Right now, it’s a bit tricky to forecast what kind of decisions the Detroit Tigers will make this offseason. Everything depends in one way or another what they decide to do with ace Tarik Skubal as we near his final offseason before free agency. So before we start tackling the state of the rest of the roster and the possibilities for signings or trades to improve the club this winter, we have to begin right here with the key player on the team. In the end though, I don’t think things are as complicated
as the online chatter might lead one to believe.
This is your classic game of trade, hold, or extend. Scott Harris has been pretty loathe to make any significant moves or take any scaled up risks since he took over as president of baseball operations, so you have to take the possibility of just playing things out as they stand pretty seriously. I’d argue that’s far and away the likeliest outcome this offseason in regards to Skubal.
There is a lot of vested interest in the media in talking up Skubal trade scenarios as a topic headed into the offseason. So don’t be too swayed by the punditry around the game. If the Tigers are actively shopping him this winter, we’ll know within a matter of weeks.
Extending Tarik Skubal
Personally, I think this ship has long since sailed. Currently, Skubal is angling toward a contract of $360M-400M or more when he reaches free agency after the 2026 season. With only one year to wait, and set to make roughly $18M this year in his final arbitration eligible season according to MLB Trade Rumors, he’s just not going to accept something like eight years, $280M at an annual rate of $35M a year. If the Tigers want to keep him long term, Chris Ilitch is going to have to step in as chairman of the ownership group and commit to a massive offer in the neighborhood of $350M to start any serious conversation on the matter.
Scott Boras takes most of his biggest clients to free agency as a matter of course, and no one knows better how to protect his player from the possibility that an injury derails the plan. Skubal is no doubt well insured for the case of an injury. And, there’s only one year left to free agency. That is not really the time for a long-term extension. When you’re buying out 2-3 arbitration years, you’re guaranteeing the player money he wouldn’t otherwise have made in those years. At this point, that minor leverage has mostly evaporated. Probably, Boras and Skubal were dead set on free agency all along, and there was never really a viable path to a long-term extension unless the Tigers paid in full with a massive deal last year.
If they were really going to get something done, the Tigers should have made a really aggressive extension offer after the 2023 season, when it was clear already that Skubal was pitching as well or better than anyone in the game. That’s the time to try and make it happen. You have to be willing to be early and take some risk, because you’re asking the player to take some risk of losing out on a truly maxed out contract. As a sidebar, consider that perspective in the case of Riley Greene this offseason in regards to extension talks.
Others might feel that the Tigers were right to wait until a full season of tier 1 dominance over the league and should have just offered a massive deal last offseason, which they clearly did not do. Others would say no single player could ever be worth this to a mid-to-small market team in particular, and that’s a reasonable perspective as well. In either case, the possibility that Skubal was always going to free agency is pretty plausible, so perhaps none of this extension business ever mattered at all.
There’s a pretty good reason to think the Tigers were never serious about an extension either. It was reported recently by Jon Heyman of the New York Post that the Tigers offered Skubal something close to $100M over four years last offseason. Evan Petzold has confirmed that report in the Detroit Free Press, and that deal was immediately scoffed at as a non-starter by Boras when news of an offer emerged last offseason. Understandably so.
That report, assuming the details are at least somewhat close to accurate, says that the Tigers were never serious about this in the slightest. It’s not impossible that Boras simply floated that number to the press and it never really happened that way, but in that case the Tigers needed to dispute the report, even if they can’t get into any specifics due to a pretty standard team policy of not talking about numbers until a deal is done.
If Scott Harris thought Skubal was going to give up the chance at $350-400M and sell out two of his free agent years for much less than market rate, just to make a little more in his final two arbitration years, well he’s out of his gourd. That isn’t me being harsh either, there’s really no other reasonable way to characterize a lowball offer like four years, $100M or less. If they really thought that might start talks and then they’d negotiate up a little from there, that is a very bad look for the front office.
I don’t believe that Scott Harris is entirely incompetent, so I continue to think that this was just a PR offer, made solely for the purpose of saying that they made some kind of an attempt at an extension. They can’t possibly have thought they would land Skubal for a little more than half the deal Garret Crochet signed later last offseason. Perhaps they didn’t expect Boras to actually release the numbers and embarrass them, but that’s its own brand of naivete.
Either way, the point is the same. The Tigers were not serious about extending Tarik Skubal, and so they absolutely are not going to extend him now for the $325M+ it would cost to even get a seat at the table in negotiations. Unless ownership suddenly takes a hand in this one, it isn’t happening.
So it isn’t happening.
Keeping Skubal for 2026
So extending him or trading him are the two obvious decisions, but to quote Neil Peart of the legendary rock bank, RUSH, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. There is a pretty good argument for simply keeping Tarik Skubal for the 2026 season, knowing that he’s gone to far more lucrative pastures at season’s end.
The “trade him” crowd often characterizes this as getting “nothing” from Tarik Skubal. That’s pretty far from the truth. If you keep Tarik Skubal this season, well you have Tarik Skubal this season, you see…
The Tigers have made back-to-back postseason appearances and won two Wild Card series. A decent chunk of that is based on Skubal’s presence alone. With an average starting pitcher in his place, they’re an 81-84 win team, rather than an 85-88 win team. That’s usually the difference between going home at end of September or playing in the postseason. It’s also the difference between your ownership group making good money or really good money by baseball standards.
Having Tarik Skubal for one year is worth an awful lot to the Detroit Tigers. As a starting point, to make it worth the Tigers while to bother trading him now, a team has to cover them for 6-7 WAR worth of pitching value, which converts to $60-70M in WAR terms, as well as revenue from being a contender and then a postseason contestant next season. The Tigers made about $4M extra from the postseason revenue pool last year for losing in the ALDS. But there’s merchandise and there is also the extra sales associated with being a contender, boosting the amount of season ticket holders and their cost, as well as single game ticket buyers. Reaction in terms of ticket sales will not be great if the Tigers trade Skubal away this offseason. These aren’t nearly as important a factor as Skubal’s value on the field, but there is an added value built into having the league’s most dominant pitcher on your team.
The point is, a year of Tarik Skubal is worth quite a bit even if he walks at season’s end. The compensation pick they would receive from extending him the qualifying offer is another fairly valuable piece of the puzzle. The Tigers drafted Kevin McGonigle with a competitive balance pick A selection in 2023. The compensation pick would be of a similar value.
All this is just to establish that a team handing over two 50 future value (FV) picks in the second half of the top 100 prospects league wide isn’t likely to get it done. Someone is going to hand over a true blue chip prospect or young player already in the league just as a starting point. The Tigers can still get a lot in July, so they have no reason to do anything but hold out for a pretty overwhelming offer right now.
You can quibble with all my vague calculations here, but there is a pretty good case that unless a team blows them away with an offer of an elite prospect and more, or a good major league player with plenty of team control and a nice, but not elite, prospect package, the Tigers will simply keep Skubal and see how it goes. They got a back of the top 100 lists level prospect in Thayron Liranzo, plus a decent part-time shortstop prospect in Trey Sweeney, for two months of Jack Flaherty at the 2024 trade deadline. Even in late July of the upcoming season, Skubal will be worth more than that assuming he continues to look like one of the 2-3 elite caliber starting pitchers in the league.
So, to sway them from just doing nothing with him and seeing how the first half of the season goes, a team is going to really have to go over the top with a trade offer. Still, the Tigers keeping Skubal only really makes sense if the they make a push to add some more talent around him beyond the prospects who could break through.
Trading Tarik Skubal
The reason I continue to think the Tigers will just roll with Skubal and see how it goes, is simply that it’s very hard to find a partner for this level of deal. Teams willing to make a serious offer for Skubal will not be planning on giving up a huge prospect package for one year. They’ll be teams well heeled enough to ensure that they can meet his demands for a long-term contract.
That eliminates most of the teams in the league right from the start.
A team wanting to bid on Skubal in trade is going to have to have a pretty stacked farm system with at least one truly high end prospect. Your 50 and 55 future value types guys are fine, but they aren’t going to be enough to be the center piece of a potential Skubal trade. It’s got to be a true blue-chipper not far from the major leagues. Or, they have to have a young major leaguer who is highly talented and with plenty of inexpensive team control remaining as the center piece, and then add a good prospect as well.
That narrows things further.
Finally, I suspect that such a team is going to have to be a bit desperate. There’s only one year left until Skubal is a free agent. Say the Los Angeles Dodgers end up taking down the Blue Jays and winning their second straight World Series title. Are they going to be wildly motivated to trade for Skubal when they could simply try to win again with the monster roster they already have, keep the Josue De Paula’s and Zyhir Hope’s of the world (their top prospects), and simply come calling in November 2026 with the biggest offer, giving up nothing but cash money to land Skubal? Unlikely.
So, the list of possible trade partners who fit all these criteria comes down to the New York Mets. Maybe a truly crazed Dave Dombrowski offers Andrew Painter and Aidan Miller to get in the ballpark, but it’s doubtful they actually have the financial firepower to lock up Skubal quickly with a massive extension offer. It’s even more doubtful that Skubal would be too keen on signing with a team whose long-term prospects for winning a World Series don’t look too good.. The New York Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays don’t really have the prospects to make this happen. The Rangers and the Red Sox would be well outside of their usual comfort zones doing something like this, although each could potentially put together an interesting package of young talent.
Really I think the only teams even feasible for something like this is the Mets.
If the Mets offered something like budding young ace Nolan McLean with a solid prospect package behind him, they would at least be heard out by the Tigers. Maybe Jonah Tong and another of their top prospects could center a deal too. It all depends on how interested the Tigers even are in a trade. They should be holding out for an awful lot, certainly. That’s more complicated when there isn’t likely to be a widespread bidding war for Skubal’s services, and why I think the Tigers will run it back, add some help, promote Kevin McGonigle, and see what comes in the first half of the 2026 season.
Still, the Mets fit, because they signed Juan Soto and missed the playoffs. They are the most ravenous and desperate big spender in the league. Francisco Lindor isn’t getting any younger, and owner Steve Cohen isn’t getting any poorer either. They want a World Series title there badly, and maybe, just maybe they come calling with a truly massive package that the Tigers can’t refuse.
Final thoughts
Hopefully, I’ve illustrated here how slim the chances of a trade for Skubal really are. Most of the elite prospects in the game are held by teams that don’t really have the ability to extend Skubal, or at least are too far from contention to consider something like this. The top contenders and big spenders will be hard pressed to put together an offer that is wildly better than the Tigers might expect to receive at the trade deadline for Skubal if the 2026 season isn’t going well.
Most likely the Tigers will hold onto him and hope to make a deep run in the postseason in 2026, knowing that they can pivot and still extract a lot of trade value from him at the trade deadline if the first half goes badly. If the Tigers do trade Skubal, that news will be greeted by many as though a second teardown is underway, no matter who they get back in return. The front office and ownership aren’t going to want that fallout unless the offer is just too good to refuse. An interested team will have to go very hard with an over the top offer of young talent to bring the Tigers to the table.
Maybe such an offer will emerge, but for now, the Tigers should focus on getting the roster in shape to actually push further and try to win a World Series while they still have the league’s ace of aces leading the way. One more season of Tarik Skubal is worth an enormous amount to the Detroit Tigers, but if they’re going to keep him then they need to make it count and not just rely on Kevin McGonigle and another couple of one-year deals for pitching depth to get them closer to a World Series appearance. For now, we’ll proceed with our offseason preview coverage with the assumption that Skubal will be starting for the Tigers on Opening Day.
