How a rumored ‘moonshine cave’ unearthed living history of North Wilkesboro Speedway
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Tuesday, March 26, was supposed to be a routine morning at the resurrected North Wilkesboro Speedway. The legendary 0.625-mile short track is carved into the foothills that rise from the red dirt northwestern corner of North Carolina, where the Piedmont region gives way to the Appalachian Mountains. The NASCAR All-Star Race, which takes the green flag Sunday night, was still eight weeks away, what should have been a comfortable span for the speedway ground crews that were starting the process of waking the 77-year-old bullring from its wintertime slumber. The drone of leaf blowers echoed off the crusty concrete frontstretch grandstand.
Then the machines fell silent.
Steve Swift was there, up from his office at Charlotte Motor Speedway, headquarters of Speedway Motorsports Inc., owner of a portfolio of NASCAR facilities including North Wilkesboro.
“One of the crew came to us and said, ‘Hey man, we might have a problem here,'” remembers Swift, SMI’s vice president of operations and development, aka The Guy Who Makes Sure the Racetracks Work Properly.
“We all ran up there and there was a foot-and-a-half crack in the grandstand, where we had taken some of the old seats out to do some maintenance work. Next thing you know, we take a look through that hole and it’s a not a hole. It’s a cavity. I mean, you could put a Ford pickup truck in there. I thought, this is a cave. Well, that isn’t good.”
Not good for track operators, sure. But for everyone else, be they NASCAR fans, historians, people who love liquor, or Swift’s coworkers who are in the business of promoting races, that hole in the grandstand was awesome. Like, Indiana Jones awesome.
Was it a moonshine cave?
BREAKING NEWS | Sinkhole unearths rumored moonshine cave underneath front stretch grandstands. ??
FULL STORY ?: https://t.co/Iri8nwI9Nt pic.twitter.com/V1IXPnANdc
— North Wilkesboro Speedway (@NWBSpeedway) March 26, 2024
For those who do not know, a quick primer on the intertwined, inebriated history of NASCAR and Wilkes County, North Carolina. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Carolinas were settled largely by Scots-Irish immigrants, who brought their ways of distilling homemade whiskey across the pond with them. The process, in short, is that one heats up a mixture of corn mash and water in a large vat, captures the steam via a system of twisted pipes, and collects the resulting clear 150 proof alcohol into containers for distribution and consumption.
Decades of battling with the government over the taxation of that liquor pushed the majority of the liquid cooking into the mountains of Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. Why? Because the red clay soil was perfect for growing the ingredients, and the endless rolling hills provided all sorts of nooks and crannies where distillery rigs could be secretly built and fired up under the cloak of night.
When the United States Congress passed the 18th Amendment in 1920, banning all alcohol sales, illegal moonshining became instantly and massively lucrative. After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, federal agents — aka revenuers — were still charged with enforcing the taxation of homemade liquor. And there was a lot of it. Thousands of bottles of moonshine were produced daily in Wilkes County alone, waiting to be sold and hauled out of those mountains to buyers in the trunks of tricked-out cars.
A single load of 22 cases produced about $110 profit, nearly $1,300 in 2024 dollars. Most of those delivery vehicles were Ford sedans, retrofitted with high-horsepower Indy 500-worthy engines and smoothly bouncing around on custom spring suspension systems. That allowed moonshine runners to outpace would-be arresting offices by slinging their machines through zigzaggy mountain roads, all while loaded down with hundreds of pounds of liquid weight sloshing around in crates of mason jars and plastic jugs.
When the men piloting those machines inevitably began arguing over who had the fastest rides, they started holding races to find out. That’s why the North Wilkesboro Speedway was plowed out of the dirt. Stock car racing — and ultimately, NASCAR — was born.
But in between all of those deliveries and all of that racing, all of that liquor had to be kept somewhere.
“That was the biggest problem, was where to put it all after we’d made it,” NASCAR Hall of Famer Junior Johnson explained during a drive around then-dilapidated North Wilkesboro Speedway in December 1999. Johnson, who grew up in nearby Ronda, North Carolina, drove his first race at the track in 1949, when he was just 17 years old. His father, Glenn Johnson Sr., was perhaps the most prolific moonshiner in the region, as proven one day in 1935.
“The federal guys came into the house. I was 4 years old. It was me, my mom, daddy, and my four brothers and sisters living there. They found boxes of whiskey in every room of the house. The kitchen. Under the porch. Every single bedroom. Everywhere. Because we didn’t have nowhere else to hide. You just put wherever you could until it was time to haul it off to somebody.”
I am digging through all my old North Wilkesboro files and just found this. The Moonshiners & Revenuers Reunion from 2010, held at Benny Parsons’ place in Wilkes County. Yes, that’s Junior Johnson doing donuts in a 1940 Ford. Shot it on my FlipCam! #NASCAR75 pic.twitter.com/CPBaNHHjb3
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) May 17, 2023
The feds found 7,254 cases of moonshine stuffed into every corner of the Johnson house, the largest illegal liquor seizure ever seen on dry land. On that cold, rainy day in ’99, standing next to the old speedway that had been shuttered nearly four years, Johnson pointed into the mountains … and wait … did he point toward the racetrack itself?
“I know I built about a thousand stills in my lifetime. That’s a lot of whiskey. We hid the stills and we hid the whiskey everywhere. Anywhere where we thought someone might not look. Some of ’em was pretty much right under everybody’s nose.”
Or perhaps under their butts.
Back in Section O, Row 7, Swift and his team started peeling back the concrete like the top of a Spam can. As they did, he couldn’t help but think of a warning given to his crew in 2022, when they started the seemingly impossible process of resurrecting the racetrack for its first Cup Series event since 1996.
“During the construction process we were working on the suites that were that were left from back in the day, the ones that sit up above that main grandstand on the frontstretch,” Swift says of the buildings that were basically double-wide trailers atop stilts that tower over the modest sixteen 20-row sections of seats that line the frontstretch.
The hill that serves as their foundation was made from dirt that was piled up during the track’s construction in 1947, the oval famously laid lopsided. The frontstretch runs downhill and the backstretch uphill because track founder Enoch Staley couldn’t afford to make it perfectly flat.
“When we started running equipment up that hill, Paul Call came up here and warned us that we needed to be really careful because there were things underneath that grandstand that might cause that equipment to fall through,” said Swift.
Paul Call was the caretaker and unofficial welcome director for North Wilkesboro Speedway. He lived in a house adjacent the racetrack and started working there in the 1960s for Staley. During most of the 26-plus years that the bullring sat empty, he was its only employee, mowing the grass and telling stories to anyone who stopped by to take a look at the place as it slowly disintegrated.
In Wilkes County, the surname Call is like Smith. It’s everywhere. See: Willie Clay Call, aka “The Uncatchable,” who streaked through the hills around the racetrack in his liquor-packed 1961 Chrysler New Yorker. Paul Call saw every single NASCAR event run at North Wilkesboro, including last year’s All-Star revival. He died four months later, taking the secret of exactly what was beneath the grandstand with him.
When Swift spelunked his way into the chasm, he expected to find evidence of a sinkhole. They aren’t very common in the Carolina high country, but that had to be it, right? After all, this was the racetrack that had been plagued by infamously awful drainage issues, including the 1979 Holly Farms 400, which had to be postponed two weeks because of a gully-washer of a rain shower that canceled pole qualifying, but also caused the surfacing of — in the words of the Charlotte Observer — “millions of earthworms” that squirmed out of the dirt of the soaked infield to cover the asphalt racing surface with slime and also completely clogged the pipes that had been installed to whisk away the water.
Instead of water, mud or even a handful of nightcrawlers, Swift, a construction guy, found just that. Construction. They ran sinkhole tests, even pumping water into the hole to see where it went, hoping to trace any potential paths of erosion that might create future grandstand collapse. Instead, the hole filled up like a cement pond and the water had to be pumped back out.
“We found a wall that had been placed and some columns that were underneath, stuff you don’t find inside of what is supposed to just be a dirt bank,” Swift recalls, still audibly shocked. “There was things in place there that just didn’t appear as something that had happened over time. This was a purpose-built structure.”
But for what purpose? Swift still doesn’t know for sure. Though he does sound like a man who has a pretty good idea.
“Down in there, all I could think about was Paul Call. He tried to warn us.”
Swift’s job is typically an endless race against time, especially when he discovers serious structural issues within a facility that is preparing to host a big league event. However, this go-round, he told his crew to slow down, take their time and make sure they sifted through every bit of dirt for some sort of clues as to why they were standing inside a designed concrete box.
“You felt like an archaeologist,” Swift says, laughing. “But you aren’t looking for the tomb of Cleopatra or anything. Instead, I had Marcus Smith calling me all the time, asking, ‘Did you find anything yet? Any moonshine down there?'”
Smith, a NASCAR history junkie, is the son of a NASCAR history-maker, promoter and track owner Bruton Smith, who spent nearly his entire 95 years dealing with a roster of questionable stock car racing characters dating back to 1940s. Marcus, now chairman of the company his father started, SMI, knows the stories about Middle Georgia Raceway, a half-mile oval in Macon, Georgia, that hosted nine Cup Series (then Grand National) races from 1966 to ’71, won by the demigod likes of Richard Petty, David Pearson and Bobby Allison.
On Sept. 23, 1967, three months after Petty won the Macon 300 and three years before Jimi Hendrix played a show on the frontstretch, federal agents discovered what one described as “the most cleverly run moonshine operation I have ever seen.” A secret trapdoor in the floor of a faux ticket booth entered into a 125-foot tunnel that led to a chamber hidden 17 feet beneath the grandstand, containing a pair of stills that produced an estimated 80 gallons of moonshine daily.
“I won the next race they ran there, just a few weeks later,” recalls Allison, a three-time Macon winner and a four-time victor at North Wilkesboro. “I asked them if there was any of that whiskey left, but they said the feds blew it all up.”
Alas, North Wilkesboro’s cave wasn’t Middle Georgia’s. In the end, Swift and his team found nothing more than dirt and speculation. After a couple of weeks of investigating, the urgent business of NASCAR All-Star Race prep was unavoidable. The hole was filled with concrete, the grandstand was repaired and the seats were bolted back onto the cement.
The skeptics of the internet have labeled it all as either a publicity stunt or this generation’s version of Geraldo Rivera stepping into an awkwardly empty Al Capone vault on live TV. But those who love NASCAR, liquor and fun chose to roll with the legend of it all, like a bootlegger hanging onto the steering wheel of a Flathead Ford as he hears oncoming sirens behind him in hot pursuit.
“I think there was definitely something down there,” surmises Petty, the career leader in North Wilkesboro wins with 15 checkered flags. “But if someone was keeping a bunch of cases of liquor down there and someone else knew about it, then it wasn’t going to be down there for long. Some guy either drunk it all or sold to a guy who drunk it all.”
This weekend, those lucky fans with All-Star tickets in the next-to-last section before Turn One will know they are rooting for their favorite racers while sitting atop the most notorious spot of NASCAR’s most notorious speedway, right smack in the middle of America’s most notorious moonshine running valley.
And they can do so while sipping from a jar of perfectly legal, government-approved moonshine purchased from the North Wilkesboro Speedway concession stands, including a jar of “The Uncatchable” with Willie Clay Call’s mug on the label.
“The best part of this whole project, even as hard as it has been getting a place that had been sitting there empty falling apart, ready for racing, has been living the history of that place while also bringing it into the present,” Swift explains proudly. “You just got to work one day and you find a cave that someone built that no one knew about? That place is almost 80 years old and it has history going on.”
Still.
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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