Is it too late for Florida State to turn its season around?
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Andrea Adelson, ESPN Senior Writer
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida State coach Mike Norvell has dealt with 0-2 starts. Bad home losses. Negativity. Quarterbacks getting booed.
Never, however, as a defending conference champion.
And never as a top-10 team.
Coming off a season when Florida State was left out of the College Football Playoff as an undefeated conference champion, Norvell had plenty on his plate: rebuilding a roster, developing leadership and getting his team past a snub that continued to sting months later.
He felt good about his plan, telling ESPN in July, “This has been arguably the best offseason I’ve ever been a part of. The way that they approached our winter drills, spring practice, summer, the work has been there. It’s a fast, explosive, powerful football team.”
But Florida State’s first two games exposed not only flaws in what should have been team strengths but also a general lack of cohesion and leadership that has led to mistrust on the field. What’s more, all of this played out with a national television audience watching and with the school’s lawsuit against the ACC challenging the grant of rights as a backdrop.
The Seminoles have not looked fast, explosive or powerful. Rather, they allowed Georgia Tech and Boston College to be the aggressors, dictating exactly how the first two games of the season would go. Meanwhile, offensive coordinator/offensive line coach Alex Atkins will miss his third game Saturday as he serves an NCAA-mandated three-game suspension for recruiting violations.
Norvell has vowed to be better as his team attempts to hit the reset button on its season against Memphis.
The question, of course, is this: Is it too late?
AS THE GAME clock wound down against Boston College, the Florida State sideline was as quiet as the rest of the stadium. Athletic director Michael Alford stood with his arms crossed, looking up at the scoreboard, disbelief settling in over a 28-13 loss that would drop the Seminoles from preseason No. 10 to outside the AP Top 25.
Another Florida State official used the word “bewilderment” to describe the scene. Norvell glared straight ahead as he ran off the field. Nobody — from Alford to Norvell to the coaching staff and players — expected to start 0-2.
Florida State was supposed to be past all this after Norvell elevated the program from irrelevance to an ACC title in four years. Perhaps the lowest point came in 2021 when the team got off to an 0-4 start and quarterback Jordan Travis was booed so badly he considered quitting football. From that point to the 2023 ACC championship game, Florida State went 28-6.
If the Seminoles engendered any sympathy after getting left out of the playoffs, it quickly dissipated after the school opted to sue the ACC to get out of the league. The team’s 0-2 start has drawn widespread ridicule on social media and whispers in ACC circles about karma being delivered to the two schools that have filed lawsuits (Clemson having lost 34-3 to Georgia in Week 1).
The lawsuits, however, have nothing to do with the on-field performance. The snub did send the program reeling, at least in the short term. For four years, Norvell had told his players that if they put in the work, the reward would follow. Except in the case of the playoff, it had not, leading to anger and a crisis in confidence.
Nearly a quarter of the roster either opted out of last season’s Orange Bowl or entered the transfer portal; Florida State lost that game to Georgia 63-3. Ten players off its 2023 roster were drafted, including Travis, receiver Keon Coleman, defensive end Jared Verse and defensive tackle Braden Fiske.
Players throughout the offseason, and at ACC Kickoff, lamented the snub and vowed not to fall short of the playoff again. Asked whether the playoff snub has lingered this year, receiver Kentron Poitier delivered an emphatic no.
“It ain’t about last year, it’s about this year,” Poitier said. “Yeah, we talk a little bit about [the snub], but this is a whole new team.”
Norvell, meanwhile, had conversations with Alabama in January about replacing Nick Saban. But he stayed at Florida State and earned a contract extension that will pay him $10 million a year until 2031. At the time, he said, “There’s a lot of excitement around our program. I’m just excited to continue to build upon the foundation that’s been laid.”
Florida State dipped into the transfer portal again to rebuild. Since his arrival, Norvell has been strategic about the type of players he has brought into the program. Early on, he brought in players with multiple years of eligibility to help lay a foundation, including Verse, Trey Benson and Jammie Robinson. Florida State rose back to an elite level thanks in large part to the portal evaluations the program made — from Verse, Fiske and Coleman to Johnny Wilson, Benson, Jermaine Johnson, Keir Thomas and Robinson.
This year, though, Norvell wanted to add complementary players to a roster that returned 82 players — many of whom Norvell recruited. In his mind, the foundation had been set, and the Seminoles wanted to rely on their role players taking on bigger starting roles while using portal players to complement what they already had.
The Seminoles signed 17 transfers this time around, bringing in a top-10 portal class. The Seminoles knew they had to bring in a veteran quarterback with Travis gone and Brock Glenn still in need of development. They targeted the two biggest names: Cam Ward and DJ Uiagalelei. The quarterbacks visited on the same weekend in December.
Ward had also visited Miami and told ESPN in a previous interview that he made it clear to both coaching staffs that he planned to declare for the NFL draft but would keep his options open to return to college. “A lot of schools wanted to rush my decision, but I was going to do it on my time no matter what,” Ward said. Ultimately, Uiagalelei committed to the Seminoles on Jan. 1; Ward declared for the draft the same day but did not sign with an agent. He changed his mind and decided to play at Miami, committing Jan. 13.
Uiagalelei had previously played in the ACC, starting his career at Clemson before going to Oregon State for 2023. From the beginning, there were questions about whether he would be able to play at an elite level at his third school. One opposing coach observed, “I just never felt like that guy was a championship quarterback. He’s just never been able to be accurate.”
Two games in, Uiagalelei has been erratic at best, and he was booed against Boston College, where the crowd also chanted for the backup, Glenn. In two games, Uiagalelei has thrown for 465 yards with a touchdown and an interception, and he is averaging just 6.7 yards per completion.
The other portal additions have been quiet, too. Defensive end Marvin Jones Jr., whom the staff raved about all spring and summer, has been neutralized as a threat (two total tackles). Alabama transfer receiver Malik Benson ranks third on the team in receiving yards. Roydell Williams leads the team in rushing but is averaging only 3.2 yards per carry.
Asked after the Boston College game whether he had missed on his portal evaluations, Norvell responded tersely, “Obviously I’ve not done a good job putting our guys in a position to showcase what I believe that they are. So I’ll be better.”
But the issues go beyond the portal players. Between 2020 and 2023, Florida State signed 25 ESPN 300 players; 13 remain on the team. Three are starters. Players Florida State wants to rely on — including DJ Lundy and defensive end Pat Payton — had to be persuaded to return to the Seminoles in the first place. In December, Payton threatened to enter the portal before changing his mind; Lundy entered the portal, and committed to Colorado, before opting to stay with the Seminoles.
What also has been glaring is the lack of leadership. Perhaps the staff thought replacing 10 NFL draft picks would not be as difficult as it has been, both from a standpoint of production and leadership. “Travis, Verse and Fiske were all next-level guys who had been through the battles, and they don’t have it this year,” another opposing coach said.
Florida State worked the entire offseason on this needed intangible. Norvell held a retreat for the veterans who made up his leadership council in January, six months earlier than usual, understanding he had a new group that had big shoes to fill. Players in March discussed the need to get to know each other better, identifying three key words to building a successful team: relationships, accountability and mindset.
At a team meeting the day before spring practice began, center Maurice Smith told his teammates to get out of their comfort zones and start building relationships with guys outside their position groups: “We’re not here for NIL,” Smith told them. “We’re here to create a team and make a run. We only go as far as our relationship goes.”
Asked about the opportunity for players to step up in the face of adversity to emerge as leaders, Norvell admitted, “There’s an open door for that. I don’t want a team that waits for the adversity for the people to arise, but it’s also necessity that in these moments, when it does happen, who are you? What is the true core identity?”
After the Boston College game, Poitier and linebackers Lundy and Cam Riley said multiple times that players had to start trusting each other.
“I would probably say really believing in each other, trusting our brothers, knowing if a safety is in the fit, just trusting he’s going to be there and not being hesitant and second-guessing yourself,” Riley said.
A third opposing coach noted that it usually takes a few games before a team identity emerges, something that has become more challenging in the portal era with a revolving roster door. “Internally how you hold it together is even more challenging,” the coach said.
PERHAPS MOST DISCONCERTING to those close to the program is the performance against Boston College. Florida State lost to Georgia Tech on a last-second field goal on a different continent. Against the Eagles at home, Florida State got dominated across the board and, by the end of the game, looked like a team that had given up.
In both games, Florida State failed to both run the ball and stop the run, a head-scratcher to those around the program because the coaching staff believed its offensive and defensive lines would give Florida State an opportunity to contend again.
Florida State returned the most experienced offensive line in the ACC with 190 starts and two preseason All-ACC players in Smith and tackle Darius Washington. With added depth in their running back room, the Seminoles felt they could be a dominant run team and rely on Uiagalelei to be a complementary player, allowing him to thrive without putting the pressure of an entire offense on his shoulders.
The first drive of the season against Georgia Tech showcased exactly that — five rushes for 58 yards, two passes for 17. But since that drive, Florida State has not been able to run with any consistency. The Seminoles have routinely lost their one-on-one matchups, making it far more difficult to run. In two games, they have 119 total yards and are averaging 0.92 yards before contact — the worst under Norvell.
Not only that, the running backs were simply not involved against Boston College. Florida State had four designed runs for running backs in the first half, the fewest in the first half of a game by an ACC team since Duke had four against Boston College in 2011.
Although Florida State did not call many designed runs for Travis last season, he always brought the threat to run; that simply does not exist with Uiagalelei, a dynamic that has affected the way defenses have decided to play Florida State. The fact that Georgia Tech and Boston College — two teams that ranked last in the ACC in rushing defense a year ago — have shut down the Seminoles is particularly galling to those close to the program.
One factor at play is Atkins’ suspension. The NCAA handed down a three-game suspension and two-year show-cause penalty stemming from recruiting violations in 2022. Although Norvell calls the plays, Atkins is hands-on with the offensive line over the course of the game and has the best feel for when to make rotations, substitutions and specific line calls. He is not allowed to be with the team on game day, including for pregame walk-throughs and planning.
The Florida State defensive front has not been much better. The Seminoles have allowed 453 yards rushing in two games, the most they have allowed in their first two games of a season since at least 2000.
One coach who watched the opener against Georgia Tech used the word “tender” to describe the defense. Norvell said he noticed players pressing to make plays against Boston College and “trying to do almost too much.”
“That’s on the linebackers and the D-line,” Lundy said. “We’ve got to play better. Teams can’t be able to run the ball on us. We’ve got to figure out how to stop the run, and we’re going to do that, I promise you.”
There seems to be a clear disconnect between what is happening in practice and what is happening on the field. Asked why what is happening in practice is not happening in games, Lundy said, “We just got to be better at executing our game plan. We’ve got to be more disciplined, more fundamental. We’ve got to do what we do in practice. But it’s all going to come down to execution.”
AD Alford has never wavered in his belief in Norvell, even when Florida State started 0-4 in 2021 and people wondered whether the coach was on the hot seat. Alford told ESPN in a phone interview last week, “I’ve got full faith in Mike and the team. We live in such a competitive arena every day, and we know what it takes to endure tough times. We have that unconquered spirit here. They’re going to be fine. They’ll get it fixed.”
BACK IN JULY, when Norvell spoke with ESPN during ACC Kickoff, he spoke about the challenges in pushing Florida State even further — to a place where the Seminoles compete not just for ACC championships but for national championships.
Two months later, his words sound more prescient than ever.
“The closer you get to the tip of the mountain, the steeper it gets. You miss a step there, and it can be a tumble, and we’ve seen that happen within our own program years back. … Now it’s time to go take another step,” Norvell said. “It’s time to be better than what we’ve been, and the challenges, the adversity, all those things, they’re going to show up. We haven’t arrived. But there’s also a lot of excitement.”
Now is the time to see what type of response and leadership Florida State has on its 2024 team before it’s too late.
“Our program is built off responding,” Lundy said. “There’s a lot of season left, and we’ve got to decide what we’re going to make the season to be. We’ve got to come together. It’s all on us. Coach likes to take the blame, but it’s on us.”
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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