The Detroit Tigers are going to have to take a page out of the Los Angeles Dodgers' book if they want to keep Tarik Skubal in the Motor City for the duration of his MLB career. In addition to resetting everything else about baseball's economy over the last couple of years, the Dodgers have also helped reset the pitching market, handing a 12-year, $324 million deal to Yoshinobu Yamamoto two winters ago.
Yamamoto was significantly younger (25) than Skubal will be when he hits free agency at the end of the 2026 season (30), but the lefty is also a far more established Major League pitcher. He'll no doubt ask for more on the open market — and now we have an idea of just how much more.
Skubal could warrant the first $400 million contract for a pitcher when he’s due for his big extension in a couple years. That’s the price tag ESPN's Jeff Passan said the Tigers should have in mind if they hope to keep him around for the long haul, and it’s one the Tigers should absolutely meet if they want to not just retain Skubal but also remain relevant in the American League.
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Tarik Skubal could become MLB's first $400 million pitcher
This is obviously contingent on whether Skubal continues his meteoric ascent upwards as arguably the very best pitcher in all of baseball. The defending AL Cy Young winner had a destructive 2024 season, claiming the pitching triple crown (leading the league in wins, strikeouts and ERA) in the process.
He anchored an otherwise thin Detroit pitching staff that nevertheless reached the AL Division Series. And he's followed up with one heck of an encore, pitching to a 2.21 ERA to help lead the Tigers to a blistering start in 2025. There’s nothing more he can do to prove he’s worth whatever he asks for.
Though he’ll be 30 years old, for him to demand upwards of $40 million in annual average value shouldn’t be a stretch. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander reached that on multi-year deals in the recent past, as Passan points out, and Gerrit Cole was just under $40 million average per year on his nine-year, $325 million deal with the New York Yankees.
So there is some precedent here, and it's not too much of a stretch to get Skubal where no pitcher has gone before: the $400 million contract milestone. There’s no reason why the Tigers wouldn’t want to give him that. The problem would be if one of baseball's top spenders decides they want to match or even surpass that.
The New York Mets, New York Yankees and the Dodgers themselves could all be in the mix for Skubal when he officially is out from under team control. Don’t be surprised to see a team like the Toronto Blue Jays get in the mix either; knowing they had to pay Vladimir Guerrero Jr., they still threw a lucrative offer at Juan Soto this past winter, to no avail.
The competition will be fierce; while the market for position players on the wrong side of 30 has cooled a bit, the market for pitchers hasn't, as evidenced by contracts for players like Max Fried and Corbin Burnes this past winter. Skubal can justifiably tell himself that he's less than two years away from a record payday, and Detroit will need to go above and beyond to get him to forgo that.