LSU baseball coach ‘1,000%’ confident Pirates’ Paul Skenes could win an MLB game right now
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My first question to LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson regarding Pittsburgh Pirates first-round draft choice Paul Skenes was pretty simple.
What are the Pirates getting in this guy?
“You can’t get a better pitcher. And you can’t get a better person,” Johnson instantly replied.
On the personality side, during his first media session as a Pirate on Tuesday, Skenes commanded the room. Especially after the stodgy, formal Q&A and picture-taking session. When Skenes spoke with a smaller pack of reporters, he came off as polished, professional, thoughtful and funny.
“You’re talking about a Hall of Fame human being that is equal as a person to what he is as a pitcher,” Johnson said during Friday’s “Breakfast With Benz” podcast. “You have a leader. You have the highest character person. You have a guy that will raise the level of everybody else around him. He’s a great teammate. He’s got a great personality. There’s nobody that the Pirates will have an easier time getting behind as a player than Paul because of the person and player that he is.”
As for the pitching side, the numbers do the talking. The 6-foot-6 right-hander tallied 209 strikeouts, a 12-2 record and a 1.69 ERA last year with Johnson’s 2023 College World Series champions. But Johnson says there is even another layer to those statistics.
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“When you look at Paul’s season, the level of dominance is like something we haven’t seen too often at this level. Then you peel that back and look at how he did it with the stuff,” Johnson said. “It’s a fastball that is over 100 miles an hour more than it’s not. A great slider, a great changeup, great command of all his pitches. He does everything right, manages the running game, fields his position well. It’s just this unbelievable, professional approach to his preparation that is like I have never seen before at the college level.”
So that begs an interesting question.
Given Skenes’ physical and emotional maturity and his arsenal of pitches, how soon before he could contribute on the Major League level? In the draft lead-up, some analysts were suggesting that Skenes could help a big league club later this year if they needed it.
I took that to be a bit of hyperbole. But Johnson doesn’t.
“Do I think he could go pitch successfully and win in a Major League Baseball game today? 1,000%,” Johnson insisted. “He’s just prepared to do that. As any college player that I’ve ever seen. The Pirates, I’m sure, are doing this as we speak — looking at the load that he has pitched so far through our season. Looking at the time off that he’s had. Then there’s probably a process of rebuilding and rebooting him back to competitive pitching that they have to pay attention to.”
That’s big. To whatever degree the Pirates want Skenes to reacclimate to competition this year, how worthwhile is it on his arm after throwing 122⅔ innings this season in Baton Rouge? Especially if the big league club is out of contention.
By the way, if this is the first Pirates column you’ve read since their 20-8 start to the season, the last two and half months … um … haven’t been so good.
One thing Johnson stresses, though, is that the 21-year-old’s arm has managed to stay very sound because Skenes and the Tigers’ program have gone to great lengths to manage his health in between appearances.
“The self-awareness piece with Paul is on a different level. I think he understands what he needs to do to have his body right, to have his arm right. We do a lot of assessment with other pitchers throughout the week to see (if) their hips are right. Is their back right? Are their legs right? So that they can stay in their good delivery to be able to protect their arm,” Johnson said.
“He has a phenomenal delivery, very connected with his arm. He’s such a big, strong physical guy that figured out how to move correctly. He’s in as good of a position to stay healthy as any pitcher that I’ve ever seen. You never can guarantee that. But if I was going to trust somebody to continue to do the things that they need to do to stay healthy and perform at their optimal level, I would trust Paul Skenes.”
Also in the podcast, Johnson talks about what it was like to be the manager of a club that had both the No. 1 and No. 2 draft choices on the board. He also gets into whether the No. 2 pick, Dylan Crews, was truly put off by the idea of being drafted by Pittsburgh, as some reports suggested. And Johnson tells us why Skenes dropping the hitting portion of his skillset may have helped his development.
Even if Pirates fans want to think the club has just drafted the next Shohei Ohtani.