors to be red, white and blue.”
Things came so easy for a young Skenes, even at one of the most rigorous undergraduate environments in the country, that Rutter once asked the future No. 1 pick if he had any weaknesses that bothered him. This from a guy who hit .367 at Air Force and batted leadoff while throwing in the high-90s.
“I’m not that fast,” Skenes replied. “I wish I was faster.”
Rutter still chuckles at that one.
“Paul was ready to be a second lieutenant when he showed up here,” Rutter recalled. “He was ready to be an officer in the Air Force.”
Old classmates at AFA sent him photos from graduation last month. His mom still talks to their parents. He’s a patriot first, but pitching pays the bills.
“A big part of me wishes that I could graduate from there and be doing what I’m doing right now,” Skenes said. “But that’s not super compatible in a lot of ways. But (I) kind of got the best of both worlds.”
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Originally Published: June 15, 2024 at 7:36 p.m.
