LSUs Paul Skenes is a modern pitcher in the making
Before Paul Skenes was Paul Skenes, before he was a top prospect for this summer’s MLB draft — long before anyone mentioned him in the same sentence as Gerrit Cole or Stephen Strasburg — he was a gangly kid, all arms and legs, who had no idea why his body moved the way it did.
He didn’t know about revolutions or spin rates. He had never heard of TrackMan data or Edgertronic cameras. When he tried to pitch, stepping on a portable mound inside a workout facility, his back shoulder dipped like a seesaw before he sprung toward a net. The year was 2017. Skenes was a freshman at El Toro High in Lake Forest, Calif. Maybe 15 feet from his session, a few kids sat on workout machines, chatting and waiting their turn.
Forgive them for not knowing to watch closely.
“He was rawer than raw,” said Eugene Bleecker, the founder of 108 Performance, where Skenes first trained with a focus on biomechanics. “But he was obsessed with figuring it out.”
Skenes was always a modern pitcher in the making, a blend of art and science and unbending will. At Air Force, his first stop after high school, he was a two-way player who once sprained his ankle in the fourth inning, caught another two, then pitched the final three to close out a win. At Oregon State, on an official visit after he decided to transfer, Skenes found his new slider grip when he and the pitching coach played catch before his flight. At LSU, where he landed before this season, he asked to sit with Wes Johnson, a former major league pitching coach, while Johnson sifted through the information that showed up in detailed scouting reports.
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Learning, tinkering, trying whatever might help him improve are habits the 21-year-old can’t kick. And as he grew into his body, sprouting to 6-foot-6 with the build of a tight end, they have helped Skenes become LSU’s towering ace, a pitcher the whole baseball world expects to be a top-five pick in July. He could very well go second to the Washington Nationals if the Pittsburgh Pirates don’t take him first. There are others in the mix, namely outfielders Dylan Crews — the consensus top player and Skenes’s college teammate — and Wyatt Langford and Max Clark. There are also obvious injury risks to selecting a pitcher so high because no arm is designed to throw a 101-mph fastball, then do it again, then again and again and again.
But throughout the season and more recently in the College World Series, Skenes has offered a question to any team considering anyone else: Do the uncertainties outweigh the risk of passing on a potential generational ace? And do they want to find out?
“I’m sort of addicted to finding edges,” Skenes said. “It’s fun to dig and dig and keep finding ways to get better, get ahead.”
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“It wouldn’t have mattered if this was 10 years or 50 years ago — Paul Skenes is driven to find any way to make himself better,” Johnson, now LSU’s pitching coach, explained. “I tell people he’s a once in a 10-, 15-year window kind of guy. If you get two of these guys, maybe three, in your whole career as a college coach, it’s been a special run. You don’t come across those players.”
Skenes’s season line heading into Thursday’s Wake Forest matchup: 18 starts, 114⅔ innings, a 1.81 ERA, 19 walks and 200 strikeouts.
His arsenal: a four-seam fastball that has touched 103 and sat in triple-digits late in outings, a sweeping slider, a change-up, a sinker and a curve.
Earlier this season, the morning after a strong start against Tennessee, Skenes relaxed behind a desk at LSU’s stadium and broke down his pitches. He already had leafed through the TrackMan data report left on the chair at his locker. His fastball had averaged 15 inches of horizontal movement and 18 inches of induced vertical break the night before. His change-up was creeping back into his pitch mix after he didn’t throw it much early on. (Because it runs in the low-90s, mid-major hitters who were late on his fastball could time it up by accident.) And then Skenes mentioned his curveball and grinned.
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He had thrown a few dozen to that point of the season, far less frequently than his slider. But the curve had a 100 percent whiff rate, meaning of all the swings against it, none resulted in contact. Like, not even the lightest foul tip. From the start, though, nothing in his short career has made a ton of sense. Take what happened in his first months at Air Force.
“The first time he steps on the mound, he’s 90 to 91 right out of basic training,” said Ryan Forrest, Air Force’s pitching coach. “A lot of kids are 90-mile-an-hour arms in high school, and then they’re throwing 82 once they’re finished with basic. For five weeks, you just run and do push-ups, and you’re exhausted at the end, mentally and physically. But Paul was just different. The way he moved was different. And at the end of the fall, he’s sitting 95. After Christmas break, he was 94 to 96.
“How? I don’t know. If we could replicate him over and over, we would.”
An American League executive whose team doesn’t have a top five pick recently had a similar thought about Skenes: If he could be replicated, if there were unicorn college aces at the front of every draft, then it would be much easier to pass on him for any of the ultra-talented outfielders. But in Skenes, in his rare velocity, in the slider and the change-up he used to dominate Tennessee in the College World Series, there’s an opportunity to add a top prospect who could very well debut in 2024.
Going first, second or third shouldn’t alter that timeline. Only injuries or underperformance could. Yet once he put everything into pitching at LSU, Skenes has demanded attention with every pitch he has thrown. He no longer takes the mound in front of an idle audience. He may never again.
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