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 then an arbitrator looks at the player’s accomplishments and decides which number to use for the season.
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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 offered $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 would be the largest in arbitration history, besting Juan Soto’s $31 million with the New York Yankees in 2024.
There’s no telling who will win. 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, using past players with similar stats, and normally value more old-school numbers than what you’d find on a Baseball Savant page. Teams and players often avoid these battles because of the awkwardness of arguing why a guy deserves less money in front of said guy.
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If we look at pitchers only, here are some recent big names and what they got in their final years of arbitration, which Skubal is entering. You be the judge on whether he should get more than they did:
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Framber Valdez (2025): $18 million
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Dylan Cease (2025): $13.75 million
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Corbin Burnes (2024): $15.6 million
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Max Fried (2024): $15 million
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Julio Urías (2023): $14.25 million
Notably, all of those numbers were reached via agreement, not arb hearing.
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Whichever side wins the Tigers’ hearing, Skubal will be receiving the largest arbitration salary for a pitcher in MLB history.
That, of course, makes sense, because no recent MLB pitcher has had Skubal’s résumé while still 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. Besides Skubal, six pitchers have won multiple Cy Youngs in the past 15 years — Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Corey Kluber, Jacob deGrom and Blake Snell — and none of them entered arbitration after the second trophy.
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That’s because teams usually do whatever they can to keep 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 exhibit a similar chasm between the two sides underscores how unlikely a deal appears to be.
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