Tarik Skubal wants $32 million. The Tigers only want to give him $19 million.
If Tarik Skubal is playing for another team on Opening Day of 2027, the Detroit Tigers will at least be able to say they made him a record-setting offer. It just won't be a good record.
Thursday saw MLB teams and players submit their filings for salary arbitration, a clerical move that sets up arbitration fights for further into the offseason. A player asks for one salary, his team asks for a different, lower salary and an arbitrator looks at the player's accomplishments and decides which number to use for the season.
It's not often the most thrilling day, but the numbers filed by Skubal and the Tigers were interesting for multiple reasons. Skubal asked for $32 million, while the Tigers had $19 million, according to ESPN's Jeff Passan.
That $13 million gap is reportedly the widest in arbitration history, by a large margin. And if Skubal wins, his $32 million salary will be the largest in arbitration history, besting Juan Soto's $31 million with the New York Yankees in 2024.
There's no telling who wins. It will be up to the arbitrator to decide if Skubal is worth more or less than $25.5 million, the midpoint between the two sides. These decisions are based primarily on precedent, identifying past players with similar stats, and normally use more old-school numbers than what you'd find on a Baseball Savant page. Teams and players usually avoid these battles because of the awkwardness of arguing why a guy deserves less money in front of said guy.
If we look at just pitchers, here are some recent big names and what they got in their final year of arbitration, which Skubal is entering. You be the judge on how much more he should get than them:
Framber Valdez (2025): $18 million
Dylan Cease (2025): $13.75 million
Corbin Burnes (2024): $15.6 million
Max Fried (2024): $15 million
Julio Urias (2023): $14.25 million
Notably, all of those numbers were reached via agreement rather than arb hearing. Whichever side wins, Skubal will be receiving the largest arbitration salary for a pitcher in history.
That, of course, makes sense, because no recent MLB pitcher has had Skubal's résumé while in arbitration. Skubal has been the easy pick for the best pitcher in baseball over the past two years, with two Cy Young Awards and a Triple Crown in 2024. Aside from Skubal, three players have won multiple Cy Youngs in the past 15 years — Blake Snell, Jacob deGrom, Corey Kluber — and none of them entered arbitration after the second trophy.
That's because teams usually do whatever they can to lock down that kind of player, but that effort hasn't been fruitful for the Tigers so far. Skubal is slated to enter free agency after 2026 and he and the Tigers have been reported to be so far apart in negotiations for an extension that a trade could be on the table.
The fact that their arbitration filings have a similar chasm between them underscores how unlikely a deal appears to be.
Category: General Sports
