34,406 people in Detroit stood up twice on Wednesday for a guy their own team spent February telling an arbitration panel was overpaid. If you want to know why the Tigers are trading Tarik Skubal, and it sure looks like they are, stop looking at the standings. Look at February.
Why the Tigers are trading Tarik Skubal was decided before Opening Day
Skubal filed for 32 million dollars. The Tigers filed at 19. That’s a 13 million dollar gap, and no team and player in the history of salary arbitration had ever walked into a room that far apart. There’s no splitting it either. The panel picks one number.
So they sat down and argued, out loud, in a room, that the back to back reigning Cy Young winner was worth 19.
And while they were still sitting there waiting on the verdict, that same night, they gave Framber Valdez 115 million dollars over three years. Jeff Passan had it hours after the hearing ended. 38.3 a year, the biggest annual salary anybody has ever handed a left handed pitcher, for a guy who ran a 3.66 in Houston last season.
Then they lost the hearing.
So they paid both. They paid the record 32 to the guy they said wasn’t worth it and 115 to the guy they signed while pretending they couldn’t afford him.
Nobody in Detroit is broke, they picked
This is where somebody tells me small market, and no. That payroll is a franchise record. Cot’s has it around 206 million, RosterResource had it closer to 217, and either way Detroit is bumping up against the luxury tax line for the first time basically ever. They spent this winter. They spent a LOT this winter.
They just didn’t spend it on him.
And it isn’t only the hearing. Skubal told Bob Nightengale back in March that the Tigers never put a long term offer in front of him. His words were there is no offer, and there won’t be one until the end of the season, and that’s fine, it’s their decision.
That’s a guy who already knows how this ends.
Detroit ran this exact play before and it took six months
That arbitration record Skubal broke in February? It belonged to David Price. Detroit gave him 19.75 million in January of 2015, the biggest one year deal any arbitration player had ever gotten.
They traded him July 30th of that same year.
Six months. Set the record in January, gone by the end of July, and he went off and got 217 million from Boston that winter. Skubal broke that record in February. The deadline is Monday at 6.
Same franchise, same record, same week of the same month, eleven years later.
And the man is somehow better than the numbers you know
He punched out the first hitter he saw on Wednesday for career strikeout 1,000. Took him 857 innings. Fastest anybody has ever gotten there in a Tigers uniform, and he beat Max Scherzer’s franchise mark by 87 innings. It took him 153 games, and per ESPN Research the only left hander in the history of baseball who did it in fewer is Randy Johnson at 152.
Across 2024 and 2025 he put up 12.6 wins above replacement. Best in the sport. The next closest pitcher was at 11.1, which isn’t close.
Oh, and he had a loose body cut out of his elbow on May 6th. That surgery normally costs you two to three months. He was back on a mound June 13th. Five weeks.
So he takes a shutout into the seventh on Wednesday, the crowd is standing, he tips the cap, and then he walks off with a 7-0 lead. Baltimore hadn’t scored a run in 15 innings coming into that seventh. Fifteen. The bullpen gave up seven in two innings, and Detroit lost 10-9 in 12.
He said afterward he didn’t even know what the final score was, only that it hurt.
What actually happens Monday
The Tigers are 51-58 with five teams standing between them and the last wild card. That math doesn’t fix itself in four days, which means somebody is calling Scott Harris with a farm system attached.
And whoever gets him is renting the best pitcher alive for two months, then getting in line behind everybody else this winter, because Skubal is a Boras client heading for a number that starts with a 4. Whatever he signs for becomes the floor. Every ace who negotiates after him is going to point at that contract, and that’s the part that reaches your team whether you care about Detroit or not.
Skubal said last week that winning for the city that drafted him has always been the goal and that it will never change unless he’s told he’s on a different team.
