Since news emerged last week that the Detroit Tigers and their ace left-hander, Tarik Skubal, were $13 million apart in arbitration numbers, the whole thing has quickly blown up into a proxy for everything
distasteful about the business of sports, and every frustration surrounding the Tigers, specifically. The arbitration battle gets into every aspect of the game, from what players and owners should earn from the fans’ dollars, to the often fragile concept of loyalty between fans, franchises, and players.
The punditry has been downright frothy over all the connected issues, and the arbitration dispute can be spun into support for all sorts of positions that have nothing to do with the simple matter of how much Skubal will get paid this year. Fundamentally this is just an argument over $13 million, a relatively paltry sum in the broader picture of the sport.
On one issue, hopefully there is finally clarity for the Tigers’ fanbase. There was just never any chance the Tigers were going to extend Skubal. The Ilitch family is not providing enough spending power to allow Harris to risk getting stuck with a $300-350 million contract over 10 years for a broken pitcher. As I emphasized all last offseason, if there was a time to offer Skubal an aggressive extension bid, the 2024-2025 offseason was that last chance, but almost certainly it was just never in the cards.
As someone who has covered the Tigers for a decade, and is talking every day with other SB Nation folks who cover the other 29 teams, the lack of a real PR push from either side to gain control of the narrative here has been fairly telling all along. Everyone seems to have known the score for a long time.
The Tigers made no serious offer, and at no point was there any committment from ownership or Harris to “do what it takes” to keep Skubal for the long term. They also never made a face-saving type of move like publicly revealing a $200 million offer and trying to put Skubal and Boras behind the eight ball either. At that point, they could have argued that “hey, at least we tried.” Likewise, there was never anything from the Skubal camp along the lines of, “I want to be a Tiger for life, I recognize that this isn’t a major market and want a contract that allows them to continue to add talent around me.”
In other words, signs of a potential agreement never appeared, and neither side even seemed that interested in playing the PR game too seriously either.
We are of course talking about super agent Scott Boras, representing the preeminent pitcher in baseball, who is also a union representative elected to the players’ executive subcommittee for the MLBPA. Odds are high that since Skubal developed into the best pitcher in baseball in the second half of the 2023 season, they’ve intended to make him the next test case in free agency no matter what the Tigers did. From the players’ side of the MLBPA vs. owners battle this makes all the sense in the world, and with the next CBA negotiation only a year away, there’s more at stake here than just how many millions of dollars Skubal earns. The duo is trying to raise the bar in free agency both for themselves, and in the hope that it sets a higher standard of pay for all players in the end.
At the center of all this is president of baseball operations, Scott Harris, and he’s in a pretty tricky situation.
Harris can’t sign Tarik Skubal long-term, because he clearly doesn’t have the financial push from ownership that a move like that would require. Giving out the largest free agent contract in history to a 30-year-old pitcher with two major arm surgeries behind him and a game that depends pretty heavily on fastball velocity, is just too dangerous without an ownership group willing to eat some of the cost should things go wrong.
Of course, if Harris decides to trade Skubal, which is probably the smart move considering the low odds of winning a World Series for any team in any season, a lot of fans are going to revolt. It will be taken by many as a clear sign the that Tigers are punting on the 2026 season, going back into a rebuild mode, and will never win a championship anytime soon.
Finally, if they play out the season with Skubal and don’t at least reach the World Series, many will be quite frustrated that the Tigers squandered Skubal’s long-term value in trade only to miss the playoffs or at least get no further than they did in 2024-2025. If they struggle badly out of the gate and end up trading him in July, that may feel even worse.
That’s why the president of baseball operations makes the big bucks. The seat is always hot when you’re a chief decision maker in major professional sports. However, reporting today from the Free Press isn’t doing him any favors, either.
Evan Petzold of the Freep reported on Wednesday, that the Tigers initial offer to Skubal, prior to exchanging numbers and going into file and trial mode, was $19.8 million. That’s a nice bit of reporting, as a key question had been whether the Tigers had offered Skubal more than the number they filed at and gotten rebuffed. Turns out they had, but not by much. Once again, this brings up the spector of the $19.75 million they offered David Price way back in 2015, a number that was accepted and avoided an arbitration hearing. Why Harris would imagine that a decade later a $50K increase was reasonable for a better pitcher is anyone’s guess, but the simplest answer is that they preferred to take this to arbitration from the start.
An offer that low forces Skubal and Boras to go to arbitration and frankly it puts all the responsibility for the dispute on Harris. Skubal and Boras had nothing to lose here. Harris meanwhile, is going to look pretty foolish for not offering a more reasonable number, say $23-25 million, should Skubal win his case. If Harris wins? He’s just going to end up paying slightly less than he offered prior to going to arbitration anyway. In that sense, there’s no winning possible on the Tigers’ side, only the risk of shelling out the extra $13 million.
The Tigers are regarded as a “trial and file” club, so presumably there isn’t going to be any further negotiating prior to the arbitration hearing. So while Skubal and Boras may well have always wanted to try and test what they could get in an arbitration hearing, Harris didn’t give them any other option. He’s either going to pay slightly less than what he offered anyway, or he’s going to end up paying $32 million.
Skubal and Boras will be able to base their case on comparable free agents because he’s in his third year of arbitration. On that basis, and because this is Boras vs. Scott Harris, it’s easy to think Harris overplayed his hand and is going to come out of this looking poorly. Either way, Boras and Skubal had nothing to lose in trying. In the end, that $13 million difference probably has little bearing on anything beyond the Tigers’ final payroll this season, because it sure doesn’t seem like the Tigers were planning to spend money on another good free agent this offseason anyway.
Just going off of Roster Resources’ basic 2026 payroll for the Tigers, the Skubal decision will mean that the Tigers have a starting payroll of $177.5 million should he win his case, or $164.5 million should he lose. Either way the payroll will be roughly MLB average, and it’s unlikely they’re doing anything else of a significant nature unless Harris does finally decide to trade Skubal and has to sign another free agent starter to take his place.
It’s fair to suggest that most of this is about appearances. The Tigers may come off looking bad here, but what Skubal ends up making in 2026 really has little relevance as the club has shown no real interest in spending more money to add talent anyway. The issue is still the Tigers’ broader committment, or lack thereof, to actually trying to win a championship versus being satisfied with making some postseason appearances and keeping business brisk in Comerica Park.
The arbitration case itself is now just a proxy to amplify fans opinions about the team, it’s leadership and ownership, and its star player.
The Ilitch family is one of the wealthiest ownership groups in baseball, and it’s reasonable to be frustrated that they’ve been unwilling to risk losing a pretty meager amount of money by their standards to try and complete Mike Ilitch’s dream of winning a World Series. You can still believe that even if you think giving Skubal an enormous long-term deal is a bad idea, as ownership hasn’t shown much interest in taking advantage of his presence to make a push for a title before he departs.
If you feel like Scott Harris is out of his depth here? There’s hay to feed that horse as well.
Feel like players and owners are both too greedy and it’s ruining the compact between the game and the actual fans who ultimately pay the bills? Well this whole story can play into that on either side.
The one who comes out of this looking pretty good, is Tarik Skubal. If $32 million seemed like a crazy ask initially, it certainly looks different based on the Free Press report that the Tigers were never interested in trying to meet him somewhere in the middle. The Tigers reported offer for 2026 was as low as they could possibly go, so there was absolutely nothing to lose by trying to get the $32 million, a number he’s clearly worth by performance if not by arbitration precedent.
However you feel about all this, it isn’t going to be much fun watching this play out in a few weeks. We’ll all be happier when baseball is being played again, and the business of the game recedes into the background for a while.
