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 as 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 …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Sports
