Skenes

Before the glizzies and the glamour of winning the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards in Major League Baseball, Paul Skenes was a cadet at the Air Force Academy.

“When you go there, baseball’s secondary, you’ve got to want to serve, you’ve got to want to do everything that being in the military, and being at a military academy, requires,” Skenes said recently. “It was a good opportunity to get an education and play baseball at the same time.”

Unlike many of his peers, Skenes lasted only two years at the academy, and clearly it was for good reason, as he transferred to Louisiana State and won a national championship with the Tigers in 2023, eventually becoming the first overall pick by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the MLB draft that same year.

For former Army player, and current Altoona Curve catcher Derek Berg, who played against Skenes in college, his transfer was a sigh of relief.

“We weren’t too sad to see him leave,” Berg joked at PNG Field recently.

Berg and Skenes, who were in the same class, faced off twice for their respective academies before Skenes left for LSU.

“We knew they had this freshman that was playing, and he was big. He wasn’t as filled out as he is now, but he was big,” Berg recalled. “We knew he’s behind the plate, and we knew he had an arm, so the report going in was he’s a decent hitter, but he’s young, so you know we’re gonna, we’re gonna attack him, see what he’s got and behind the plate we got to have a good jump to go, he’s a good arm.”

Skenes and his Air Force teammates got the upperhand over Berg and Army both years he was at the academy, but in that short time, his legend continued to grow.

“We’re playing these guys, and I think he had hit against us,” Berg said. “He caught the first seven, and then he got pulled, and we were like, what’s wrong, like, what happened? He went running down to the bullpen and then closed out the eighth and ninth.”

Beating your rival is always a goal at the beginning of the season and that is only magnified when playing against another service academy.

“There’s a rivalry there for sure over which is the better branch,” Skenes said. “Whenever you play Army or Navy, you always want to beat them.”

While Skenes was at Air Force, the Falcons went 5-2 against Army and Navy, including a 4-0 mark against Berg’s Army squad.

Despite the rivalry on the field, the level of respect between the academies and what they have to do off the field goes far beyond the box score..

“You want to beat them,” Skenes said. “That’s probably the biggest rivalry that we have in terms of teams that we play against, but keeping it in perspective you know what the other side is going to do, you know that there’s a common respect there, so it’s pretty cool.”