After winning a national championship at Louisiana State together in 2023 and then getting drafted No. 1 and No. 2 in that year's Major League Baseball draft, Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews will face each other for the first time tonight at PNC Park when the Pirates at Nationals square off.

Crews, who's played in 43 career games for the Nationals since being called up last season, is hitting eighth for the Nationals today and spoke this afternoon about the opportunity to face Skenes for the first time:

"I'm excited. It's something that we've been looking forward to for a while now," Crews said about the opportunity. "He's a good buddy of mine. We've had some good history with each other. I'm just excited for this day, it's gonna be fun."

When asked, Crews said he hasn't spoken to Skenes since the offseason when they were training together. However, he said they talked about it in the past, but not a lot.

"We're just kind of working hard everyday and we're just really excited for this matchup today. It's gonna be fun," Crews said.

Before being drafted with the first two overall picks in the 2023 MLB Draft, Crews and Skenes were big pieces of the Tigers' national championship run as they defeated Florida in a three-game set. I asked Crews today if he and Skenes ever spoke about possibly facing off one day when they were back at college and he said they were pretty locked in at the time.

"We were so locked in to try and win a national championship at that point, we didn’t have that much time in-between the national championship and getting drafted. I think it was a week or two," Crews said. "After the national championship we just kind of split off and did our own thing. We are here now and definitely enjoying these moments.”