Anyone with eyeballs could tell you that Paul Skenes is among the best in college baseball. But just how good is he?
Leave that to former LSU coach Paul Mainieri, who caught up with Bobby Hebert and Mike Detillier on SportsTalk this week.
"It’ll probably blow you away when I make this comment, but he’s probably the best college pitcher I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I have watched college baseball my entire life," Mainieri said. "Who throws 100 mph consistently with a wipeout slider and has that kind of natural athletic ability?"
Listen to the full interview with Paul Mainieri in the player above? Can't see the embed? Click here.
High praise, considering Mainieri is a legendary coach in his own right and has tutored the likes of Alex Lange, Aaron Nola and Kevin Gausman, all of whom were exceptional in college and are currently on MLB clubs.
Skenes has paced the top-ranked Tigers all season, though a series loss at Auburn has dropped them behind Wake Forest in the rankings for the first time in 2023. To his credit, the lone victory against Auburn came on the back of 15-strikeout performance over 7.1 innings in a win over Auburn. It was a career high for Skenes and the first time it had been done by an LSU pitcher since Tyler Jones in 2011. It was the first 15-strikeout outing in an SEC game by an LSU pitcher since Anthony Ranaudo -- also against Auburn -- in 2009.
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Skenes leads college baseball in strikeouts with 139. He's also No. 1 in the SEC in ERA (1.71), inning pitched (72.2) and opponent batting average. He's 9-1 on the season, with his lone coming when he went 7 innings allowing 1 earned run vs Arkansas, but with LSU losing 9-3. He's earned a national player of the week credit six times over the course of the season from various publications.
"So with all due respect to all the great ones I’ve had … this kid, he’s on another level," continued Mainieri, who also added he expects Skenes and teammate Dylan Crews to go 1 and 2 in the upcoming MLB draft.
LSU will look to get back on track with a weekend series against Mississippi State this weekend, then the SEC finale series against Georgia the following weekend.
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MORE FROM PAUL MAINIERI
THOUGHTS ON DYLAN CREWS
“Of course I know Dylan Crews well because we recruited him and coached him for a year. So I knew this young man was going to be really special. His unfortunate summer before his senior year and then having the pandemic cut short his senior year was a benefit to LSU, because I don’t know if he would’ve gone in the first round out of high school," Mainieri said.
"They only had a five-round draft. And if he wasn’t going to go in the first round, most teams were focusing in on college players because they were only getting pick five players. And that worked out for our benefit, that he came to school. And when he decided to pull himself out of the draft, I just knew he was going to be a special player in LSU baseball history. So everything that he’s done has not surprised me one iota. He’s right up there with the best players I ever had the opportunity to coach.”
ON APPROACH TO SEC TOURNAMENT
“I’ve always felt more pressure, our team always felt more pressure, during the 56-game regular season, because that’s where you set the stage for what kind of team you’re going to have in the postseason, where you’re going to be seeded, are you going to be a national seed or a regional host, are you going to even get a bid? And if you do, where are you going to have to go, can you play at home or whatever. The SEC Tournament, most years we knew we were going to be in the NCAA Tournament. Most years we knew we were going to host. Many years we knew we were going to be a national seed. … So the SEC Tournament was fun, because the pressure wasn’t on you very often where if you lose, your season’s over," Mainieri said.
"So I took it as a time to just get our guys prepared for the NCAA Tournament. And I tried to get them to understand that if they played loose and confident and really just tried to have a lot of fun out there and enjoy the game, the pressure was off. We’ve already got through the 56-game schedule. We’ve established ourselves. Now the fun begins in the postseason. This is the really fun, exciting time. And I tried to get our guys in that mindset that if they play loose and they play confident and they really get after it … and then we carried that into the NCAA Tournament. You can’t play baseball uptight. You’ve got to be able to play relaxed. Focused, and hustling and all those things. But you’ve got to play relaxed and confident if you want to be successful in the big games.”
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