Paul Skenes Is the Gen Z Superstar Major League Baseball Has Been Looking For

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Somewhere in Fullerton, California, a lanky nine-year-old named Paul Skenes plays catch with his father. Every day, as soon as Dad punches out and Paul finishes his homework, they come here: an elementary school flanked by two baseball fields. One day, the kid picks up a bat and smashes Dad’s fastball over the fence—to the busy street past the outfield. After that, they do their hitting in the batting cages. The same year, Paul puts on a jersey, steps on the mound, and pitches a fastball to another kid. “I hit fifty-one miles an hour,” Skenes remembers now. “And everybody went crazy.”

Twelve years later, in the summer of 2024, Skenes isn’t so lanky anymore. He’s just fricking big. Six-foot-six and 260 pounds. A number-­one-overall draft pick making his MLB debut for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He takes a breath and lets it rip. The gun tells the truth: He’s doubled it. Twice as fast. A goddamn blur. One-oh-two.

Now everybody in the baseball world is going crazy for the kid from Fullerton.

“It was the only thing I ever played,” Skenes says, telling me his origin story from Bradenton, Florida, where he and the rest of the Pirates are in the middle of spring training. The twenty-two-year-old is entering year two with the Bucs as one of the most exciting young athletes in sports, period. Skenes holds just about every accolade a rookie can muster, dates one of America’s preeminent influencers (LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne), gives Gen Z and below a reason to care about America’s pastime again, and pitches like he’s trying to make opposing batters quit the sport. It’s easy to imagine his face on a plaque in Cooperstown one day.

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