There’s a very specific subgenre of internet content where a man’s body becomes contested cultural terrain, and it’s usually reserved for people who signed up for the appraisal: pop stars unveiling a comeback single, actors promoting a summer blockbuster, guys who understand their delts are part of the pitch. I did not expect that subgenre to swallow a 24-year-old starting pitcher on a beach vacation with his girlfriend, mostly because Paul Skenes wasn’t selling anything. He was on vacation.
The photos came from a Key Biscayne trip with Livvy Dunne, published in mid-August, and showed exactly what you’d expect a guy on a beach vacation to look like: off-duty, standing next to his girlfriend, doing nothing more interesting than existing near water. Within about a day, a meaningful chunk of the response wasn’t really about the vacation. It was about his body, and what his body supposedly meant for his season. One widely shared take, as Yahoo Sports reported, put it about as bluntly as this genre gets: “Skenes is simply not in shape for a pro athlete. In fact, it is not even close.” A companion argument dressed the same complaint up as sports science, claiming the extra weight “could definitely be affecting his stamina, and in turn his velocity and ability to pitch in the deeper innings.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Db9ObHBAdoW/
That’s the part worth sitting with before anything else. The criticism converted instantly into body commentary the moment there was a photo of him out of uniform, and it did so with a speed and volume that performance criticism alone almost never generates on its own. Nobody built a viral thread out of his last four starts until there was a beach photo to hang it on. The stat line had existed for weeks. What actually got people typing was the shirt being off.
Which isn’t to say the “he should be in the cage working on his slider” crowd is inventing a problem. Skenes is having a genuinely rough year by his own standard: a career-worst record and ERA after a Cy Young-winning 2025, and he hasn’t gone past 5.1 innings in any of his last four outings, including a five-inning start against the Marlins with diminished fastball velocity. ClutchPoints reported that “multiple people” around the game described him as looking heavier and less athletic this season, tying it to a delivery that’s lost some zip. The broader trend backs that up loosely — his velocity and spin rate have been quietly declining since April, a real pitching problem that predates any beach trip by months. The Pittsburgh Pirates have a legitimately underperforming ace on their hands, and that’s a defensible thing for a baseball reporter to write about.
But “dad bod” isn’t a scouting report. A scouting report says his fastball is playing down and his release point has drifted. “Dad bod” is a body-shape verdict handed out by strangers who watched a man stand on sand for four seconds. Those are two different sentences wearing the same jersey, and the tell is how fast the second one showed up relative to the first. It’s the framing that stuck, too — not “conditioning concern,” not “workload management,” just dad bod, repeated until it became shorthand for the whole slump.
Barstool Baseball and Barstool Sports both ran with the dad bod framing that same week, which is usually a decent proxy for how far a storyline has traveled beyond the people who actually watch Pirates games.
https://twitter.com/StoolBaseball/status/2088006660396622154
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db_rh_KTY2X/
Here’s the piece that makes this a different, uglier discourse than “is this guy pitching well”: Livvy Dunne was in the frame. She’s a former LSU gymnast and full-time content creator who is already one of the most photographed and most-picked-apart women in sports-adjacent media, where every update to her timeline gets treated as content, dissected for weight, outfit, and proximity to whoever she’s standing next to. Put her next to a struggling starting pitcher on his day off, and the whole moment stops reading as a rest day and starts reading like a lifestyle post, something the audience feels entitled to grade instead of just watching. A guy alone at the beach doesn’t generate this reaction. A guy at the beach with a famous, heavily scrutinized girlfriend does, and that gap tells you where the actual energy is coming from.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s really about conditioning, either, even though conditioning is the language everyone reached for because it’s the only vocabulary sports media treats as legitimate. It’s harder to say “I think athletes with public relationships owe us a certain visible restraint on their day off” out loud, so it gets translated into velocity talk instead. Skenes isn’t the first guy this has happened to. Athletes’ bodies becoming the story instead of their play is its own recurring genre at this point, one that seems to activate hardest whenever there’s a woman photographed nearby to make the moment feel like lifestyle content instead of labor.
What I keep coming back to is that the baseball complaint and the body complaint arrived at the same volume, on the same day, from what looks like two different audiences wearing one jersey. I’m not sure those two audiences would describe themselves as different from each other. I’m not sure they’d want to.
