How the Air Force fueled the rise of Paul Skenes
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Ryan Hockensmith
PAUL SKENES IS TRYING to sleep. But he’s too tall for his Air Force bed, so his feet dangle into a sink in his dorm room, just a few feet from two other people who are also trying to sleep.
He’s at basic training in June 2021, exhausted in his room alongside a randomly assigned fellow “doolie” and a randomly assigned Korean exchange student. Every cadet is given a standard-issue 7-foot bed inside a standard-issue cramped dorm room.
Skenes is 6-foot-5, 225 pounds — on his way to 6-6, 250 — and he has grown so fast that his body seems a little foreign to him.
The tale of this period of his life is almost too tall to believe. During those two years — 2021 and 2022 — Skenes began an unheard-of rise from an unknown Division I catcher to a transcendent baseball pitching phenom in about 1,000 days. There has been almost nothing in recent baseball history like his ascension, and it’s hard to imagine a sequel coming along any time soon.
Skenes was 5-10 and 150 pounds as a high school sophomore, then gained 57 pounds in one year once he learned how to lift and eat like the Division I athlete he wanted to be. And he just kept growing.
Basic training is a blur. For six intense weeks, Skenes gets up at 5 a.m. to the sound of “Reveille” and has 10 minutes to brush his teeth, get in uniform, shave and make his bed before breakfast. He and his two roommates can’t believe how hard it is to complete that last part, and eventually call in bed-making ringers to assist.
“We were so slow,” Skenes says now. “We always had to get other people to run into our room to help us.”
At breakfast, he has 15 minutes to eat whatever is put in front of him, then hustles down to the baseball diamond for an hour of some light throwing and hitting off a machine. There are no coaches around so calling these sessions practices would be an insult to practices.
The rest of the day is even blurrier. Classes on how the Air Force operates. Chow. Classes on how to stand, how to study, military history, important historical quotes. Chow again. At 9 p.m., sometimes with a pair of his giant dogs in the sink, “Retreat” plays and lights go out. Rinse and repeat. This is his daily routine for most of the summer.
Skenes quietly goes about his business. Cadets are required to wear masks at all times, and he’s never been a loud person. He connects with another cadet, Aerik Joe, and they start making plans to live together when boot camp is over. Joe is a fast, 5-10, 180-pound shortstop and scrappy top-of-the-order guy. He’s neat and driven, just like his new friend.
Once the normal Air Force Academy fall semester kicks off, Joe and Skenes move in together. After long days, they collapse in their room. Joe pulls Skenes in on one of his hobbies, meal prep and cooking, and the two may or may not have allegedly skirted a rule about running a bootleg kitchen in their room. Skenes, in turn, introduces Joe to one of his favorite things, firing up some George Strait and other old-school country music. They’d eat and sing along until “Retreat” retired them for the day.
At some point early in the fall, Skenes says, “You know, I pitch a little, too.” Joe is surprised. A Luka Doncic-sized catcher and pitcher? That’s not a thing, he thinks. And besides, Skenes has emerged as the team’s best hitter and starting catcher. Coaches are talking about batting him leadoff just to get him more at-bats. What’s he going to do, catch one day, pitch the next, then catch again? Who does that?
But teammates also get to know Skenes enough to understand how driven the big man is. Skenes doesn’t have to be here. He narrowed his list to Air Force and Navy instead of Stanford and UCLA because he wanted to serve. Wanted the grind of academy life. To fly jets and play baseball. He’s a different kind of motivated, and his teammates all see it right away.
Fall practice sessions are slightly more organized, but mostly the guys just hit off a batting machine. As Skenes blasts towering BP home runs, his teammates marvel at the way the ball comes off his bat. When Skenes talks about pitching, too, everybody just kind of shrugs. He’s already become such a stoic figure that the idea of the team’s best catcher being a pitcher, too, seems both patently absurd and perfectly reasonable.
Then one day during an intrasquad game, Skenes finally takes the mound. His first pitch is a 94 mph thwack that raises about 60 eyebrows. Maybe Skenes isn’t playing around when he talks about pitching.
Skenes has so much ambition that coaches aren’t quite sure how to quench it. Skenes is an incredibly gifted catcher — renowned baseball trainer Eugene Bleecker says if Skenes caught five games in MLB right now he’d be among the league leaders in receiving metrics — and he expresses interest in playing every game except for the day he would start on the mound. And Skenes doesn’t just want any day on the mound: He tells coaches he sees himself as “the Friday night guy,” which is sacred in college baseball. Really good pitchers start on Saturday. Solid starters go on Sunday. Friday is for aces.
As the season approaches in winter 2021, coaches come up with a patently absurd but reasonable middle ground with Skenes — he would be the team’s everyday catcher … and its closer.
FIVE YEARS AGO, Paul Skenes was a decent Southern California Division I catching prospect, with soft hands and a gawky body that somehow still generated power. To this day, his coaches shake their heads that he even ended up in central Colorado.
Yes, he wanted to serve and would have heavily considered the academy. But Skenes had spent 2017 and 2018 working on his pitching with Bleecker, who’d emphasized catching when he first met Skenes in 2015. When they spent the next two offseasons focused on his pitching development, Skenes’ fastball went from the mid-80s to 90 to low 90s so quickly, without heavy work, that Bleeker began to see Skenes as a potential college pitcher — maybe even a Friday starter.
He could wind his body up and power down through his lead foot in such a fluid but forceful way that his velocity seemed like it could go up another 5-10 mph. “His delivery was Mozart, Mozart, then Metallica,” Bleecker says. He emphasizes the “Metallica” to capture how metal Skenes’ delivery had become.
Skenes was getting scary good at both positions. The coaches and kids at Bleecker’s training facility started giving him nicknames, such as Big Hoss, Big Country and Shohei Paultani. It’s worth noting that Skenes is exhibit A for the generation of young baseball players who grew up in the age of Ohtani and reset their dreams in a way that made some seemingly impossible ideas — like being a catcher and closer — seem possible.
But just when Skenes was about to NASA launch into Power 5 college offers and potential first-day draft consideration as a pitcher, COVID shut down his senior season.
Air Force pitching coach Ryan Forrest had begun hearing rumbles that Skenes — the academy’s blue-chip catching prospect — was generating chatter among MLB scouts and Division I coaches as a pitcher. Then the world went into quarantine before he truly lifted off. “If COVID didn’t happen, I don’t think Paul Skenes makes it to our campus,” Forrest says. “I think he’s been pitching in the big leagues for two or three years by now.”
Skenes pushes back on that idea, saying he would have been able to resist the MLB draft if he had blown up as a senior. “You know why I wouldn’t have changed my mind?” he asks. “Because I was committed to Air Force. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was an easy decision.”
But even the Air Force didn’t yet see him as a pitching recruit in the same way that Skenes saw himself. Falcons coaches loved how his big body and hands seemed to comfort pitchers in such a way that they felt like they were throwing to the side of a barn instead of a person. He got so good at framing pitches that between innings once during his freshman year, an ump told Air Force assistant coach Jimmy Roesinger, “Hey, if you don’t see me again, it’s been fun.”
“What do you mean?” Roesinger asked.
“Your catcher has the quickest hands I’ve ever seen,” the ump said. “So I’m probably going to get fired because I keep calling strikes that aren’t strikes.”
His pitchers loved his attitude, too. Skenes could certainly bark at a struggling pitcher to jolt him out of a funk. But he was mostly soothing, with a habit of raising one fist every time a pitcher got to two strikes. “He would get after your ass if he needed to,” says his friend Doyle Gehring, a starting pitcher from the same recruiting class. “But he would sometimes tell you to take a deep breath and that you’d be OK, and you believed him. He always knew which attitude to have.”
Gehring’s favorite memory is from a chippy game against Nevada his first year, where he gave up such an obvious home run that he never even turned around to see if it went over the fence. He just waited for a new ball and stared in at the plate, where Skenes’ body language indicated the ball was about 400 feet away.
But Skenes’ body language also indicated something else: silent scorn. The batter took his good old time getting out of the box, tossing the bat, celebrating toward the dugout, dragging out the home run for 10, 15, 30 seconds. By the time he got to first base, Gehring was smiling at observing Skenes’ fury.
“Start running!” Skenes yelled. “Run!”
Skenes went to home plate and was standing over it, giving a death stare to the hitter as the theatrics continued around the bases. Gehring saw the plate ump had noticed that Skenes was blocking the plate.
“Move back a little,” the ump told Skenes.
Skenes just stood there.
“Move back,” the ump said.
Skenes ignored him, or he didn’t even hear him through the fog of irritation.
The runner rounded third and everybody waited for the looming confrontation at home plate. But the hitter was wise enough to slow down as he approached, then he came to a near stop and snuck the tip of his cleat between the legs of Skenes to complete the home run. Skenes never moved and never stopped staring.
There was no more Nevada hotdogging the rest of the game, even though the Wolfpack won 14-7.
For most of the season, Skenes had an unorthodox arrangement that most fans, players and coaches had never seen before. He’d catch eight innings, then hustle down to the bullpen for a few warmups before the ninth inning so he could close out the game. As rare as a catcher and closer might have been for Air Force players and coaches at first, opposing teams were completely befuddled.
His very first college pitching outing happens to come against, of all schools, LSU, his future transfer destination. The moment became an indelible image for Skenes and his Air Force family: him heading to the mound with a 6-4 lead as teammates wait to see if their catcher actually could do double duty. There is a genuine sense of nerves in the Air Force dugout — LSU is No. 7 in the country, and nobody had any idea if this might be an ugly flameout for Skenes against one of the nastiest hitting lineups in the country.
The Baton Rouge crowd, meanwhile, is giddy. Tigers fans behind the Air Force dugout laugh when Skenes drops his gear and starts to warm up. He is sweaty, dirty and moves like someone who’s been catching for two hours. “They’re out of pitchers!” fans say loud enough that the Air Force bench can hear it.
In his warmup tosses, Skenes dials up low-90s heat and looks sharp enough to rile up his teammates. What a sight — their Adley Rutschman ditching the gear to become their Craig Kimbrel. He’d be facing 9-1-2 in the LSU order, which included freshman Dylan Crews (now a consensus top-five MLB prospect) and potentially thumper Tre Morgan (now a promising Rays minor leaguer) if anybody got on base.
His first pitch is a two-seam thwacker that hits 97 mph. The fans aren’t giggling anymore, and his teammates start oohing and aahing. Skenes strikes out the first guy swinging and goes up 0-1 on Crews.
But Crews turns on a fastball and lifts it beyond the outfield wall. Suddenly LSU is within 6-5, with the heart of the order coming up. Skenes gets the next hitter to ground out, then digs in for a showdown with Morgan, a future third-round pick in the 2023 draft. Morgan battles from 1-2 to 3-2, and Skenes stands on the mound for a make-or-break pitch.
He’s still standing on the rubber when Morgan steps out of the box and stares at the barrel of his bat. Morgan takes his time, inhaling a few deep breaths, staring at his bat again, and Air Force coaches notice that Skenes hasn’t moved. He’s a statue, ready to throw, as Morgan dilly-dallies outside the box. It’s eerie how still Skenes remains, as if somebody hit the pause button on him the same way Gehring described him standing at home plate. He’d begun to grow into his frame.
It’s getting downright concerning how stuck Skenes is when Morgan finally steps back into the box. As if somebody just hit the unpause button, Skenes launches right into his windup and dials up a 98 mph fastball on the money pitch.
Metallica. Thwack. Swing and a miss.
Skenes celebrates in a very subdued, Air Force kind of way with his teammates in front of their dugout in Baton Rouge. It’s the ninth inning of a Sunday afternoon game, not the first inning of a Friday game. But it feels significant, and there’s a vibe in the stadium that people had just seen something they’d never seen before, a catcher and a closer living within the same body.
Now that vibe feels like a piece of baseball history, one of those moments that 2,572 fans saw. But don’t be surprised if, oh, 100,000 people someday claim to have been there that day when the astonishing pitching career of Paul Skenes began.
AS MUCH AS the Air Force impacted Skenes as a baseball player, he says the academy changed him as a human being even more. He studied biochemistry and started every baseball game as a freshman, with a hilarious stat line unlikely to ever be reproduced in major college baseball: 3.0 GPA while tutoring other freshmen in math and science courses, with team bests of 11 home runs, .410 BA, 43 RBIs, 131 total bases and 11 saves. And yet he still had one goal crystallized in his brain: He told coaches he saw himself as the Friday night guy.
He stuck around for a chunk of time that summer to cram in more coursework, and so did his roommate, Aerik Joe. They’re both achievers (Joe is now an Air Force combat rescue officer, the branch’s equivalent of a Navy SEAL), so the idea of a nearly empty campus sounded delightful to them, not daunting. They hung out, listened to country, cooked in the room (allegedly) and studied.
In their free time over the summer, they’d hang out at one of their coaches’ houses. Almost all of their coaches were older, with kids, and yet Skenes and Joe liked being around them. Skenes would play with the kids like a big kid himself — pitching coach Ryan Forrest’s son still remembers being a 3-year-old who asked for (and got) “the heat” from Skenes in whiffle ball. “Paul would blow it by him with no regret whatsoever,” Forrest says.
But mostly Skenes was a 19-year-old going on 29. He had a vision for himself, and it didn’t include most of the stuff other college underclassmen were grappling with on weekends. Brushing back a 3-year-old and eating a steak with his baseball coach was about the wildest party scene that Skenes liked to engage with.
Skenes eventually went home to California for a few weeks in midsummer. But then it was back to business on campus, and he took a class in Air Force standardizations and evaluations. Part of the class entailed him participating in something like a nightmarish merging of an RA with a hall monitor, charged with enforcing rules and regulations across campus. Skenes was supposed to keep tabs on his peers for things such as compliant uniform wear, room cleanliness, length of hair and, of all things, proper shaving.
Let’s just say he understood the assignment. One piece of Skenes lore is an anecdote about how he was at the baseball field one day and observed two people not following academy protocol. The clock had struck 4:45 p.m. and, like it did every single day of life at Air Force, “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play over the academy’s giant speaker system. Air Force rules require everybody to turn and salute the flag at that time, and these two guys in a golf cart — they were cadet managers with the football team — kept moving. “No hesitation, when the anthem was over, Paul went up and got on the guys,” Gehring says.
The issue wasn’t necessarily about the song or gesture itself, though he does treat the anthem with great seriousness. Skenes is the kind of guy who, if the academy had asked cadets to stand at attention every day at 8:29 a.m. and sing “What Does The Fox Say?” he would have been in your grill to start making animal noises.
Another time, Skenes had been assigned to do room checks on fellow cadets during lunch period, which is a little like giving out parking tickets to your friends. But Skenes was relentless about it, going so far as to give a senior basketball player’s room a 30 (out of 100). He was so disgusted that he even grabbed Aerik Joe and took him to the room. “Look at this atrocity,” Skenes said.
The irritated cadet eventually saw that his room had failed inspection. So he reached out on Instagram to plead for Skenes to give him a passing grade. Skenes’ response: “Clean your room.”
Skenes says the guy’s lucky he even got a 30. “It was a bad room,” he says, and he immediately recounts that in addition to being a mess, the room hadn’t been locked properly and the cadet had a Chicago Bulls flag that hadn’t been authorized. “If I put my name on that room, that’s my name. I can’t do that. I probably graded it too fairly. I could have been more harsh. You’ve got to be on top of your stuff.”
His teammates and fellow cadets grew to respect his stickler ways, though. The same way he refused to yield Air Force cleaning standards for rooms, he also held himself to a high standard. Joe would always be hustling to clean up or study late at night with the 9 p.m. buzzer lurking, and Skenes would be talking about recovery time for his body and living clean and overcoming caloric deficits, a common issue for cadets constantly on the go. Skenes usually already had handled his business for the day as Joe hustled to close the gaps.
Skenes is also a compartmentalizer, which means he blocked out time for his cadet duties, his baseball duties and his fun and friendship duties. On tough days that can break many cadets, Skenes would sit and listen to Joe as he worked through whatever struggles he was going through. Skenes wouldn’t say much. He’d just listen and nod his head. Somehow, even with a mask on, his eyes conveyed that he understood.
And yes, he also made space for fun, but it was planned fun. Skenes wasn’t so Type A that he scheduled out laugh sessions. But he did find pockets that were reserved for fun — whiffle ball heaters, for example — and tried to maximize those time slots. Joe still is amused when he thinks about how Skenes would fire up a clip or two from the movie “The Other Guys,” the goofy Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg police buddy comedy from 2010. He also loved throwing out some Ferrell quotes from “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers,” two other Skenes favorites.
Teammates goofed on Skenes a bit when he received two incentive plane rides, a reward for handling his business. Skenes rode in an F-15 once and an F-16 another time, and his buddies loved seeing him mashed into the cockpit with his legs curled up and his upper body vised on both sides. The only thing missing was a sink for his feet.
As the spring semester kicked off in 2022, Skenes had emerged in the offseason as his obvious final form — he was hitting 98 mph with ease in intrasquad games, which meant Air Force coaches would have been derelict in their duties if they didn’t focus on him as a pitcher.
The only question remaining: What day would he be starting?
AS THE 2022 SEASON approached, Skenes seemed to have been seized by what he now believed to be his calling. It wasn’t catching, and it wasn’t pitching, either. It was both.
He’d begun telling coaches that he wanted to be a starting pitcher and play catcher or DH in every other game. In his mind, his world should now revolve around him throwing a complete game on one day — a very specific day, ahem — and then he’d play every inning of the next two. But even in an era of Ohtani, coaches were torn between his dramatic improvement as a pitcher, and his remarkable skill set as a catcher and hitter. Doing both seemed like too much, too soon, even for Shohei Paultani.
“I’m the Friday guy,” he’d say. “I’m starting on Fridays.”
“You’re so valuable to the team in several roles,” his pitching coach, Forrest, would say. “So I can’t guarantee it.”
Then Skenes would always stare at Forrest the way he stared at that celebrating home run hitter from his freshman year.
“I’m a Friday guy,” he’d insist.
Eventually, the coaches couldn’t fight him off. Skenes was hitting mid-90s, with a solid breaking ball, and he’d been named a team captain, a rare honor for a true sophomore at Air Force.
Then he found out the news he’d been waiting for: He’d start the opener and be the team’s “Friday guy,” and coaches would try to get him in the lineup as much as possible on the other days. They had a rough outline of him pitching on Fridays, DHing on Saturdays and catching on most Sundays. The 2021-22 season opened against a tough Iowa team that eventually finished as the Big Ten runner-up that year.
His first college start was also among his worst. Skenes got bounced around by Iowa on Feb. 18, 2022, giving up four runs in 3⅓ innings in a 12-2 blowout loss. It’s not like he stopped wowing people seeing him for the first time, though. In what would be a regular occurrence that year, Skenes hit for himself, and against Iowa, he clubbed his first of 13 home runs. He didn’t have the gear on anymore, but he was still doing a bang-up job of replicating Shohei Paultani from the year before.
Skenes settled into a schedule that made him perhaps the busiest major college athlete in the country. He played every game that year and was often the best player on the field, regardless of what position he was playing. He’d become a Paul Bunyan figure to his teammates, always capable of doing something to make them shake their heads in disbelief. “Paul Skenes was the most unbelievable thing most people have ever witnessed during a baseball game,” says his hitting coach, Roesinger.
On the mound, he wins four of his next five starts and looks better each game. His growth is so fast that even the coaching staff feels like there are vapor trails behind him. At the plate, he’s the team’s best hitter, batting .283 with three home runs and 11 RBIs in 18 games.
But the rocket ship has a scary moment on April 8, 2022, against Cal Baptist. Skenes is dealing on the mound, cruising into the sixth inning with nine strikeouts and one run allowed. With one out in the sixth, he’s still throwing 95-plus mph when he uncorks a fastball that a Cal Baptist hitter connects hard with. The ball is right up the middle, going north of 100 mph, and coaches still remember the thump of the ball bouncing off Skenes’ face.
Skenes collapses backward and lies there for a second as coaches and teammates sprint toward the mound. “I thought the worst …” Roesinger says. He decides not to finish the sentence, other than to wait a few seconds and say, “A big tree falls hard.”
When Roesinger and the other coaches reach the mound, Skenes stands up and moves around as blood poured out of his face. He seems cognizant even though everybody can already see bruising form around his eyes.
“All right, let’s get you off the field,” an athletic trainer tells Skenes.
Skenes is taken out but ends up getting the win. He does seem fine when he is out of the game, and he passes every medical check afterward. So believe it or not, the following day Skenes shows up and DHs even though he looks like he just lost a five-round 50-45 UFC decision. His eyes are both puffed and purpled up, but he looks good in batting practice and is insistent on playing.
He goes 0-for-4 and Air Force gets drubbed 21-5. The Falcons are now a disappointing 14-16 and feel like they should be 20-10, especially with Skenes finding his footing as an ace. But they can’t string together wins and panic is beginning to set in. They needed the Sunday game if they had any hopes of achieving what had been a realistic preseason goal — to make their first NCAA baseball regional since 1969.
The coaching staff decided to let Skenes catch on Sunday, even though his eyes had gotten worse overnight. But he could see and felt fine, sounded fine, caught fine.
Cal Baptist jumped to a 5-0 lead in the third inning of that crucial game, and desperation began to seep into the Air Force dugout. Another blowout loss would crush morale and put another loss on a record that needed W’s to maintain postseason hopes. Skenes settled down starter Seungmin Shim, who gave up only one more unearned run as Air Force battled back. At the plate, Skenes went 3-for-5 with three RBIs, including a two-run homer, as Air Force roared to a potentially season-saving 12-7 win.
The team didn’t exactly go on a heater after that. But there were signs of life, and it’s because Skenes began to morph into his sorta-final form. Air Force posted a 12-11 record down the stretch, with Skenes going 7-0 in his starts. He gave up 11 runs in his starts and hit 10 home runs in the games he didn’t pitch. He was especially ridiculous against No. 1 Texas, where he didn’t pitch but went 5-for-9 with two home runs and five RBIs in an impressive — and necessary — two-game split in Austin.
Air Force eventually ran through the Mountain West tournament, going 3-0 behind a Skenes masterpiece in the title game (7 shutout innings, 10 strikeouts) to lock up the school’s first regional berth. The Falcons were overmatched there, though, going 2-2 with both losses to Texas.
On the field afterward, the entire team was somber but proud of the late-season push. A few coaches and players seemed downright distraught, though, and that included Skenes. He had told the staff that the team’s final game would be his final game with the team — he was going to transfer.
He essentially had no choice. If he had returned to the Air Force for his junior year, he could have been drafted but would have been locked into spending his senior year completing schooling at the academy. That one-year mandatory sit-out would have been bad for everybody involved. His head coach, Mike Kazlausky, worked with the academy to ask for an exemption. But the Pentagon eventually said it wouldn’t be able to bend the rule — Skenes had to either transfer to another school or stay at Air Force for two more years.
Skenes still wrestled with the choice. He loved the Air Force. Loved everything about it. He still says he wants to go back someday and finish his training. But in Kazlausky’s office, through tears, he explained why he thought he had to leave. Kazlausky, to his enormous credit, gave Skenes no choice. “You have to go,” he told Skenes. That was the permission Skenes needed to move on.
The two hugged and tears were shed, and then Kazlausky had his assistants come to his office. When they walked in and saw Skenes and the misty eyes, they all started crying too. “We knew,” Forrest says.
So when they got knocked out by Texas, that core group of coaches felt especially somber. Skenes had become college baseball’s Shohei Paultani, winning the John Olerud Award as the best two-position player in the country.
On the field after the last Texas loss, quite a few Air Force players lingered as the Longhorns celebrated the win. They just milled around, taking their time, talking about what a bittersweet but historic season they had. The vibe was a little weird — as if the players kind of knew deep down that this moment was one they’d want to hang on to forever.
During that time, Skenes pulled his roommate, Joe, aside and told him he was transferring. They both cried and hugged. Joe looked at Skenes and couldn’t even believe how much he’d changed as a baseball player and yet was the same guy who slept with his feet in the sink and may or may not have cooked lots of food during basic.
Joe thinks he and Skenes walked around on the field for 30 or 45 sweet-and-sour minutes after the game. It was one of those beautiful nights for young people where everybody knew the end was near and that it was going to hurt. “I told him I loved him the same no matter what, that I understood this was something he had to do,” Joe says. “I think he saw his best opportunity to play professional baseball was to leave the academy.”
As soon as the team got back to Colorado, Skenes announced to everybody else that he wouldn’t be back. “This has been an honor,” he said. “I wish I could stay. But I have to go.”
Then he fell apart, and so did about 40 other guys. “There were a lot of dudes with tears in their eyes,” Gehring says. “Everybody loved the guy. Nobody held it against him. It was the right decision.”
Not long after, Skenes picked LSU, where he’d unite with the team he caught and pitched against in one of his first college games. But the days of throwing off the gear and hustling out to the bullpen for a few quick warmup pitches were in the rearview mirror ever since he started hitting 100 mph on the radar gun.
Skenes was going to LSU as a pitcher — a starting pitcher — and there was no doubt when he’d be pitching: He’d become the ultimate Friday guy.
THE NEXT YEAR was all Paul Bunyan, no Paultani. As a pure pitcher at LSU, Skenes was breathtaking. He became the clear No. 1 pick during a dream season (13-2, 1.69 ERA and a ridiculous 209 strikeouts in 122⅔ innings) that ended with him as the NCAA pitcher of the year, the NCAA player of the year, the most outstanding player at the Men’s College World Series for the national champ Tigers. He won everything you could win. The Pittsburgh Pirates had no choice but to take him.
The only sad memory for his old Air Force coaches and teammates is that Skenes never got a chance to chase a career as a catcher. His recruiter from the Air Force, C.J. Gillman, is now the hitting instructor for the Mariners’ minor league teams. Before the 2024 draft, he sent the team’s lead catching evaluator footage of Skenes at Air Force behind the plate.
“I hope we’re going to draft this kid?” the guy responded.
“I don’t think we can get him,” Gillman joked, “because he’s starting the All-Star Game for the National League as a pitcher.”
Skenes has nothing but fond memories himself. When he’s asked what the Air Force did for him, he says he doesn’t even know how to answer the question. “It’s easier to answer, what didn’t it do for me?” he says. “You can’t get away with anything at the academy. If you waste time, if you’re not on top of things, you’re going to drown. There are so many benefits to your work ethic, time management, everything.”
Many of his former teammates and coaches regularly catch up with him, and the Air Force is talked about as the foundation for everything that has happened since his cadet days. So the academy isn’t in his rearview mirror; it’s on the dashboard.
When his old friend, Doyle Gehring, heard chatter in 2023 that maybe Skenes had started dating Olivia Dunne, the LSU gymnast and mega-influencer, he asked him point blank, “Are you talking to Livvy Dunne?”
“Well …” Skenes said. He never finished the sentence. He didn’t have to.
The rumors were true. A friend of Skenes’ was dating LSU gymnast Elena Arenas, who introduced Skenes to her roommate, Dunne. He can’t remember exactly what they did as a first date — it was either sushi or ice cream, or maybe both? He just remembers they realized that they had to go out in the quietest possible way.
“If we had been spotted, it would have made waves in Baton Rouge,” he says.
They’ve been together for a little more than a year now, and his friends all say she has been the perfect partner during Skenes’ meteoric ascent to the top of baseball. She has been famous for years and knows how to manage celebrity and all its trappings, and Skenes is a newbie. “She knows how to deal with it, and I know how to deal with it now, too,” he says. “She’s been so good for me.”
That fame is only going to increase, though. Skenes is one of those star rookies who crosses over into phenom territory like he is in the EZ Pass lane for A-list sports status. He has all the ingredients: He’s 6-foot-7, throws 100 mph, is dating one of the most famous college athletes ever and even has an awesome mustache.
However, the mustache drives some of his old Air Force buddies up the wall. It began so innocently at LSU when he ran out of razor blades on a road trip to Ole Miss. As the mustache came in, Skenes let it grow. “I decided, screw it, I’m keeping the mustache,” he says.
When Kazlausky saw him at the All-Star Game, he said, “Your mustache is a stupid-ass mustache.” Then he turned to Dunne and implored her to tell Skenes to shave it off. “And make him get a haircut, too,” Kazlausky said.
Skenes just grins when Kazlausky needles him. He knows that Air Force standardizations and evaluations officer Paul Skenes would agree with Kazlausky about Paul Skenes, a Pirates pitcher with a Doc Holliday ‘stache.
But other than the mustache, it’s hard not to spot the Air Force when you look at Skenes. Roesinger had on a West Virginia baseball shirt, repping his current employers, and went to Skenes’ start against the Reds in July. Skenes got him a spot in a section of family and friends of Pirates players. About 50 feet away, Roesinger clocked Dunne right away but didn’t approach her. After the game — a 4-1 victory for Skenes — Roesinger was supposed to go down to the clubhouse and he ended up near Dunne, who also was headed down.
He started to introduce himself. “Hi, I’m Jimmy, one of Paul’s coaches from …” he began.
“From Air Force!” she interjected. “I kept looking for you but I was expecting to see you in Air Force blue. So nice to meet you.”
Roesinger was struck by how warm and kind Dunne was, but also by how much Skenes carries Air Force with him. He spent a few minutes chitchatting with her, and the way she asked questions about the Air Force made him feel like the academy was a part of their relationship.
Of all the possible favorite moments to choose from, though, Skenes’ old head coach, Kazlausky, makes a surprising choice. Kazlausky went to the All-Star Game as a VIP guest of Skenes’ and watched him pitch a scoreless inning against the AL’s top of the order. Yet he says he’ll never forget when he watched Skenes on the field for the national anthem in Arlington, Texas, that night.
No surprise, Kazlausky is a big-time rah-rah anthem guy. But he was especially proud to see how Skenes stood at attention, right hand on his heart, left hand firm against his side, his feet touching at the heels and spread out in a perfect 45-degree V shape.
The Air Force way. Just without the sink this time.
Thirty years ago, the New York Mets and Colorado Rockies opened Coors Field on April 26,1995 in a game that would embody the beauty (if you’re a hitter) and absurdity (if you’re a pitcher) of the ballpark, when they combined for 20 runs and 33 hits in an 11-9, 14-inning Colorado win. It was just the beginning of a baseball experience like no other.
Standing 5,280 feet above sea level in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood, the picturesque ballpark is one of the sport’s gems, constantly ranking near the top of MLB stadium rankings and keeping the Rockies’ attendance among the league’s highest regardless of the home team’s record.
“Since 1995 I’ve been at nearly 95% of the games played at Coors Field,” owner Dick Monfort told ESPN last week. “Of all those thousands of games, my fondest memories are of a sold-out ballpark on an 85-degree day with no humidity, a beautiful sunset, and 50,000 men, women and kids soaking in the timeless magic of iconic Coors Field.”
But for the pitchers who have taken the mound at the stadium over the past three decades, Coors Field is something else: a house of horrors.
‘S—, the whole time there was a horror story, man,” said Marvin Freeman, who started 41 games for the Rockies over the first two years of the ballpark. “We called it arena baseball. It was like a pinball machine up in there sometimes. Balls were flying out of there. And you just had to make sure when you did leave Colorado you maintained some sanity because it could be hard on your mentality.”
To commemorate the anniversary of a launching pad like no other, we asked those who have pitched or taken the field at a place where breaking balls don’t break and a mistake left over the plate can travel 500 feet into the mountain air to share their best (er, worst) Coors Field horror stories.
A big swing haunts you: ‘It’s all part of the Coors experience’
On May 28, 2016, Carlos Estevez was less than a month into his major league career when he entered in the eighth inning against the San Francisco Giants with a daunting task: facing a future Hall of Famer in a one-run game.
Before Buster Posey stepped into the batter’s box, Estevez’s Colorado coaches and teammates gave the reliever some advice on how to approach the situation.
“I remember throwing a fastball away,” Estevez recently recalled to ESPN. “He could crush pitches close to him. ‘Stay safe. Go away. He’s going to single to right field, worst-case scenario.’ I’m new. The new guy was showing up.”
When Posey connected on a 96 mph fastball on the outer half of the plate with a 2-0 count, it momentarily appeared to Estevez that following the advice had paid off.
“I go [points in the air like pitchers do for popups]. It was one of those. The ball goes out. I didn’t even look anywhere else. I just kept my face down,” Estevez said. “Oh my god. That was so bad. After that, never again — unless I knew the ball was right on top of me. Man, that was bad. I felt so bad. The older guys, of course, made so much fun of me with that. Like, bro, you don’t know where you’re pitching.”
0:28
Flashback: Buster Posey cranks his second 3-run HR of the game
On May 28, 2016, Giants catcher Buster Posey takes Carlos Estevez deep for his second three-run homer of the game at Coors Field.
If Estevez can take solace in anything from that day, it is that his experience mirrors that of pitchers throughout the sport — just ask Ubaldo Jiménez, who had a run of stardom for the Rockies until being traded in 2011. “We were like, you can never point up, you can never think it is a fly ball, because it’s probably going to go out.”
Jerry Dipoto, Rockies reliever (1997-2000) and current Mariners general manager: I saw some of the longest home runs that a human can possibly hit. At the height of Mark McGwire, I watched him literally hit one over the scoreboard, which, if you have a chance and you stand at home plate, look at the left-field scoreboard, the Coke bottle that used to run alongside the scoreboard. He hit it over the Coke bottle, into the parking lot, through the windshield of Jerry McMorris, our owner, which was awesome.
Andrés Galarraga and Mike Piazza hit home runs over the center-field fence, over the forest in the rock waterfall up there, and up into the concourse that has like a 20-foot opening, looks like something out of “Star Wars,” and they were both line-drive missiles that probably only stopped because they hit something out in the concourse.
Ryne Nelson, opposing pitcher: I haven’t pitched there a ton, but C.J. Cron hit a ball that felt like it was 10 feet off the ground the whole way and it left the yard. So I’m not sure if it would’ve been a home run everywhere, but it was one of the more impressive home runs that I’ve given up.
Dipoto: I can remember giving up a homer to Henry Rodriguez to left field, one year when he was at the height of hitting homers. It was like a broken-bat, end-of-the-bat, oppo, what I thought was just a floater. It wound up in the wheelchair section out there.
Jeremy Guthrie, Rockies starter (2012): I was facing the Oakland Athletics. And they hit at least two, maybe three, upper-deck home runs. I was not under the impression they weren’t going to go out. Seeing balls go further and further and fans boo louder and louder, though — it’s all part of the Coors experience.
Dipoto: They had a row of seats in the upper deck in right field that was like a ring around the upper-deck seats, and it was a mile above sea level. An absurd distance beyond home plate.
I remember I had a really difficult time through the years with Ray Lankford. And Jeff Reed was catching me one day and I’m trying to get fastballs by Ray Lankford and I can’t get anything past him. It’s foul ball, foul ball, it feels like a 10-pitch AB. And he comes walking out. And every day in spring training, in my catch game, I’d throw a changeup. I didn’t actually have one or throw it in a game. It was just something to try to get some feel. Reeder came to the mound and said, “Hey, what do you think about just throwing that changeup?” I said, “I’ve never done it in a game, Reeder.”
He said, “Yeah, if you’ve never done it in a game, he won’t be expecting it either.” So I threw a changeup, and I actually threw it for a strike, and he hit it above the purple seats. It wound up going a mile. Like literally going a mile.
Tyler Anderson, Rockies starter (2016-19) and current Angels pitcher: My rookie year when I was called up … I remember there was a runner on first and two outs, which usually you feel pretty safe.
[Evan Longoria] hit like a line drive that got past the second baseman, where normally you’re like, “All right, there’s runners on first and third now.” And it just like rolled all the way to the wall. He got a triple and the runner scored from first. And I remember thinking to myself, How the heck is that a triple? Obviously I was pretty young in my pitching career, but I pitched a lot in college and the minor leagues, and that was never a triple. That was crazy. I remembered that. And I always thought pitching in Coors Field, it doesn’t matter if there’s only a runner on first, you’re never safe. Two outs, runner on first sometimes could feel safe, but it’s never safe.
Freeman: I always liked to say that every bad game that I had at Coors Field was because of Coors Field, not me. I usually fall back on that. But I do remember one particular case where I made it into the ninth inning, my son was going to be born the next day, and I was actually on the mound thinking about pitching my first complete game.
I ended up giving up a home run to Hal Morris. He hit an opposite-field home run on me. And Ellis Burks, I thought he was going to jump the fence and bring it back, but he didn’t catch it. And then I end up getting knocked out of the game in the ninth inning, and we subsequently end up losing that game, and my son was born the next day. That’s really the only game that sticks out to me … you gotta try and survive the next one.
ERAs turn into a scary sight: ‘That place is a nightmare’
Late in the 2023 season, then-Minnesota Twins reliever Caleb Thielbar boarded the plane to Colorado with something treasured by pitchers everywhere — an ERA starting with a 2.
With the Twins trailing 6-4 in the series opener, Thielbar was summoned from the bullpen to face Rockies star Charlie Blackmon. Thielbar retired the Colorado outfielder and left the outing with his sub-3.00 ERA still intact.
But the next day, with the Twins ahead 14-0, Thielbar entered the game in the bottom of the seventh inning — and his ERA wasn’t so lucky that time.
“It was my last outing of the year and I gave up back-to-back homers,” Thielbar told ESPN earlier this month. “And it bumped my ERA up over 3.00. And just one of those things that makes you mad and it stuck with me for a little bit.
“I don’t understand how to pitch there. For some reason, the Rockies have always kind of gotten me — no matter home or away — so they really got me there. But that place is a nightmare.”
Even though the back-to-back home runs hit by Colorado’s Elehuris Montero and Sean Bouchard pushed Thielbar’s ERA from 2.67 to a season-ending 3.23 mark, you’ll have to excuse some other pitchers who might not feel too badly for someone whose Coors Field horror story only involves allowing two runs.
Guthrie: I don’t know that I had any good outing at Coors. I know my ERA was 9.50 [at Coors] and 3.67 on the road that year. I really did want to pitch well there. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I went in with high hopes and a positive attitude. There aren’t as many people who go in with a good attitude as you hope. I really felt like the organization treated pitchers, and especially new pitchers, in a way where it’s almost inevitable you’re going to struggle. You need to change the way you prepare. You need to be aware of how your body is going to react at high altitude. Nothing felt different physically. I just pitched a lot worse.
Among the 223 pitchers with at least 40 innings at Coors, Guthrie’s 9.50 ERA is second worst, ahead of only Bryan Rekar, who posted a 10.16.
Walker Buehler, opposing pitcher: If you’re a starting pitcher and you normally go six, seven innings — going five innings there is some sort of accomplishment. I think honestly the toughest part from our side of it is not necessarily the home run, which a lot of people think it is. The field is so big. You give up a lot of hits you normally don’t give up.
On June 27, 2019, Buehler gave up 13 hits over 5⅔ innings at Coors, although the Dodgers won the game 12-8. Buehler gave up seven of the eight runs and his ERA rose from 2.96 to 3.43.
Honestly, it’s probably a top-five ballpark in baseball, but I just don’t think our game should be played at that kind of elevation. It legitimately changes the game. It’s just different. I don’t know if there’s some sort of f—ing dome vacuum technology thing we can get going there or what.
The scoreboard becomes a horror show: ‘Every game there is like a football game’
Sometimes it doesn’t matter who is on the mound at Coors Field, especially in the summer months when the days get warmer and the Rocky Mountain air gets even drier. An entire pitching staff can leave the ballpark with a battered ERA.
In fact, teams have averaged at least five runs per game at Coors Field in every season it has existed. Over that span, there were just three seasons since 1995 when the MLB average was 5.0 runs per game or more (1996, 1999 & 2000).
Even in the ballpark’s long history of scores that look like they belong in a football game, four-hour marathons of runners touching home plate and double-digit rallies, one series stands out from the crowd. Over four days on Father’s Day weekend of 2019, the Rockies and Padres combined to score 92 runs, setting a modern record for runs in a four-game series by surpassing a total set by the Philadelphia Phillies and Brooklyn Dodgers … in 1929.
“Every game was like 15 to 14 or something like that. We would take the lead and then they would take the lead and then they would take the lead back,” recalled Trevor Story, the Rockies’ shortstop from 2016 to 2021 and a current Red Sox infielder. “It was just back and forth the whole way. Every game of the series was this way, so it was just mentally exhausting. You felt like whoever hit last was going to win. I think we lost a series and it ended up, it was just kind of deflating because we put up all those runs. That series sticks out to me.”
The teams scored in double digits five times, six runs were the fewest for either team in any game, and the Padres’ team ERA jumped from 4.23 to 4.65 while the Rockies’ rose from 4.97 to 5.29.
“My god, that series against the Padres. PTSD still. Between both teams, we scored 92 runs in a four-game series. It was miserable,” Estevez said. “That series just ran through everyone. Everyone gave up runs. [Fernando] Tatis had an amazing series. I don’t know what he didn’t do. I mean, he didn’t pitch.”
While not every series is quite that extreme, almost anyone who has spent enough time at Coors Field has a similar story to tell.
Ryan Spilborghs, Rockies outfielder, 2005-11: One of my favorite memories of Coors Field was against the Cardinals. We were down 7-1 in the bottom of the ninth inning, and we ended up walking off the Cardinals. The best part of it was Tony La Russa. Threw his hat and broke his glasses. And so the next day, it was a Sunday and they didn’t have time to get his glasses fixed so you could see him. He got them taped. Looked like the Poindexter glasses. So we’re just loving it. We’re like, “Hey, we broke La Russa’s glasses.”
Bruce Bochy, opposing manager: We had a game in which Bob Tewksbury started great, six or seven good innings. I had to take him out when we were ahead 9-2, and Willie Blair went in and we lost 13-12.
Dan O’Dowd, Rockies general manager, 1999-2014: You’d give up five or six runs, and you’d be like — ah, no problem. You never felt like you were out of it.
Clint Hurdle, Colorado Rockies manager, 2002-09, and current hitting coach: It’s almost like when we were playing street basketball. You get your two teams together. Last bucket wins, right? That’s what I realized early on. But it was going to be a blessing and a curse because your position players actually started believing we’re never out of it.
Jack Corrigan, Rockies radio broadcaster: Even with the humidor and everything else, the outfield’s the biggest in baseball, the wind — I think sometimes that’s why it’s a great place to watch a game. The Rockies might be a bad team that particular year or whatever, but it might be a heck of a game.
Trevor Hoffman, opposing pitcher: Every game there is like a football game. The offense always has a chance. I cannot imagine playing 81 games a year like that.
The altitude goes to your head: ‘This is not baseball’
Jim Leyland took the job as Rockies manager in 1999 coming off a sustained run of success in Pittsburgh and Miami — and lasted only a year. Buck Showalter managed the opposing Diamondbacks in one of Leyland’s final games in Colorado, and after the game, Leyland told him he was finished. “He said, ‘I’m out of here. You can’t win here.’ He was done,” Showalter recalled over the weekend. “He said, ‘I love the game, I want to manage baseball. This is not baseball.'”
Near the end of that season, Leyland turned to then-first-year general manager Dan O’Dowd and said, “Do you have any f—ing idea what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
O’Dowd stayed with the organization through the 2014 season and was constantly racking his brain for ways to manage the unusual circumstances in Colorado.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, he says he would try the model that the Rays use: build around player development, and then, when young players are at their peak trade value, flip them for a big return. “I’d have waves and waves of depth — power arms, strike throwers and athletic guys.”
Showalter was heavily involved in the planning and building of another expansion team of that era, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and wonders how the pitcher-centric approach would work sustainably at Coors Field. If you were running the Rockies, he said, “You’d have to develop your own pitchers. You’d take pitchers in all 20 rounds. You’d have to be three layers deep.”
The longtime manager also noticed during his time competing against the Rockies that there was always some new idea on how to conquer Coors Field.
“It seems like everybody has had some magic potion [to deal with the elevation], but none of them worked,” Showalter said. “It wore on you physically to play games there.
“What they should do is put a 40-foot-high jai alai wall and play it off the fence, and use four outfielders.”
O’Dowd’s attempts to reinvent baseball at altitude were never that extreme, but he did oversee the deployment of the ballpark’s humidor in 2002, and looking back, he “almost wishes I hadn’t.” In some ways, it mitigated the home-field advantage that the Rockies had in the early days of the ballpark — and he believes that in order for the Rockies to have success, they have to thrive at home, because the inherent closer-to-sea-level or at-sea-level conditions in road games will always be a disadvantage for the team.
“We were looking for a way to normalize the game. … In hindsight, it would’ve been better to not have it.”
Bud Black, Rockies manager, 2017-present: Other managers, coaches come to me. I’m sure they came to Baylor. Leyland quit after one year. They say, “How do you do it? How can you hang in there?” I just know that when I was with the Padres and we’d come in, our hitters were like, “Yes!” Our pitchers were like, “Oh, s—.” You can see pitchers visibly rattled.
Freeman: It wasn’t just the Rockies. It was the visitors. Some of them guys that came in, they were coming up with mysterious injuries for three days when they came in for a series with the Rockies, man. I know for a fact some of my Braves buddies used to ask me all the time, “How do you guys survive mentally out here?” We’re like, “We just look forward to going on the road when it’s our time to pitch.”
Bochy: They had one of those smoke shops by the ballpark. I always said they put that there for the managers, to stop there and get something that would get them through the game.
It’s a different game — a totally different game. It’s a beautiful ballpark, with the architecture, the Rockpile, everything they have there. But it changed how you played the game. You had to manage a little bit different, stay with your starting pitchers a little longer because you could really tear up your bullpen over a series.
LaTroy Hawkins, Rockies reliever, 2007, 2014-15: I think because they let the elements intimidate them. They’re mind-f—ed already, before they even get there and before they even take the mound. They’re already mind-f—ed. And that’s not having a positive attitude about the situation. Hey, everybody else pitches in this stadium. Everybody else. I’m going to have to pitch in it too. Let me go in it with a positive mental approach — PMA — a positive mental approach to Coors Field. And that’s how I got through it.
Kyle Freeland, Rockies starter, 2017-present: It is not an easy place to pitch. It comes with its factors with the altitude, the dryness, how hard it is to recover in that environment that guys throughout the rest of the league don’t understand until they come to Coors for a four-game series and they realize their body feels like crap on Day 2, and that’s a big factor.
Shawn Estes, Rockies starter, 2004: You always looked at the calendar when the schedule opened and you knew when you were going to pitch and when you’re not going to pitch. So you know you have three trips into Coors and you have a pretty good idea if you’re going to pitch in any of those series. Put it this way, if you find out you’re not pitching for three games there, it’s probably the best road trip you take of the year.
Dipoto: I remember the first or second year of interleague [games], John Wetteland, who at that time was one of the best closers in the league, comes in and blows a save. He was really fighting himself. And the next day, he comes out and gets ready to walk in from the visitors bullpen and he [knocks] on the cage, and he looks at us all getting ready for the start of the game, and he says, “I have to know, how do you guys do this?” And everybody told him the same thing: “Short memory, man. You just have to move on.”
Ubaldo Jimenez, Rockies starter, 2006-11: Colorado is a different monster than anything else. If you go out there for a couple innings and you start throwing, I don’t know, 20, 25 pitches, you’re probably going to be out of breath right away. If you run to cover first base, when you go back to the mound, you’re going to feel the difference.
I wanted to be out there regardless of how difficult it was. I wanted to be out there for the fans. It made me develop; it made me be a better pitcher because I work hard. I work really hard. I worked so hard, running-wise and conditioning-wise. I remember I used to do the stairs in the stadium, or I used to go to Red Rocks Amphitheatre that’s like 20 minutes away from Denver, like going to the mountains. Rocky is the one who inspired me for sure. Every time I had to run in the mountains, I ran — I just didn’t chase the chicken. Other than that, I did pretty much everything Rocky did just to get ready for Coors Field.
Your stuff disappears in thin air: ‘They tell you to keep it down, don’t listen’
Pitchers are taught to “trust their stuff” from the time they first pick up a baseball, but at Coors Field, they learn quickly that pitches don’t do what’s expected.
During Dipoto’s four seasons in Colorado, Rockies relievers bonded over the shared experience of sitting beyond the outfield walls while waiting to go in and find out how their stuff would fare on a given night.
“There’s a storage room in the back of the bullpen at Coors Field, where during the course of a game — because you’re so far out, I mean, it’s the biggest field in the league — we would sit because we had a small TV at that time that would allow us to see what was happening in the game. … There’s these brick walls, painted brick walls. Every reliever had his own brick, and you got to write a message to all the relievers that came after you. It was related to the ballpark, some of the challenges. It was almost like a yearbook, but it was, in theory, preserved forever because it was on a brick wall.
“The trick was you weren’t allowed to have a brick until you gave up four runs in an inning. And everybody had a brick. So this was going on for like five years, and everybody who had come and gone had their own brick, even guys who were kind of small-time then. And [general manager] Bob Gebhard walked in one day and saw the messages on the wall and got angry with the relievers for writing on the wall and had the grounds crew paint over it. All of a sudden what was really something special that you could pass along from generation to generation, and mostly just laugh it off, like you have to be able to laugh at that, got covered over.
“My brick was something along the lines of, ‘They tell you to keep it down — don’t listen.’
“I went to Colorado. And the first thing — Billy Swift was one of our starters. And I walked into the clubhouse; we shared an agent. Billy shook my hand and he said, ‘Sinkerballer, right?’ And I said ‘yeah.’
“He said ‘Good luck, bro. It doesn’t work.'”
Even when the humidor was added after Dipoto’s time in Colorado, pitchers routinely saw their trusted pitch mixes abandon them at high altitude.
Spilborghs: A couple of years ago, they had to repaint in the bullpen [again], but if you went into the bullpen before, all there, all these great names of pitchers like Huston Street, Tito Fuentes, literally all these great bullpen arms, and they’d have their line — a third of an inning, nine hits, nine runs — written on the wall. Just to prove to you that Coors Field would get everybody.
Estevez: What you’re used to, it doesn’t work up there. If you’re a big sweeper guy, the sweeper doesn’t do anything, it just spins. Guys that are not up there for a long time, they go, like, “Man, my sweeper is off today.”
No, bro, it’s not. It’s just Coors Field. You’re fine. Trust me. That’s the thing. Even your fastball doesn’t ride as much. What plays better over there is changeups. It’s hard to find what truly works over there. For me, you’ve got to find the consistency.
Zack Wheeler, opposing pitcher: I’ve been lucky to miss it a bunch, thankfully. I did get roughed up there early in my career, but you hear about breaking stuff not breaking like it should. The ball flies, of course. When I made the All-Star team in 2021, when the game was there, the bullpen catcher told me to break out my changeup if I had a good one. I didn’t know about that until he told me. So now I tell everyone that I know, “Hey, if you have a good changeup, use it.”
Anderson: The ball flies, your stuff doesn’t move. When you throw two-seams, sometimes they cut. So if you’re a two-seam guy — like you know the seam-shift, right? I think what’s happening with some of these two-seams is they’re a seam-shift to two-seam where the seam catches, then it gets to two-seam. And maybe because the air is thinner it doesn’t have the same catch. So it just cuts instead.
Hoffman: The thing that I remember about pitching in Coors is that you just couldn’t feel the baseball.
The former star reliever tried different methods to get some moisture onto his hands to rub up the ball. Saliva didn’t work, because he would be dried out — it’d be like spitting cotton balls, he said. Remnants from chewing gum could make the surface too tacky.
Hoffman is in the Hall of Fame largely because of the excellence of a straight changeup that he threw — and when he pitched at Coors, it just wasn’t the same changeup.
The velocity was the same, but the pitch just didn’t have the same depth. I threw some good ones, but sometimes the changeup would just sit there, like it was on a tee.
Of course, it was Hoffman’s Padres teammate, Jake Peavy, who took the mound in the most famous game in Coors Field history — Game 163 of the 2007 MLB season.
Late in the regular season, the Padres were fighting to clinch a playoff spot and knew in the last weekend that if they tied the Rockies, necessitating a play-in game, the tiebreaker would be held in Coors Field. Needing just one win to wrap up a berth, the Padres lost on Saturday — and Jake Peavy met with manager Bud Black and general manager Kevin Towers and lobbied hard for them to let him pitch the next day in Milwaukee. Peavy begged Black and Towers to let him pitch Game 162 in Milwaukee on Sunday, and he thought that Towers would back him. But Peavy was overruled: Black and Towers hoped that the Padres would clinch without Peavy, so they could line him up against the Phillies’ Cole Hamels in Game 1 of the playoffs. Instead, the Padres lost Sunday, and Peavy started Game 163 in Colorado.
Peavy: I’ve been part of a lot of great games there, but that place is not baseball. It’s a different game than anywhere else. I was a sinker-slider guy, but I didn’t use the sinker there; I couldn’t. Because half the time the ball would cut and go the opposite way.
That team was hotter than anybody on the planet, and [the elevation] took my sinker away from me — and I didn’t have that against Holliday, Todd Helton and Troy Tulowitzki. That’s a huge weapon taken away.
What happened in Game 163 was classic Coors: Colorado led 3-0, fell behind 5-3, the two sides swapping the lead back and forth. Peavy allowed six runs in 6⅓ innings. The Padres took an 8-6 lead in the top of 13th, and in the bottom of the inning, the Rockies scored three to win 9-8 on Matt Holliday’s famous slide. Peavy has never looked at a replay of the close game-ending play at home plate.
What’s the point?” Once he’s called safe, it doesn’t matter anymore. We didn’t have replay back then.
Slaying the Coors Field monster: ‘My first time pitching at Coors was unbelievable’
Yet despite all of the horror stories, some pitchers have managed to succeed at Coors Field, whether for a single start or a sustained period — and speak of their experience in the same conquering manner a mountain climber would after scaling a hallowed peak.
Shawn Estes was well-versed in pitching at Coors Field when he joined the Rockies for the 2004 season, having spent the first seven seasons of his career with the division-rival San Francisco Giants. Though his 5.84 ERA was the worst of any full season during his 13-year career, he also won 15 games for the Rockies during his lone season in Denver, and he credits a mindset shift for helping him succeed.
“As a [Rockies] player pitching in Coors Field, I could care less what my ERA was. That wasn’t my mentality at all. It was about winning. And fortunately I had enough years of playing against the Rockies in Coors Field where I knew exactly what I was getting into.
“It was really trying to get through five innings, minimize the damage and know that your offense is going to score runs as well. As a visiting player, it was all about survival when you went to Coors Field and just trying to somehow get through the meat of that order with as little the damage as possible.”
But of the 34 starts he made for the Rockies in 2004 (15 of them in Colorado), it was the last time he took the mound at Coors Field in a home uniform that still resonates most for Estes, because he outdueled a Hall of Famer — and even registered a base hit off him.
“I remember beating Randy Johnson there for my 15th win in 2004. And I got a hit off him. Yep, I threw seven innings. That was probably my best game that season when you consider everything.”
Estes is not the only one who looks back with fondness at the times he stood tall at the game’s highest elevation.
Mark Leiter Jr., opposing pitcher: My first time pitching at Coors was unbelievable. I punched out nine in four innings. Second time I pitched at Coors, struck out five in the first two innings and it was early in the season so I got tired. I would say the thing about Coors is it definitely fatigues you a little more. That’s definitely real. And I think you have to be precise — like, you can’t have lazy finishes.
I feel like the second you change how you’re pitching because it’s there, you lose out on your flow. And that’s where I think guys get intimidated, if I had the right way to put it. Just being more selective and careful of your off-speed puts you probably in more of a defensive mode.
Jeremy Hefner, opposing pitcher: The game I pitched well, I think it was a makeup of a snowout earlier in the year. So we were somewhere, had to fly to Colorado for one day, and I end up making the start. I gave up a homer right down the left-field line to Tulo. I think CarGo [Carlos Gonzalez] may have hit a double or a hard hit. I got an RBI groundout — bases-loaded RBI groundout. I remember it being very sunny. The opposite of when we came earlier in the season.
Blake Snell, opposing pitcher: I can’t remember just one [horror story] but I can remember the opposite of one. July 19, 2016. My first game there. I gave up one hit. I was young and naïve. I’ve never pitched well there since.
When asked “What do you think of first when you think of Coors Field?” Snell paused before summing up what’s on the minds of many pitchers as they arrive in Colorado’s thin air.
When we fly out.
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Tyler Glasnow was put on the injured list Monday with what the Los Angeles Dodgers described as shoulder inflammation, joining fellow frontline starter Blake Snell, who has been sidelined by a similar injury.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Glasnow’s right shoulder is structurally sound but is also dealing with what Roberts called “overall body soreness.”
Glasnow gave up back-to-back homers in Sunday’s first inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates, then was removed from the game after experiencing discomfort while warming up for the second. Afterward, Glasnow expressed frustration at his constant string of injuries and speculated that his latest ailment might stem from the mechanical adjustments he made to improve the health of his elbow.
Glasnow sat out the 2½ months of last season — including the playoffs — with what was initially diagnosed as an elbow sprain, a big reason why the Dodgers were relegated to only three starting pitchers in their march toward a World Series title. Now, he is one of eight starting pitchers on the Dodgers’ injured list.
One of those arms, Tony Gonsolin, will be activated Wednesday to make his first major league start in 20 months. But the Dodgers are short enough on pitching that they’ll have to stage a bullpen game the day before.
“Pitching is certainly volatile,” said Roberts, who added journeyman right-hander Noah Davis to the roster in Glasnow’s place. “We experienced it last year and essentially every year. I think the thing that’s probably most disconcerting is the bullpen leading Major League Baseball in innings. When you’re talking about the long season, the starters are built up to go take those innings down. That’s sort of where my head is at as far as trying to make sure we don’t redline these guys in the pen.”
Dodgers relievers entered Monday’s series opener against the Miami Marlins having accumulated 121⅓ innings, 7⅔ more than the Chicago White Sox, who are already on a 122-loss pace.
Glasnow and Snell aren’t expected to be out for a prolonged period, but their timetables are uncertain. Clayton Kershaw could return before the end of May, but Shohei Ohtani might not serve as a two-way player until after the All-Star break. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki could temporarily assume a traditional five-day schedule, as opposed to the once-a-week routine they’ve been following, but the Dodgers have only four starting pitchers on their active roster.
Glasnow, 31, is in his 10th year in the big leagues but has never compiled more than 134 innings in a season, a mark he set last year. The Dodgers acquired him from the Tampa Bay Rays and subsequently signed him to a five-year, $136.56 million extension in December 2023 with the thought that his injury issues might be behind him.
“Tyler said it — very frustrating,” Roberts said. We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it.”
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