The Late Bloomers About To Change Baseball
Paul Skenes and Charlie Condon are proof that in baseball, patience is a virtue
There is a myth in youth sports that talent is obvious: that the best are always the best, that kids must specialize in a sport as young as possible to sharpen their skills before it’s too late and everybody else has passed them by. That type of thinking is ridiculous, of course. But can you blame people for believing it? Everybody wants to create the next phenom.
Baseball’s youth culture has gotten even more out-of-hand than most sports’: Perfect Game, an organization whose investors include the MLB and several former All-Stars, creates vast annual rankings of the nation’s top prospects—but not just Minor Leaguers. They scout kids and teams as young as the 9U division. Those are eight-year-olds. One study found that, by 8th grade, the average cost of having a child play baseball is “north of $5,000 per year.” Private coaches and trainers make hundreds an hour helping 12-year-olds perfect their curveballs.
Look at baseball this week, though, and you’ll see two phenoms who took very different paths to the top of the sport. And maybe—just maybe—they can bring some hope that it doesn’t have to be this way.
In college ball, this has been the year of Charlie Condon. The slugger from the University of Georgia is the sport’s best player and the projected top pick in the upcoming MLB Draft. He’s batting .459 on the year, alongside a remarkable .568 OBP and a 1.673 OPS. He’s hit 33 home runs—six more than the next highest mark in the NCAA. He’s created scenes straight out of movies: the tall, lanky kid who saunters into the batter’s box and leaves scouts in the bleachers scratching their heads, slack jawed.
“I started calling area scouts,” Jim Callis, who has scouted local players since 1988, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But what Callis told his colleagues next has become less and less typical. He didn’t say, “He’s even better than you told me,” or, “The hype is real.”
He said, “Where’d this guy come from?”
That’s because in baseball terms, Condon had come from nowhere.
He attended a small, private high school in Marietta, Georgia, where he played quarterback in the fall and baseball in the spring. He was tall at 6’5”, but at less than 200 pounds, he was assumed to be too scrawny to ever amount to much. Even worse, most college baseball recruiting events happened in the Fall, when Condon was throwing curl routes on the gridiron. Only two Division III schools, Rhodes College and the University of the South, had any interest in letting him play college sports—and they wanted him only if he would play both football and baseball, a 2-for-1 type of deal.
Then Georgia’s baseball coach, Scott Stricklin, got a call from a friend. Would he consider giving a scrawny kid a shot as a walk-on? Stricklin and his staff looked into it: If the kid could put on a little weight, maybe he could pinch hit or something. And most importantly, the kid had great grades and could get into UGA on his own merits. What was the worst that could happen? If nothing else, he could help the team’s GPA. Stricklin offered Condon a spot. “He was a pure walk-on,” Stricklin told ESPN.
To get ready for UGA, Condon played in a summer league after high school graduation. He struggled, hitting just .268. In Athens, Condon redshirted—never making it onto the field. “It takes a lot of mental strength to get through a season like that being away from everything,” Condon said. “You're kind of isolated out there and it's just you and the game. It really forces you to get comfortable in your skin quickly.”
Instead, Condon hit the weight room. He put on the Freshman 15—of pure muscle. He ingratiated himself to the rest of the team, a constant presence in the facility. The next season, Condon forced his way into the lineup. He hit .386 and added 25 home runs. He hasn’t looked back since.
"I think what's made him so good is that he's had adversity,” Stricklin said. “He's had obstacles, and he never complained. He bought into everything.”
Said another scout: "In an industry full of special people, he's like a true unicorn. When you start going through the comparisons for him, we start brushing up against Hall of Fame players and legendary figures.”
Not bad for a walk-on.
Then there’s Paul Skenes.
The Pittsburgh Pirates prospect will make his Major League debut tomorrow, when he’ll be the most anticipated young pitcher in the MLB since Stephen Strasburg in 2010. The first overall pick in last year’s draft, he has cruised through the Minors. So far this season in AAA, Skenes has amassed a 0.99 ERA to compliment one of the most baffling stats I’ve ever seen from a prospect: Skenes has struck out 42.9 percent of the batters he’s faced while walking only 7.6 percent of them. Not crazy enough for you? His fastball averages 99.99 mph and tops out around 102. Put another way: 104 of the 105 fastest pitches thrown in AAA this season are courtesy of Skenes. Every now and then, he’ll mix in a splinker, a diabolical concoction that’s part-splitter, part-sinker and moves like a changeup that somehow comes at you at 95 mph. Point is, the guy’s stuff is filthy.
“Seriously, when I say he's pretty good, it's different. I ain't being dramatic,” Skenes’ teammate Brent Honeywell told ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “It's like, oh, he throws hard, he throws hard, he throws hard. Yeah, that shit's cool and all, but the kid can flat-out pitch. Pitch. That dude paints. He throws it where it's intended to go, and I think it's the biggest thing that Paul Skenes does. He's got a cool fastball. His heater's really good. But that dude throws the ball where it's supposed to go."
He's exactly the type of once-in-a-generation talent that the youth baseball system is built to create and identify…right?
That’s not quite how his story went, either. Unlike Condon, Skenes has always been big. And though his fastball has long been menacing, in high school, that was just about all he could throw. Lacking any secondary pitches, he was recruited as a catcher to the Air Force Academy. Like all cadets, he arrived at school and went through basic training. That’s when his coaches noticed something odd about the new freshman: as basic training went on, he got stronger on the field. His pitches were thrown with more umph, the bats hit with extra pop. If he could handle that, they decided he might be able to play two ways: as both a catcher and as the closer.
Skenes added a changeup. He stayed late, working on his craft. “He’s the best leader I’ve been around,” Air Force pitching coach Ryan Forrest said last year. In his second season, they moved him out of the bullpen and into the starting rotation.
Had Skenes stayed at Air Force, he would have been required to serve. And though he wanted to stay, his coaches insisted that he had too much talent to risk missing a shot at the MLB. They urged him to transfer, and soon he found his way to Baton Rouge, where LSU wanted him to simply focus on his pitching. Skenes was supposed to compliment Tigers outfielder Dylan Crews, who started last season as the projected top pick.
Then Skenes poured everything into pitching. Before long, he had surpassed Crews in scouts’ eyes (they ended up going 1 and 2). Through the entire season, Skenes struck out 209 batters and only walked 20. After games, Skenes would walk back into the dugout frustrated; his slider was good enough to get college batters out, but he knew it wouldn’t work against Big Leaguers. He and LSU’s pitching coach, Wes Johnson, would have frequent check-ins throughout the season. During one, Skenes said, “I don't mean this to be arrogant. I think the only way I get beat is when I beat myself.”
"What we're seeing, more than anything, is a remarkable desire to be very honest with information, very honest with feedback and very fast to adjust," Pirates general manager Ben Cherington told ESPN. "I hate making comps. This is not a great comp because it's not the same type of player. But I've told people I believe Mookie Betts is the best practice player I've ever been around. Yes, he's talented, but specifically because he's so open to the truth and has such a comfortable relationship with, 'Oh, I'm not doing that well enough? Great. Give it to me so I can do something about it.'
Skenes started as a catcher, and now he has more promise than just about any pitcher of his generation.
Condon started as a quarterback, and now he’s one of the best college sluggers of all time.
They didn’t specialize. They didn’t require fancy coaches or travel tournaments. They put in the work. They asked for feedback. Their biggest edge can’t be bought or trained: it’s their minds.
In baseball, as they say, it’s never over ‘till it’s over. It’s funny how many people have forgotten.
🏀 Between the NBA Playoffs and the NBA’s rights deal negotiations, TNT’s NBA Tonight has been in the news quite a bit recently. Take a moment for this sweet Twitter thread about host Ernie Johnson and an unexpected act of kindness—or two. Just try not to smile afterwards.
🧢 One pitcher who entered the league with as much hype as Paul Skenes? The Dodgers Clayton Kershaw. This week, longtime baseball scribe Andy McCullough’s book The Last of His Kind was released. It’s a look at Kershaw and what has fueled his career to this point. As one friend said to me after I recommended it to him, “Easiest Father’s Day gift ever.” Check it out.
🏃♀️ 26.2 is the new tattoo. Axios investigates why so many young people are running marathons.
🗣️ Stephen A. Smith sat down with the Washington Post’s media reporter Ben Strauss to do what he does better than anybody else: talk about nearly everything. We’re big fans of Stephen A. here. Such big fans, in fact, that…well, stay tuned.
🤿 Here’s a lovely essay by Sally Montgomery, an anthropologist, who, “takes us on a journey ‘down the line’ to explore what freediving can teach us about ourselves and kinship with the sea.” If you’re interested in freediving, you can check out an episode of the OG Religion of Sports series, Rise.
