Tarik Skubal Is the Winter's Biggest Prize, and Everybody Knows It

Every winter has one name that bends the whole market around it, and this winter it is not close. Tarik Skubal, the two-time Cy Young Award winner the Los Angeles Dodgers pried out of Detroit at the trade deadline, is a free agent. He is the best pitcher on the market by a distance, he is in his prime, and — this is the detail that should make every big-market front office sit up — signing him costs nothing but money.

Because Skubal changed teams in the middle of the season, he was not eligible for a qualifying offer. There is no draft pick attached to him, no compensation math, no reason for a team to talk itself out of bidding. His agent, Scott Boras, saw the shape of this back in the summer. Boras said it plainly after the trade, in comments reported by the California Post: "It's great for both the Dodgers and for Tarik that they both get to know one another quite well and determine more about what the future may hold for them." Read that again. The rental was an audition, and both sides knew it.

The suitors are exactly who you think

ESPN's Jeff Passan reports that the New York Mets will compete with the Dodgers for the highest offer, and that the Chicago Cubs want Skubal badly — while doubting they can stay in the room once the numbers get where they are going, well past $300 million and potentially into the $400 million range. ESPN's Kiley McDaniel counts as many as seven teams expected to make a real run. And Gonzalez, who covered Skubal's stint in Los Angeles up close, offered the read that matters most. Gonzalez wrote: "My sense is Skubal would love to return to the Dodgers. He truly seemed to relish his 2½ months in Los Angeles."

The Mets are not a courtesy mention. They have the money, they have the need for a signature ace at the front of the rotation, and they have an owner who has never enjoyed losing an auction. The Cubs are the fascinating middle case — genuine desire, real resources, and an open question about whether desire survives contact with a $400 million winter. The Padres have been floated as a sleeper. But the structure of this race was set the day Detroit made the trade: Los Angeles got the head start, and head starts matter when a player has already lived in the clubhouse and liked it.

So what does the number look like?

USA Today's Bob Nightengale put a floor under it this week, speaking on Foul Territory. Nightengale said: "They're not going to go under 325. We'll see if it hits 400." Other projections reported this week run higher still, with some insiders putting the final number close to half a billion dollars. Even the conservative end of that range resets the market for pitchers. And Skubal, by all reporting, is in no particular hurry to sign — which is another way of saying the bidding has room to climb.

The clock behind the auction

One force pushes against patience: December 1. That is when the collective bargaining agreement expires, a lockout is expected, and nobody can say with certainty what the sport's economics will look like on the other side of it. Players want their money locked in before the door closes; teams want their ace in the building before a winter of labor fog. That tension — Skubal's camp in no hurry, everybody else glancing at the calendar — is the real story of the next three weeks.

The Dodgers have lived the other version of this film before: trade for the superstar rental, watch him walk in December. It is the risk they accepted in July, and the reason they will not be outbid quietly. Somebody is going to hand a pitcher a contract that leads every sports show in America. The only questions left are who, and whether it happens before the lockout turns the lights out on the winter.

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