Air Force transfer ready to be the Top Gun of LSU's pitching staff
Whether it’s football, basketball, baseball, softball or any college sports, the NCAA transfer portal since its inception in October 2018 has increasingly made for some strange bedfellows.
For instance, there's LSU center fielder Dylan Crews and his new Tigers' teammate Paul Skenes, an Air Force Academy transfer.
Two seasons ago in 2021 when both were freshmen, LSU’s Crews in his eighth college at-bat hit the sixth pitch of then-Air Force reliever Skenes’ college pitching debut for a ninth-inning one-out solo homer in Alex Box Stadium.
“We’re now on the same train together,” Crews said. “I’m just glad he’s on the same side as me so I don’t have to face him anymore.”
Crews said he and Skenes have never and will likely not discuss the home run. Because if the subject was ever broached, Skenes could mention how he recovered from Crews’ dinger by striking out LSU’s Tre’ Morgan and Mitchell Sanford to close out his first college save in a 6-5 Air Force victory.
Skenes, one of college baseball’s most versatile players, often pitched (as a starter or reliever) and played catcher, designated hitter and first baseman all in a weekend conference series for Air Force.
Friday night at 6:30 when the preseason No. 1 ranked Tigers open the 2023 season in the first of a three-game home series vs. Western Michigan, Skenes will make his much-anticipated debut as LSU’s No. 1 starting pitcher.
“Opening up my college career here (at Alex Box) was one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do,” Skenes said. “So, I'm looking forward to being on the other side of it with however many fans we're gonna have here.”
Despite anticipated chilly temperatures, a sizeable opening night crowd is expected to pack Alex Box because of national pre-season hype enveloping head coach Jay Johnson’s second LSU team.
After Johnson’s first squad finished 40-22 last season when it was eliminated by Southern Mississippi in the Hattiesburg Regional, he and his staff signed college baseball’s No. 1 recruiting class stuffed with big-time transfers and possible impact freshmen.
There’s not a bigger name on the list of newbies than Skenes, a 6-6, 235-pound junior.
In two years at Air Force, he hit .367 with 24 homers and 81 RBI and sported an 11-4 pitching record with 11 saves, a 2.73 earned run average, 126 strikeouts and 39 walks.
All this by a guy who self-admittedly “didn’t get serious about pitching until I was a junior” at Lake Forest (Calif) El Toro High where he was an all-state player mostly recruited by Air Force for his catching and hitting ability.
“Catching was something that I did since I was eight years old,” Skenes said. “My sophomore year in high school, I wasn’t good enough to pitch.
“My junior year, I grew into my body. I was 6-5 and 220 pounds and I started throwing hard enough to pitch. I committed to Air Force as a catcher. I didn’t think I was going to pitch. But I started throwing harder and got better command of my stuff.
“Since then, I feel like I’ve been living out a lot of kids dreams. My freshman year when we played LSU, I caught eight innings and then closed out the game in the ninth. That’s now unheard of.”
As an Air Force freshman when he was a reliever in addition to starting 28 games at designated hitter, 18 at catcher and two at first base, he finished 14th nationally with a .410 batting average and was ninth with a school record-tying 11 saves. He was named a first-team All-American by three publications as well as College Baseball News national co-Freshman of the Year and the Mountain West Conference Player
Then last season as a sophomore, Skenes became Air Force’s Friday night starting hurler and saw a dramatic increase in his innings pitched. He had a 10-3 with 15 starts and a 2.73 ERA as the Mountain West co-Pitcher of the Year. Though his batting average dipped to .314, Air Force won the league title and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 50 years.
Though Skenes still loves hitting, he made a business decision when he transferred to LSU. He’s projected as a first-round major league draft choice as a pitcher, so he wanted to be in a program that accelerated his growth facing the best competition in college baseball in the the talent-loaded SEC.
Also, if Skenes wouldn’t have transferred from Air Force after last season and re-enrolled for his junior year this past fall, he would have been bound by the Academy rules to stay through his senior season and graduate.
Johnson still wants to use Skenes’ bat. But there’s enough offensive firepower on the LSU roster to not have to rely on Skenes’ offense on the days he’s not pitching.
“He has tremendous power and plate discipline,” Johnson said of Skenes. “I have great faith in his ability to drive a baseball and take quality at-bats.
“But his life is headed toward being a major league pitcher for a long time. He’ll definitely hit, but we have to be diligent about what’s best for him and what’s best for the team.”
Skenes is on-board with Johnson’s cautionary plan.
“I’m taking swings three to four times a week and kind of feeling it out,” Skenes said. “If I don't feel pretty much 90 to 100 percent, I'm not going to take swings. I’m going to try and get ready to hit, but the priority and the goal for me is to go out there and pitch every weekend.”
That’s what Skenes’ LSU teammates want him to do, also.
“He’s one of the top two pitchers I’ve ever seen,” Crews said of Skenes. “He has true command over five different pitches. He can throw whatever he wants anytime he wants. I've never seen anything like that.”
New LSU sophomore third baseman Tommy White, a North Carolina State transfer who set an NCAA single season freshmen home run record last season with 27, agreed with Crews’ assessment.
“He’s got a lot of pitches and he knows how to use every single one of them,” White said. “Not only that, he's just very competitive. He’s such a dog out there. He doesn’t want to lose, so he’s going to give everything he has every time he steps on the mound.”
This season, Skenes is armed with considerably more knowledge of the biomechanics of pitching, thanks to new pitching coach Wes Johnson and LSU’s multi-million dollar pitching laboratory near the Alex Box Stadium right field stands.
Johnson, hired late last June to replace Jason Kelly who was named University of Washington head coach, came to LSU after four years as a major league pitching coach with the Minnesota Twins.
Also, Johnson also coached at Arkansas, Mississippi State and Dallas Baptist, producing a combined 30 pitchers taken in the MLB draft.
“Before I came here, a lot of what I did on a baseball field was just go out and there have fun,” Skenes said. “I worked really hard at it and I got good at it.
“Now, it’s more businesslike and I appreciate it. God has put a lot of people in my life but specifically being able to talk to Coach Wes about pitching and develop professionally and as a human being is a huge blessing.
“He’s helped me have a better understanding how my body moves when I pitch. It’s made me a lot more comfortable with myself.”
Johnson said he loves working with Skenes because he’s someone who wants to improve every day.
“A lot of things make Paul elite,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to have talent, understand the game and understand what makes you special every single day through your workouts, your sleep, your nutrition, your recovery and then understanding how to use your stuff to attack hitters.
“Pour all that in the funnel and that's kind of where Paul Skenes comes out.”
It was a tough, but necessary decision for Skenes to transfer from Air Force. When he enrolled in 2021, he never thought he’d have a shot at playing in the major leagues
.“The reason I went to Air Force is because when I was in high school I wanted to be a fighter pilot so bad,” said Skenes, who didn’t qualify to train as a fighter pilot because he too tall according to the Air Force height requirements. “Flying a C-17 (Air Force cargo planes) is still an option down the road, but it (his Air Force career) was tough to walk away from.”
Skenes has made it a point this season to stay connected to the Air Force by using his NIL money to donate $10 for every batter he strikes out to Folds of Honor, a nonprofit organization that provides educational scholarships to the spouses and children of military and first responders who have died or been disabled.
Two former Air Force baseball players – Travis Wilkie and Nick Duran – died in plane crashes in November 2019 and June 2021.
“Travis died in pilot training during a formation landing,” Skenes said. “I met him during my recruiting visit. You could tell he loved life and loved flying.
“Nick was a teammate who owned a prop plane and was flying home when he died in a crash-landing. I'd seen him just the week before. When I got the call one morning that he died, it was a gut-punch.”
Wilkie was an Air Force catcher who wore No. 20. Skenes has always honored Wilkie by wearing No. 20 as he did at Air Force and will again at LSU where he’s eager to spend his last college season in baseball nirvana.
“This is like the peak,” Skenes said of playing for the six-time national champions and annual attendance leaders. “This is as good as you’re going to get in baseball until you get to the big leagues.
“This is really cool.”