As the United States military’s attacks overseas receive widespread condemnation, some American athletes are helping to shore up support for Trump’s militarism.
After the United States won the gold medal in hockey at the 2026 Winter Olympics, FBI Director Kash Patel was pictured partying with the team and chugging beers in their locker room. Later, most of the team attended ceremonies at the White House and the State of the Union, where many were pictured wearing Trump hats and making pro-Trump statements.
Now, as the United States and Israel attack Iran, Pittsburgh Pirates ace pitcher and 2025 NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes, who attended the Air Force Academy and trained to be an F-16 pilot, has made increasingly militaristic statements. When asked how he felt about representing Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, he made aggressive comments that outraged many.
"We're America, we've got to assert our dominance over everybody else. That's what we do. It's gonna be fun,” Skenes told reporters earlier this week.
Skene's statements about the United States needing to assert its dominance were picked up by outlets like Fox News and went viral among right-wingers. Yesterday, Skenes doubled down on his statements in an interview with The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
“This is the greatest country in the world. That’s what I believe. That’s why I wanted to serve, why I went to the Air Force Academy. And those folks don’t get the recognition they deserve,” Skenes told The Athletic.
The Cy Young winner then made it clear that he saw pitching for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic as a way to support the United States military.
“We’re doing it to represent the men and women that are fighting for us, along with many other things that make this country the greatest country in the world,” Skenes told The Athletic.
The 23-year-old pitcher then claimed that Americans don’t respect the U.S. military enough.
The statements outraged some Pirates fans like Pittsburgh sports author Bob Ross, who has written heavily against “sportswashing,” the practice where right-wing politicians use athletes to help build support for right-wing causes.
“It would be one thing if you were just this 20-something-year-old athlete who really believed in Team America and wanted to kick Japan’s ass at baseball, I get that kind of competitiveness," says Ross. “But to say that and connect it directly to the military in general, and in the context of the United States launching a war against Iran and by proxy, Lebanon and Palestine, I think it's really obnoxious, dangerous, and quite frankly bigoted.”
“It just makes me kind of sick, honestly,” added Ross. “He's standing by his words before that America should dominate the rest of the world, and it's just disgusting, because at the end of the day, this isn't a game, this is people's lives and deaths that we're talking about.”
Skenes wasn’t the only Pittsburgh Pirates player to make statements supporting nations that are bombing Iran this week. Spencer Horwitz, a utility player for the Pittsburgh Pirates, is suiting up for Team Israel and said that, given the current global situation, he is proud to be representing Israel.
“There’s not many Jews in baseball, that’s for sure. It’s like a brotherhood that you don’t really talk about it,” Horwitz told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review this week. “The times we’re in right now are crazy. I’m proud to be where I come from.”
However, Horwitz wasn’t born in Israel, but in the United States, like all the other American Jewish players who were recruited to play for Team Israel.
“For Spencer Horowitz to conflate Jews and Judaism with Zionism in Israel is a dangerous conflation, and that leads to antisemitism, and it leads to misunderstandings of what Jews and Judaism are,” says Ross. “And it suggests that everything that Israel does is somehow Jewish in nature, which is, of course, ridiculous, because Israel is a nation state. It's a genocidal nation state that claims to represent Jews and Judaism.”
In 2022, Russia was banned from competing in the Olympics as a nation, given the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Ross says that Israel should be banned due to the genocide it is undertaking in Palestine.
“Israel is an apartheid state, a genocidal state, a rogue state, and it's really a shame on the organizers of the World Baseball Classic and the Olympics and many other international sporting bodies that they haven't banned Israel in the way that, they were very quick to ban Russia after Russia invaded the Ukraine, or South Africa was banned during apartheid."
Ultimately, Ross says that athletes like Skenes and Horwitz should be called out for making militaristic statements during the World Baseball Classic so that young men, who see these athletes as role models, aren’t attracted to their right-wing causes.
“This combination of imperialism and masculine kind of aggression, it’s very attractive to young men and that’s something that we have to worry about,” says Ross. “Sports are political, and sports are used for political objectives, often used by the powerful.”
