The Los Angeles Dodgers' season ended abruptly Thursday night and in so doing effectively kickstarted the most scrutinized free agency for a starting pitcher since Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s arrival three years ago. Tarik Skubal, like all free-agents-to-be, will not officially be a free agent until five days after the World Series ends. But he will not pitch another inning before he signs. His resume is written. The market will do the rest.
Exactly how the Mets will approach, let alone shape that market is not something they have been willing to share yet publicly. President of baseball operations David Stearns went so far at his end-of-season news conference as to dodge a question about the high end of the starting pitching market that he merely inferred (correctly) was referring to Skubal. Publicly, at least, he and his front office have barely provided any tea leaves at which to squint.
But context, history, and conversations throughout the season with Mets officials who could not speak publicly about a player who was not yet a free agent, offer some insight into a potential Skubal pursuit. Despite Stearns' infamous reticence to hand out massive pitching contracts, the Mets seem likely to chase him to some degree – if only because there is no superstar Cohen technically cannot afford and therefore no superstar he seems unwilling to pursue. And unlike Kyle Tucker or evenBo Bichette, when the Mets pursued the former and signed the latter, Skubal directly addresses his team’s greatest need.
At present, the situation is loaded with variables about which the available information is incomplete. The first of those variables is Skubal, who was unwilling to speak about his future immediately after the Dodgers’ loss in Game 4 of the NLCS Thursday night. He offered no hints. He was focused on the disappointment.
"Today sucks, you know," he told reporters, including the California Post. "And that's kind of where my head's at."
Skubal, 29, has always spoken publicly like someone who will prioritize winning in his next destination. He is represented by Scott Boras (more on that later), who also represents Juan Soto. People familiar with Soto’s thinking say he still firmly believes Cohen wants to win and will do what it takes to transform the Mets into the annual World Series contender he promised. If Skubal checks in which his fellow Boras client, there is no reason to believe he would not hear a spirited pitch for Queens.
And if Skubal, who is currently on the Major League Baseball Players Association’s Executive Subcommittee, wants to prioritize setting a new bar for starting pitching contracts… well, Cohen and the Mets are capable of doing that, too. While Cohen has spoken publicly about how financially inefficient free agency can be, and while some have speculated that he might wish to pull back on payroll after two missed postseasons, Stearns was adamant in recent months that he is operating with no new budgetary restrictions and expects to able to make the moves he wants. Therein lies another variable.
Signing Skubal to the kind of massive, long-term contract a two-time Cy Young Award winner in his prime will expect goes against all of Stearns' team-building instincts. The only time Stearns pursued a long-term deal for a free agent starting pitcher, it was for the much younger Yamamoto, who was 25 when he signed and therefore fit the Mets' youth-driven model for pitchers more comfortably.
Skubal will be 30 next season and underwent an elbow procedure this year. One could almost plan for him to lose one of the next few years to Tommy John surgery (which would be his second). All great starters do at some point. But Stearns does not shy away from those deals as much because of potential injury as because of what happens later in the deals, when aging saps performance but the financial commitment is still commensurate with a premium player.
It would be worth pointing out here that Stearns has signed several other players to contracts that turned out to be financially inefficient and did not yield the long-term ace this team has needed for half a decade, and also that Cohen has pushed Stearns beyond his comfort zone for several long-term position player deals the former Milwaukee head of baseball operations would never have suggested himself. Soto's deal, for example, is astronomical. The average annual value of Bichette’s deal would qualify as an overpay in any team’s model – at least in terms of the quantifiable aspects of his impact.
Those deals offer an important lesson: Even if Stearns is reluctant to sign a player – or, more accurately, if it does not fit his team-building tenets – Cohen’s opinion matters. No one knows that better than Boras, who will pitch Skubal to Cohen as a big-market necessity. "Want to be like the Dodgers?" the argument will likely go, according to those who know Boras' approach. "Sign the stars while you build out the player development monster to support them."
Still, Cohen says one of truths he has internalized during his first years owning the Mets is how ineffective free agency can be as a team-building method.
"What are the areas to make the team better? Farm system. Trades. Staff. And free agency. Free agency is a negative expected value," Cohen said late this season. "…If you have to fill in holes, you have to fill in holes, too. So you have to be tactical. But every time you dip into free agency, you just know that’s a tough place to be."
But even as he is skeptical of its expected value, he has always seemed to understand he cannot win without using free agency entirely. For example, he has also spoken several times about operating in what he calls reality, particularly as it pertains to signing starting pitchers: If the market suggests the Mets can only sign top-end types by giving long-term deals, they might have to adjust their approach and give a few. Under the current rules of MLB – and who knows what those will be after the upcoming collective bargaining negotiations – signing Skubal is the quickest way for the Mets to jumpstart a rotation built around promising young arms that could use an ace to show them how to win.
Whether Skubal wants to be a mentor, or the pressure that comes with being the Mets' latest highly paid savior, or the scrutiny of pitching in New York after thriving as one of many stars in Los Angeles, is the biggest variable of all. The general consensus among those in the Mets organization and those who deal with Stearns' front office regularly seems to be that if Cohen decides he wants Skubal, the Mets will pay whatever it takes to get him. So trying to predict whether Skubal will be a Met next year, then, might be as simple as whether Skubal wants them.
