By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
The guy is 6-foot-6, weighs 235 pounds and routinely throws a baseball 100 miles an hour. When Paul Skenes is on the mound, “emotional” is not exactly the word that comes to mind.
But ask him about leaving the Air Force Academy to go to LSU and he’ll tell you all about emotions.
Ask him to wonder what it’s going to be like when he realizes the dream of playing major league baseball, and that word will come up again (although it is presented a different way).
It’s been a whirlwind year for Skenes yet that might seem like a light breeze compared to what’s about to come for the most recent top draft choice in MLB, picked by the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The latest stop on the Life of Paul Skenes Tour brought him to the Shreveport Convention Center Tuesday night as the featured speaker at the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl Kickoff Dinner.
It was a little more than a year ago when Skenes made a decision that would affect his baseball career and though it’s obvious how well it worked out, that doesn’t mean it was easy.
“Leaving Air Force was extremely emotional and I remember telling my coach I wanted to come see him,” Skenes said. “I walked into his office and said ‘Hey coach …’ and I just burst out into tears.
“It was a 45-minute ordeal and we talked about how much the program meant to me and how much I meant to the program. And when I told my team, even though most of them knew, I just burst out into tears again. That was the hardest thing for me up to that point in my life.”
(Skenes, who played three years at Air Force, got a chance to get back to those roots on this trip with an afternoon visit to Barksdale Air Force Base.)
The move south to LSU couldn’t have gone better for Skenes as he led the Tigers to the national championship, followed by being the first pick in the draft. They don’t pick guys No. 1 just to have them hang around the minor leagues for a few years, so the track to the majors is a fast one.
Even though he threw just 6 2/3 innings in the minor leagues this summer, it’s perfectly natural for Skenes to think about what it will be like when he steps on the rubber to throw his first major league pitch.
That’s when emotions might come into play again, only in a different way.
“To be honest, I hope it is not this boiling up of emotions,” he says. “That’s something I am kind of preparing for now. Yes, it is a dream to be a major league baseball player. But you have to win. To play for a team that wins 50 games and be a big leaguer wouldn’t make me happy. I hope it’s not this overpouring of emotions for me. I can understand it for my family. But we will see.”
Skenes pitched at three different levels in the minors this summer – rookie league, Class A and Class AA – and said it was all part of the plan.
“I got everything I wanted out of those outings,” he said. “The thing we were trying to do from the first outing to the second to the third was get used to the five-day rotation. After that it was a six-day rotation because it was so late in the season.”
He faced fewer batters in the entire summer (28) than he did in an average game at LSU.
“I was extremely happy with how it went seeing my stuff against professional hitters,” he said. “Because the game doesn’t change; people change. That was the biggest thing, to get into my routine and see how it plays.”
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com