W.P. native training baseball’s future

BY BRANDON DUFFY

During the 2023 Major League Baseball draft held in Seattle Sunday, the Pittsburgh Pirates selected Paul Skenes with the first overall pick.

The 21-year-old right-hander, who is 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 247 pounds, just completed his junior season at Louisiana

State University whose baseball team finished the season with a national championship at the College World Series in Omaha, NE, earlier this year.

Skenes led the Tigers’ rotation all year and into the postseason, amassing a 13-2 win-loss record, 1.69 earned run average and 335 strikeouts through 235 innings pitched.

However, before Skenes first took the mound in Baton Rouge — or the U.S. Air Force Academy where he began his collegiate career — the California native worked at 108 Performance, a baseball and research training center, starting in 2017.

“With Paul, I saw sometime during the first or second year that he was just different,” said Eugene Bleecker, a Williston Park and Roslyn Heights native and owner of 108 Performance, now in Knoxville, TN. “He just did everything he was supposed to do to get the best of his ability.”

Skenes was joined by Tommy

Troy, a 21-year-old shortstop from Stanford University who also trained with Bleecker. Troy was selected by the Arizona Diamondbacks with the 12th overall pick.

Bleecker fell in love with baseball at a young age playing at all levels on Long Island through college, starting in the Williston Park Little League. A Wheatley School graduate, Bleecker spent a decade at the New York Institute of Technology’s baseball academy on top of multiple travel teams before playing in college.

“I had a very good background growing up here in baseball,” Bleecker, who moved to Roslyn

Heights when he was a teenager, said. “I learned to love it at New York Tech.”

Bleecker got his start in coaching when he was splitting his time between training players in California and pursuing a professional contract as a free agent after college.

It’s an endeavor that has crossed Bleecker’s path with Major league players, teams and opening his third facility, two previous ones in California and his current one in Knoxville. Bleecker also hosts a yearly event in the winter called “Bridge the Gap” that

Continued on Page 43