NMSU issues not only in hoops, documents show
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Sara CoelloESPN
New Mexico State University officials have insisted that culture problems in their athletic department were isolated to men’s basketball, but documents obtained by ESPN show an official for the women’s team was found to have sexually harassed a student in the past year, and they reflect at least three other ongoing Title IX investigations involving incidents in the arena that houses athletic offices and an apparent lack of scrutiny in officials’ hiring practices.
All of that is in addition to recent allegations that a former football coach physically abused players under the threat of taking away their scholarships.
NMSU athletics have been under scrutiny since forward Mike Peake shot and killed a University of New Mexico student in what police called self-defense last November. Another investigation followed in February, when a men’s basketball player accused his teammates of a months-long hazing campaign.
Head coach Greg Heiar was fired Feb. 14 after less than a year on the job, and the rest of the men’s basketball season was canceled, but questions linger about both incidents.
The university declined to allow ESPN to interview any school or athletic department officials for this story. School leaders haven’t publicly discussed the situation since mid-February, when then-chancellor Dan Arvizu and athletic director Mario Moccia emphasized that the problems in basketball were not pervasive.
“We have looked and done an expansive review of our programs and everything that I have learned is that our men’s basketball program has been infected — with bad culture, bad behavior,” Arvizu told reporters. “[But] this culture of bad behavior is contained in our men’s basketball, it is not elsewhere.”
However, school records obtained by ESPN under open records laws show that a Title IX investigator took less than a week last year to find that George Ross Jr., the director of operations for women’s basketball, had sexually harassed a student who was working in his office.
The student, who worked as a janitor at the arena, said in her complaint that Ross generally got to his office around 6 a.m., when the building was empty of witnesses. In July 2022, she was vacuuming his office when he asked if she wanted to hang out and began “pushing” to take her out for a beer, according to documents.
The student said she tried to deflect and eventually left to clean a different office, but he followed her there and stood in the doorway, the documents say.
She said Ross told her, “Don’t forget what I said,” then asked three or four more times for a date, according to the documents. The woman felt threatened and told a coworker what happened, and that person took the story to the Title IX office on July 14.
In a follow-up letter, Title IX deputy coordinator Annamarie DeLovato wrote that Ross described the interaction as well-intended “small talk.” In her finding of responsibility, DeLovato gave Ross a warning and, four days after opening the case, issued a no-contact order that barred him from interacting with the student.
Notes from the case file indicate an unidentified person interviewed in the case said Ross’ behavior should prevent him from coaching or being around other women.
But even as DeLovato forbade Ross from speaking to the student and forced him to review basic staff conduct rules, she wrote in her report that the action didn’t rise to the level of violating NMSU’s nondiscrimination policy. That policy specifies that a single act of harassment is serious enough to be considered a violation, and includes harassment that’s both “unwelcome” and “of a sexual nature.”
Ross continues in his job with the women’s team. He did not respond to efforts by ESPN to reach him directly by email and phone.
Gaylene Fasenko, chairperson of the school’s faculty senate, said the allegation and that Ross was not disciplined beyond the warning was “concerning.”
The faculty senate has a hand in writing the administrative rules and is constantly reevaluating them, Fasenko said, but she would not say if the body is discussing any changes to the disciplinary standards cited by DeLovato.
NMSU’s Title IX office is investigating three other complaints of sexual harassment or abuse stemming from reported incidents at the address for Pan American Center, which houses the basketball arena and athletic department offices, according to documents. The school declined to release any details on the incidents to ESPN, including whether they involve athletes or athletic department staff, because the cases are ongoing.
As recently as March 2020, the department dealt with another investigation, this one into then-head football coach Doug Martin. A complaint to the state attorney general alleged that Martin made players, even injured ones, practice in dangerous conditions by threatening to revoke their scholarships.
Martin denied the allegation, and the school cleared him of wrongdoing, but his contract was not renewed after the 2021 season.
Heiar’s tenure was marked by scandal even before the Peake shooting. The first incident, involving one of his earliest hires, came to light before the 2022-23 season started.
After being hired by Heiar in June, defensive analyst Edmond Pryor was arrested in early August at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport upon returning from a team trip. Pryor resigned from New Mexico State on Aug. 22.
According to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, Pryor had been fired from a coaching job at a Chicago community college in 2019 after “suspicious documents,” including fake university transcripts, were found on his work computer.
Pryor was accused of forging documents to help accused criminals expand the range of their electronic monitoring anklets or get charges improperly dropped, according to the sheriff’s office and district attorney.
According to New Mexico State records, Pryor listed “other” as his reason for leaving his job in Chicago and gave the school permission to contact past supervisors.
In an interview, Pryor told ESPN that NMSU never brought up the investigation or the circumstances surrounding his departure. The forgery case against him is still pending, according to court records.
“You know, just because there are allegations against a person … doesn’t mean that person is guilty,” Pryor told ESPN in reference to both his case and the NMSU hazing allegations, which he said he has continued to follow.
The November shooting was preceded by an Oct. 15 scuffle, in which at least one member of the men’s basketball team got involved in a fight with rivals from the University of New Mexico during a football game at NMSU. Video of the scuffle showed Peake on the edges of the skirmish before a police officer separated the handful of people involved.
There’s no record that Las Cruces or campus police investigated the brawl, and authorities noted months later that they were still unsure of who started the fight or what it was about.
About a month later, NMSU traveled to Albuquerque to play New Mexico in men’s basketball. The night before the game, three Aggies players snuck out of their downtown hotel after curfew to confront a UNM player who’d fought Peake the previous month, according to state police investigative records. A few seconds into a three-on-one fight, both Peake and 19-year-old Brandon Travis opened fire. Travis was killed.
The ensuing investigation raised more questions than answers about NMSU’s team management, starting with how the players snuck out unnoticed and how Peake took a gun onto the team bus.
Officials also have not said why players were loaded up and sent back to Las Cruces without telling police — prompting troopers to pull them over on a New Mexico roadside — and why coaches reportedly kept police from questioning the players involved and handled evidence.
The district attorney is still investigating NMSU’s response to the shooting, which New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez has called troubling.
“This was not handled in, let’s say, the usual fashion,” Torrez told KOAT-TV. “I was very troubled by the way in which the institutions and some of the leaders in those institutions sort of handled the situation.”
The only investigation completed so far was by a private law firm hired by NMSU to investigate the school’s response. The firm generated a two-page report with six suggestions for improvement that focused on reinforcing student-athletes’ respect for curfews and travel etiquette. Both that report and the school’s statement of it emphasized that investigators believed the university had fulfilled its legal obligations.
Heiar, who initially told police that he’d “inherited” Peake and advised them to question veteran assistant coaches instead, announced later in November that he took “full responsibility for what happened.” School announcements and records give no indication that Heiar himself faced any discipline in the matter.
The shooting investigation was still ongoing Feb. 10, when a basketball player accused his teammates of sexually abusing him in a months-long hazing campaign. He told campus police three other players pinned him in the locker room, pulled down his pants, slapped his buttocks and touched his scrotum. The abuse had been ongoing since the summer, according to police records, and generally happened in front of the entire team.
As the team traveled to an event later that day, school officials stopped the bus, suspended the season indefinitely and put Heiar on paid administrative leave.
Two players, Deuce Benjamin and Shakiru Odunewu, this week sued school officials, saying coaching staff and administrators failed to act when they reported the behavior. The lawsuit, which named three regents, Heiar and an assistant, and three former players, says the activity went beyond harassment to sexual assault, battery and false imprisonment and that it remains under investigation by police.
“When the behavior goes too far, and crosses the line into non-consensual touching … it is battery and sexual assault,” the complaint reads. “When the behavior continues for months, it cannot be viewed as an initiation rite; instead, it is harassment and abuse. And when coaches and universities do not take adequate action to prevent or stop such behavior, they have failed their student athletes and are complicit in the abuse.”
School officials didn’t publicly outline Heiar’s role in the hazing or response to it, but they fired him within days, with Arvizu saying that the decision stemmed from the hazing incident. The school pledged to investigate other members of the coaching staff, but officials haven’t publicly spoken about the case since February. Arvizu and the university’s board of regents announced April 7 that they had agreed to a “mutual separation,” and former school president Jay Gogue was appointed interim chancellor.
“This separation is truly mutual,” Arvizu was quoted as saying in a school statement.
At their February news conference, still the only time NMSU leaders have addressed the hazing allegation, Arvizu reinforced his continuous praise of athletic director Moccia, who defended the school’s process for hiring coaches since he arrived in 2015.
But ESPN’s review of school documents raises questions about that process.
Chris Jans, Heiar’s immediate predecessor, was successful on the court with a 122-32 overall record. He came to New Mexico State after he was fired by Bowling Green State University in 2015 for allegedly sexually harassing women at a bar near campus. Jans smacked one woman’s buttocks and made lewd comments to other female patrons, a witness said. He apologized after the school fired him.
That incident wasn’t mentioned in NMSU’s hiring paperwork for Jans, according to documents.
Jans, who worked with Heiar at Chipola College in Florida and Wichita State, is among several head coaches that Heiar worked for that left jobs amid accusations of impropriety.
Heiar coached under Will Wade at LSU from 2017 to 2020. Heiar left soon after the school suspended Wade amid allegations that an FBI wiretap caught the coach appearing to make an offer to a recruit.
Heiar worked at Wichita State from 2011 to 2017 under Gregg Marshall, who resigned after several players accused him of physical and verbal abuse in 2020.
Heiar wasn’t publicly implicated in any of his previous bosses’ scandals, but he was arrested in 2008 and charged with driving under the influence after crashing his car while coaching at Chipola College, according to Florida criminal records. He could not be reached by ESPN.
“Coaching hires are not infallible,” Moccia told reporters in February. “There is not a crystal ball underneath my desk.”
The men’s basketball team is set to resume in 2023-24, although virtually the whole team, including Odunewu, Benjamin, Peake, Jaden Alexander, Doctor Bradley, Kyle Feit, DaJuan Gordon, Shahar Lazar, Issa Muhammad and Mady Traoré, has entered the transfer portal.
Benjamin announced his decision to transfer this week, saying on Twitter that his NMSU dreams had “changed into a nightmare” and adding that new coach Jason Hooten had “recently informed me that it would be in my best interest to continue my education and basketball career elsewhere.”
Hooten, who had been the longtime coach at Sam Houston State, said on his arrival that “a new culture needs to be built — a new start and a new beginning.”
Hooten, Moccia and school leaders all declined to answer questions about how, exactly, they plan to do that.
THE WORLD IS loud and fast and demanding, and to combat this, Paul Skenes forages for silence. He relishes the moments where the chaos gives way to blissful nothingness, just him and dead air. Right now, they are fewer and farther between than they’ve ever been in the past decade — a decade spent working toward this moment, when he is arguably the best pitcher in the world and inarguably the most internet-famous, which is the sort of thing that tends to put a damper on his quest for quiet.
“You can’t master the noise until you master the silence,” Skenes says. A coach told him that this offseason, and it spoke to Skenes, whose mastery of his first season in Major League Baseball — and a two-month stretch in which he went from top prospect to All-Star Game starting pitcher — set him on a path that only upped his daily dose of cacophony. He had been enjoying partaking in sound-free workouts, a far cry from the weightlifting sessions in Pittsburgh’s weight room — a petri dish of decibels and testosterone, suffused with grunts and clanks, ringed with TVs whose visual clamor complements the music thumping out of speakers, a lizard-brained heavenscape.
As fast as Skenes throws a baseball — last summer, it was a half-mile per hour faster than any starter in the game’s century-and-a-half-long history — he thinks slowly, methodically. There are things he wants to do — real, substantive things. He seeks silence because in it he finds clarity. About how to extract the very best from his gilded right arm — but also about who he is and who he aspires to be.
“The times that I’ll figure stuff out is when I’m just sitting and not doing anything,” Skenes says. “I’ll figure some stuff out, on the mound or talking to people, but there will be times where I’m just sitting or lying in bed or something like that. Silence. And there’s nothing else to do but think. I wonder — and I’m not comparing myself to him by any stretch — but Newton discovered gravity because he was sitting under a tree and an apple fell. You figure stuff out because you’re sitting in silence. Compartmentalizing stuff, thinking about the game, doing a debrief of myself. That’s how I’ll get pitch grips. Just sitting around and imagining the feel of the baseball and like, oh, I’m going to try that. It works or it doesn’t work. If you do that enough, you’re going to figure stuff out.”
The irony of this exercise is that the more Skenes figures out on the mound, the shriller his world will get. As Skenes embarks on his first full season in MLB, he’s learning what comes with the commodification of an athlete. Alongside the demand for peak performance come requests for his time and his autograph, pictures taken by gawking fans and GQ photographers. He is pitcher and pitchman. His teammates sometimes wonder whether it’s too much too soon — when they’re not needling him for it.
“You guys doing an interview about our savior?” one said this spring as a reporter queried two others about Skenes. They were, in fact, though the 22-year-old Skenes is far more than just the player Pittsburgh is praying can liberate its woebegone baseball franchise from the dregs of the sport. He is a generational pitcher for a generation that doesn’t pitch like all the previous ones — but he is also still just a kid trying to navigate his way through a universe not built for him. He is happy to forgo the convenience of an apartment adjacent to the stadium for a soundless drive to the suburbs that feels almost meditative. He can ponder the questions he would like to answer — not the ones proffered by others. For instance: In this life so antithetical to the one he thought he would be living, who, exactly, is he?
“It’s funny,” Skenes says. “When you start thinking about stuff like this, you find that you don’t know a whole lot more than you thought while also learning about yourself. I know myself a lot better — and, in some ways, a lot less.”
IN JANUARY 2023 — six months after he’d left the only place he ever wanted to go, seven months before he started a career he never imagined he’d have — Skenes was chatting with LSU baseball coach Wes Johnson about the year ahead. The previous summer, he had transferred to the SEC power from the Air Force Academy, where he had played catcher and pitched. For all of Skenes’ power as a hitter, Johnson wasn’t interested in developing another Shohei Ohtani. This was big-time college baseball, and after a fall semester that for Skenes consisted of online courses and eight or nine hours a day of training for baseball, Johnson, the former pitching coach for the Minnesota Twins, understood before most the implications of Skenes’ move.
“For the next two to three years, you will have a new normal every single day,” Johnson said.
Growing up, there were no conversations about the pressures of major league stardom in Skenes’ household. His father, Craig, was a biochemistry major who works in the eye medication industry and topped out in JV baseball. His mother, Karen, teaches AP chemistry and was in the marching band. Skenes was not allowed to touch a baseball after school until he finished his homework.
“It was never the big leagues really,” Skenes says. “It was ‘Be a good person, do your homework, go to church’ and all that. There’s nothing in my family that says that, yeah, this guy was born to be a big leaguer.”
Skenes’ parents told him to find what he loved and work really hard at it, which had led him to the Air Force. Skenes found comfort in the academy’s structure and rigor; the academy embodied his values of discipline and routine and responsibility. Skenes wanted to fly fighter jets and took deep pride in being an airman. That’s why Skenes cried when he decided, at the behest of his coaches, to leave for LSU after his sophomore year: He’d found what he’d loved and worked really hard at it and gotten it, only for something else to find him and cajole him away.
A big SEC school didn’t feel like Skenes’ speed — not the random public approaches, not the fanfare, not the Geaux Tigers of it all — but he understood why he needed to be there. He is a nerd who happened to stand 6-foot-6, weigh 260 pounds and throw a baseball with more skill than anyone in the country, and to turtle from that would be wasteful. The Air Force years had prepared him for the transition, and he ingratiated himself in Baton Rouge with a Sahara-dry sense of humor. Skenes would regularly walk around the clubhouse, stop at each teammate’s locker and rib him: “I worked harder than you today.” It was in jest, but it was also the truth, and when teammate Cade Beloso recounted the practice to ESPN’s broadcast team during LSU’s run to a College World Series title in 2023, Skenes recalls, “I’m like, dude, everybody thinks I’m a douche now. So there is still some of that. I still am that way, just not with everybody.”
He grappled with his identity at LSU, a California kid dropped into the bayou and forced to find his way. Meeting Livvy Dunne only compounded his need to adapt. An LSU gymnast with an innate talent for making social media content that bewitched Gen Z, Dunne was introduced to Skenes by mutual friends and she was immediately smitten. If LSU raised a magnifying glass over Skenes’ life and career — he’d gone from a fringe first-round pick to the top of draft boards on the strength of a junior season in which he struck out 209 in 122⅔ innings — Dunne brought the Hubble telescope. He didn’t even have Instagram or TikTok on his phone.
“I’m not perfect by any means, but I think that you can get yourself in trouble really quickly now because if you do anything, someone’s filming it,” Skenes says. “It takes a whole lot more energy to go out anywhere and pretend to be someone else than it does to go out and just be yourself. If being yourself doesn’t get you in trouble, then great. So that’s kind of the life that I think I was geared to live just based on the whole path coming up.
“I don’t think anything’s really changed. When I look at famous people or celebrities, I see a lot of the time people that do whatever they can because they think they can do whatever they can. Why is that? We’re all people. What has gotten you there? What has gotten you to being famous, to being a movie star? Whatever it is, you’re very good at what you do. So why change? I respect the people that don’t change a whole lot more than the other people that are, ‘Hey, I’m a celebrity.'”
Going with the first overall pick tested his willingness to stand by that ethos. Every pitch he threw invited more eyeballs, his rapid ascent to Pittsburgh an inevitability. The Pirates are a proud franchise hamstrung by an owner, Bob Nutting, fundamentally opposed to using his wealth to bridge the game’s inherent inequity. Skenes was their golden ticket, the best pitching prospect in more than a decade, and the excitement for his arrival at LSU paled compared to what greeted him May 11, when the Pirates summoned him to the big leagues. He was Pittsburgh’s, yes, but everyone in the baseball ecosystem wanted a piece of Skenes.
Over the next two months and 11 starts, he so thoroughly dominated hitters that he earned the start for the National League in the All-Star Game. His only inning included showdowns with Juan Soto (a seven-pitch walk that ended on a 100 mph fastball painted on the inside corner but not called a strike) and Aaron Judge (a first-pitch groundout on a 99 mph challenge fastball). He rushed home to spend the rest of the break with Dunne and settle back into a life he was learning to enjoy.
Skenes’ first season could not have gone much better. He threw 133 innings, struck out more than five hitters for every one he walked and posted a 1.96 ERA. The last rookie to start at least 20 games with a sub-2.00 ERA was Scott Perry in 1918, the tail end of the dead ball era. When Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. announced Skenes as NL Rookie of the Year winner, Dunne broke into a wide smile and rejoiced as Skenes sat stone-faced before mustering a toothless grin. Memelords pounced instantaneously and Skenes was immortalized as the picture of utter disinterest.
Which is fine by him. He was proud, but pride can manifest itself in manifold ways, and if LSU and his first big league season taught Skenes anything, it’s that he is not beholden to external whims and expectations. He’s going to figure out who he is his way. And that starts with seeking out the people whose opinions do matter to him.
IN THE FIRST inning of a July game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, Skenes left the Pirates’ dugout and beelined into the bowels of Chase Field. Randy Johnson had just been inducted as an inaugural member of the Diamondbacks Hall of Fame, and Skenes was not going to miss the opportunity to shake his hand and pick his brain.
For someone as polished and proficient as Skenes, he remains fundamentally curious. However exceptional his aptitude to pitch might be, he’s still enough of a neophyte that he’s got oodles to absorb, and he’s humble enough to know what he doesn’t know. Skenes is not shy about trying to learn, and over the past year he has sought advice from a wide array of players whose careers he would love to emulate.
Johnson’s would have ended 20 years earlier than his 2009 retirement had he not done the same. Like Skenes, he was an otherworldly talent. Unlike Skenes, he needed almost a decade to tame it. Johnson didn’t find success until Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, as well as pitching guru Tom House, advised him. So he was glad to talk with Skenes and try to offer a sliver of the assistance he’d been afforded. First, though, he had a question.
“It all depends on what you’re looking for,” Johnson said. “Are you looking for a good game, a good season or a good career?”
Skenes’ answer was a no-brainer: a good career. The no-selling of his Rookie of the Year win is a perfect example. It’s an award. It’s nice. It’s also the reflection of a single great season among the many more he anticipates having. For Skenes, the goal is game-to-game excellence and longevity, the hallmarks of true greatness. Johnson fears that the modern usage of starting pitchers inhibits players’ ability to marry the two.
Over the past 25 years, the number of 100-plus-pitch games in MLB has dipped from 2,391 to 635 last season. There were 1,297 starts of 110 or more pitches in 2000 and 33 last year. Skenes — and Johnson — believe some of today’s starting pitchers are capable of more. For a pitcher like Skenes to be limited by strictures based more in fear of injury than data that supports their implementation gnaws at Johnson, who regularly ran up high pitch counts before retiring at 46.
The second a career begins, Johnson told Skenes, it is marching toward its end, and the truly special players use the time in between to defy expectations and limitations. If Skenes is as good as everyone believes — “He’s where I’m at six or seven years after I found my mechanics,” Johnson says — then he will either convince the Pirates to remove the restrictor plate or eventually find a team that will. Which is why Johnson’s ultimate advice to him was simple: “This is your career.”
“It will be a mental mission for him,” Johnson says. “I understood throughout the course of my career that if I can talk myself through a game, I will realize my mission. I trained myself to put me in those positions for success, get me through that. I know the pitchers can do these things I talk about, but they’re not allowed to. And that, to me, is mind-boggling. It makes no sense to me. You’re not going to see a pitcher grow mentally or physically if you take him out of situations.”
Longevity was on the mind of another subject from whom Skenes sought advice. When the Pirates went to New York last year, Skenes met with Gerrit Cole in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. Cole is perhaps the best modern analog for Skenes: born and raised in Southern California, big-bodied hard thrower. Both went to college and then were drafted No. 1 by the Pirates; both are thoughtful, diligent, dedicated. Amid the de-emphasis of starting pitching, Cole blossomed into the exception, a head-of-the-rotation stalwart on a Hall of Fame track who made at least 30 starts in seven seasons before undergoing season-ending elbow surgery this spring.
Unlike Johnson, who is now 61, Cole speaks the language of a modern pitcher. He is fluent in Trackman data, the benefit of good sleep habits and the influence diet can have on success.
“In the true pursuit of maximum human performance, these tools are providing an avenue for people to achieve that quicker,” Cole said earlier this month. “With the avenue out there to reach those maximum potentials quicker, the industry demands — the teams demand — almost a higher level of performance and, to a certain extent, an unsustainable level of performance. We’ve used the technology to maximize human performance. We haven’t used the technology quite well enough to maximize human sustainability.”
Cole is acutely aware of this. After more than 2,000 innings and 339 career starts, his right elbow blew out during spring training and will sideline him for the remainder of 2025. The correlation between fastball velocity and higher risk of arm injuries is established to the point that most in the industry regard it as causative. Johnson was the exception, not the rule, and Skenes knows enough math to know the fool’s errand of banking on outlier outcomes.
“My focus is on volume and durability,” Cole continued. “In order to give myself a chance to pitch for a long time to pitch for championship-contending teams, I have to be healthy. There’s a lot of incentives — as a competitor, financial — to make durability and sustainability the main goal.
“Skenes has the foundation to match that — and exceed it. He’s got more horsepower than me. He’s asking better questions early — questions about diet and sleep. He’s asking questions about mechanics. He’s tracking his throws. He has his own process with people that he surrounds himself with that are not only looking out for his performance right now but his performance long term. That’s important for guys to have advocates in their corner, not looking out just for this year. It’s really tough to find the right people.”
With Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer on the precipice of retirement, and Cole and Zack Wheeler in their mid-30s, a baton-passing is afoot. Because Skenes is best positioned to be the one grabbing it, Cole says, his advice runs the gamut. They spoke about pitching game theory, and Cole pointed out that the approach of Verlander, with whom he was teammates in Houston, runs counter to the max-effort philosophies espoused by starters who know that regardless of their ability to go deep into games, they’re not throwing much more than 100 pitches anyway.
Piece by piece, Skenes learns from those who have been what he intends to be. Pitchers, old and young, fill in some blanks, but he looks beyond the players who share his craft, too. He plans to spend more time talking with Corbin Carroll, the Diamondbacks’ star outfielder he met on a Zoom call for a rookie immersion program, and ask him: “What do you have that I need?” He reads books like “Relentless” and “Winning” by Michael Jordan’s longtime trainer, Tim Grover, and “Talent Is Overrated,” which has particular appeal for someone whose talent didn’t manage to attract draft interest from a single team out of high school despite playing in arguably the most talent-rich area in America.
“I don’t know if I’m going to get anything out of talking to anybody,” Skenes says, but at the same time he sees no harm in asking. Considering how much the game asks him to give, he’s owed a rebalancing.
THE FIRST TIME Toronto Blue Jays starter Chris Bassitt met Skenes, he introduced himself with a proposition: “I’m gonna nominate you for the union board.”
The executive subcommittee of the Major League Baseball Players Association consists of eight players who help guide the union, particularly during collective bargaining. And with the current basic agreement set to expire following the 2026 season, labor discord has left people across the sport fearful of an extended work stoppage. The board is expected to wield even more power in the next round of negotiations, so the eight members are paramount in helping shape the game’s future.
Bassitt knew Skenes by reputation: that he was thoughtful, even-tempered, judicious — the kind of guy whose poker face on the mound would translate to a board room. He knows, too, the history of the union, that it’s at its strongest when the game’s most influential players serve as voices during the bargaining process. With the encouragement of veteran starter Nick Pivetta and former executive board head Andrew Miller, Skenes accepted his nomination and became the youngest player ever selected to the executive subcommittee.
“If we’re thinking about the future of the game,” Skenes says, “I think it’d be stupid to not have someone at least my age in there.”
Labor work is taxing. The game’s best players today often avoid the hassle. It did not have to be Skenes. But he harkened back to his years at the Air Force Academy in which cadets are taught the PITO model of leadership: personal, interpersonal, team and organization. In their first year, they focus on personal responsibility. Year 2 calls for them to take responsibility for another cadet. Skenes left before experiencing of team and organizational leadership at the academy, but the principles he learned apply enough that he felt a duty to serve as a voice for more than 1,200 other big leaguers, even if his service time pales compared to many of theirs.
The union and its rank and file are far from the only ones in the baseball world leaning on Skenes. MLB has struggled for years to create stars, and Skenes entered the big leagues with a Q score higher than 99% of players. Dunne’s presence alone invites a younger generation reared on the idea that baseball is boring to reconsider. Going forward, every marketing campaign MLB launches is almost guaranteed to include four players. One plays in Los Angeles (Ohtani). Two are in New York (Judge and Soto). The fourth resides in Pittsburgh.
More than anyone, the Pirates and their forlorn fan base regard Skenes as the fulcrum of their rebirth. They last won a division championship in 1992, when Barry Bonds still wore black and yellow. Their most recent playoff appearance was 2015, the last of three consecutive seasons with a wild-card spot (and losing the single game) when Cole was pitching for the franchise. Since then, they’ve finished fourth or fifth in the National League Central the past eight years and currently occupy the basement.
Nutting’s frugality hamstrings the Pirates perpetually. Never have they carried a nine-figure payroll. (This year’s on Opening Day: $91.3 million.) Since he bought the team in 2007, it has been in the bottom five 14 of 18 seasons. The Pirates’ revenue, according to Forbes, is almost identical to that of the Arizona Diamondbacks (2025 Opening Day payroll: $188.5 million), Minnesota Twins ($147.4 million), Kansas City Royals ($131.6 million), Washington Nationals ($115.6 million) and Cincinnati Reds ($114.5 million). Other owners privately peg Nutting as among the game’s worst.
Which only reinforces the fear among Pirates fans that Skenes is bound to follow Cole out the door via trade within a few years of his debut, lest the team lose him following the 2029 season to free agency. Rooting for the Pirates is among the cruelest fates in sports, with the combination of unserious owner and revenue disparities leaving general manager Ben Cherington to crank up a player-development machine in hopes of competing. Their free agent signings this winter were longtime Pirate Andrew McCutchen, left-hander Andrew Heaney, outfielder Tommy Pham, second baseman Adam Frazier and left-handed relievers Caleb Ferguson and Tim Mayza, all on one-year deals totaling $19.95 million. The last multiyear free agent contract Nutting handed out was to Ivan Nova in 2016.
“We’re going to create it from within the locker room, and it’s not going to be an ownership thing,” Skenes says. “Having a group of fans that are putting some pressure on the ownership and Ben and all that — it’s not a bad thing, but we have to go out there and do it. I kind of feel like we owe it to the city.”
Skenes had never been to Pittsburgh before he was drafted. “I do love it,” he said, and those who know him confirm Skenes’ sincerity. He wants nothing more at this point in his career than for his roommate and close friend Jared Jones, who’s on the injured list with elbow issues, to get healthy, and for Bubba Chandler, the Triple-A right-hander who’s topping out at 102 mph, to arrive, and for the Pirates’ farm system to churn out position players as regularly as it does pitchers. A couple more bats, a few relief arms, a free agent signing that’s more than a short-term plug, and you can squint and see a contender.
So much is out of Skenes’ control, though. All he can do is be the best version of himself. And bit by bit, he’s figuring out what that looks like.
SKENES IS ALWAYS looking for new ways to occupy himself when he’s away from the mound. In the back of his truck lays a compound bow. He shot it all of four times before abandoning it. In his bedroom sits a guitar gathering dust, $200 down the drain. He’s getting into golf these days, but he’s not sure it’s going to last.
“I get bored easily,” Skenes says. “I had a coach tell me that, and I was like, ‘I don’t think so. I think you’re wrong.’ And I’ve been thinking about that lately, and I think he’s right, because I’ve tried plenty of different hobbies and none of them have stuck.”
Similarly, Skenes wonders if the places his mind goes during his periods of silence are a function of boredom with baseball. “Not in a bad way,” he clarifies, but in the manner that behooves a player — that “there’s always something to be better at.”
In his most recent start Monday — a typical Skenes outing in which he allowed one earned run, struck out six and didn’t walk anyone over six innings — he threw six pitches: four-seam fastball, splinker, slider, sweeper, changeup, and curveball and splinker, the hybrid sinker-splitter he throws in the mid-90s to devastating effect. He toyed around with a cutter and two-seam fastball during spring training and could break them out at any moment. He waited until the fourth or fifth week of his season at LSU to unleash his curveball.
“I absolutely don’t believe that just because it’s the season, all right, this is what you got,” he says. “There’s no difference between spring training and the regular season in terms of getting better every day.”
This is his career, Skenes says, echoing Johnson, and he’s learning that he must wrangle control of it. He needs to chat with others who are what he wants to be, and he needs to find the silence to find himself, and he needs to set stratospheric expectations. Of all the aphorisms Skenes repeats, his favorite might be one he read in a book: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
“There’s no option to not do the work that I need to do,” Skenes says. “… If I didn’t want to get in the cold tub a couple years ago or whatever it is, I wouldn’t. Now I do know whether I want to do it or not, it’s a nonnegotiable.”
If he keeps doing the work, Skenes believes, everything is there for the taking. The wins will come, and the success will follow, and the search for advice will give way to the dispensing of it. In the same way his training at the Air Force Academy readied him to handle the pressure cooker at LSU, it’s likewise destined to propel him into a role as leader and elder statesman in baseball.
For now, though, Skenes is trying to focus on today, tomorrow, this week. Even if the clock on his career is ticking, the hour hand has barely moved, and he doesn’t want this charmed life to fly by without taking the time to appreciate it. Earlier this spring, Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin asked Skenes: “What motivates you?”
Skenes considered the question and gave variations on the same answer: winning and getting better every day. Winning a baseball game is in his hands once every fifth day. But those are not the only wins within his control. Hard work is a win. Learning is a win. Leading is a win. Growing is a win. And in a life that’s only getting louder and faster and more demanding, silence is the sort of win that will help remind him who he is.
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