Projecting Tarik Skubal's Contract Using Free-Agent Pitcher Precedents

MLB appears ready to lock out the players on December 1 when their current collective bargaining agreement expires. While that battle will be as bitter as it is fierce, it won’t stop a handful of teams from attempting to splash an exorbitant amount of cash to land Tarik Skubal before the clock strikes midnight on the old CBA. 

Skubal is of such quality that future salary caps and floors are trivial. He is the best pitcher on the planet, and for players of that class, you do what it takes to acquire them and figure everything else out after. Extracting every last bit of value out of pre-arbitration players wins in the regular season, but stars win the World Series. It’s how the Dodgers went back-to-back, the Rangers won their first title in franchise history, and it’s no coincidence that it took Jacob Misorowski developing into a capital-A Ace for the Brewers to get over the hump. 

Skubal is in his own class among pitchers. Since 2024, he has led all pitchers in fWAR with 18.0, collected two Cy Youngs, led baseball in pitching fWAR in 2024 and 2025, and has a 2.13 ERA in 50.2 postseason innings. 

Needless to say, to rack up all of those accolades, you need to blend elite stuff, command, and durability, which he has. He has thrown the fourth most innings (546.0), has the fourth-highest strikeout rate (30.9%), and the second-lowest walk rate (4.5%) among qualified pitchers since 2024. For all intents and purposes, Skubal is the perfect pitcher.

Are there some nits to pick? Sure, if you’re insane. His velocity was down a tad this season due to a midseason procedure to remove loose bodies from his elbow. Despite that, all of his metrics remained elite and in line with his two Cy Young seasons. He is heading into his age-30 season, which means you’re signing him to be a Cy Young frontrunner for the next few seasons, an excellent pitcher for the few after, and if his arm remains intact, probably a hell of a starter deep into his 30s. Pitchers experience age-related decline, but it’s less pronounced than position players as long as they don’t break. 

With that out of the way, the question isn’t if Skubal will land the richest contract ever for a pitcher, but rather how much it will shatter the current paradigm. At the moment, the largest deal for a pitcher is Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s 12-year, $325 million deal with the Dodgers, but that’s not really a great comp. Yamamoto came stateside as a 25-year-old after dominating the NPB, and there hasn’t been an elite starting pitcher who has hit free agency that young in my or possibly anyone’s lifetime. In reality, the best comp is the nine-year, $324 million deal Garrett Cole signed with the Yankees in 2020 at the age of 29, so let’s start there. 

When Cole hit the market ahead of the 2020 season, he had established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball, but he could hardly lay claim to the title of best. From 2017 to 2019, he racked up 16.8 fWAR, but that only ranked fifth over that span. Now, in 2019, his walk year, he did pace the league with 7.5 fWAR, a mark Skubal has never hit, but that has more to do with starting pitcher usage than actual ability. In Cole’s three-year run up to free agency, he posted adjusted FIPs (100 is league average, lower is better) of 95, 66, and 58, while Skubal’s three-year audition saw him produce adjusted FIPs of 60, 57, and 59. Functionally, Skubal has pitched at peak Cole-level for three consecutive seasons, and he ripped off a 47 adjusted FIP over 15 starts in 2023. The fWAR may be close, but the sheer duration of dominance dramatically favors Skubal. 

Trying to use current pitcher contracts when projecting Skubal’s upcoming deal would be foolhardy. He has been so good, he doesn’t have any peers, and there haven’t been any recent deals– save for Yamamoto’s– that have pushed the envelope since Cole’s. Instead of looking at current deals, the best route for analysis is to study the record breakers themselves. 

Removing Yamamoto from the equation for previously discussed reasons, the history of record-breaking pitcher contracts, as far as total value is concerned, goes as follows. There is generally a condensed rush where pitchers ever so slightly nudge the bar up, followed by long periods of inactivity, before a massive market-altering move. Since the advent of free agency in 1976 (aka, 50 years), there have only been 19 largest pitcher contracts, and that includes Catfish Hunter’s five-year, $3.2 million deal from 1974. 

Since the most recent contract on this list came in 2019, Skubal’s new deal should see a significant bump from what Cole got. On average, record-setting deals that had a five-year or more gap between them saw an increase of 48.89% in total money and a 52.2% bump in average annual value. This is an incredibly small sample from an incredibly small sample, but if it were to hold, Skubal would land either a $481.1 million deal or a $54.8 million average annual value. 

Now, Greg Maddux more than doubling his record-setting contract from 1992 in 1997 tilted those figures up, but even if you remove him from the equation, Skubal would still project to land a $444.3 million deal or $50.9 million AAV, which does sound reasonable. 

At this point, there is little doubt in my mind that Skubal will become the first $400 million arm, and I think he makes a run at $450 million. When it’s all said and done, I think the winning bid will come in at ten years, $432.5 million. That sounds like a massive amount of money, but when the market for top-tier pitching has been static for this long, it usually takes an earthquake to break it.