The Future of Tarik Skubal

Let’s start this piece off with a bit of fun trivia. In the history of baseball, there have been 10 players with 190+ IP, 30%+ K% and 5%- BB% in a single season.

Pedro Martinez (1999, 2000)
Curt Schilling (2002)
Randy Johnson (2004)
Clayton Kershaw (2014, 2015)
Max Scherzer (2015)
Chris Sale (2015)
Corey Kluber (2017)
Justin Verlander (2018, 2019)
Shane Bieber (2019)
Tarik Skubal (2024)

We know Tarik Skubal had a phenomenal year. He recently won the Detroit chapter of the BBWAA Tigers of the Year award. That was never a mystery on how he won that, unanimously. But to see him linked with this incredible list of names puts it on a new level. Two are in the Hall of Fame and more will be. Can we use this as a way to imagine his next season, and maybe beyond?

Next year

Let’s take Skubal’s season out of this. That a puts us at 9 names and 12 seasons of these stats. As you can see, Pedro Martinez, Clayton Kershaw, and Justin Verlander managed to repeat their success with this particular set of metrics. So in this tiny sample size, there has been a 25% chance of repeating. Right away that gives us some excitement. Let’s look at this chart:

This displays the average change in these metrics in the following year. I thought it would be best to look at it from a few different viewpoints. In the first column, we see all the instances. I don’t think this gives the full story because two of the 12 times were in 2019 and it was followed up by the strange 2020 season. And that’s where we get the second column — the seasons that don’t include 2020. It looks better, but it isn’t too far off. Last up, I wanted to see how guys who repeated did. So those three seasons are in the final column.

Here’s the not surprising, part — we should expect some regression. We can see that previously K% drops between 1.3% and 2.4% while BB% and HR/9 go up slightly, and, unless repeating, IP drops somewhat significantly.

Let’s go into this thinking he follows the same pattern as non-2020 guys. Next year should see him with 170 IP, 27.9% K%, 4.9% BB%, 0.80 HR/9, 2.97 FIP, and 3.9 WAR. That would still be really good!

There’s two other interesting notes to be made here. First, his 2023 season was equally as good, but was limited due to injury and not throwing enough innings. Second, he also had a significant jump in velocity this past season, averaging 96.8 MPH. That was a 1 MPH higher than his previous high and 2.2 MPH higher than his career average before last year.

Contract extension

I’d like to focus on a couple of plots for this part. First, here’s a year-by-year WAR for each pitcher after they’ve reached this threshold:

Again, this might not come as a surprise given the talent discussed. The lowest is Corey Kluber who was worth 10.6 WAR for the rest of his career. As a matter of fact, there have been as many guys to reach 30+ as there are 20 or lower. Together, they are averaging 25.5 WAR across and average of 7 more seasons including the 2020 seasons. If we use the FanGraphs ~ $8M/WAR figure, that would be 7/$205M contract.

One more plot I’d like to look at. Alex Chamberlin (who you should be following on Twitter/X if you aren’t: https://x.com/DolphHauldhagen) has a fantastic rolling WAR plot he created (see my filtered version here: https://public.tableau.com/shared/8B3MGK7YF?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link)

This plot is a rolling WAR across an entire career by season and highlighted is Tarik Skubal. Now what’s interesting is how well he lines up with another player early on. Let’s look at just those two.

This is actually Randy Johnson’s rolling WAR. Now I’m not bold enough to say that Skubal is the next Randy Johnson. However, I think it’s fun to consider that through year 4 for each of their careers, their rolling WAR is identical. And as you know, they are both lefties who strike a lot of batters out.

Conclusion

With it still being early in the offseason, I’m waiting for the day that we hear of a contract extension. I’d guess that 7/$205M is a starting point and I’d expect at least a 3.9 WAR season next year based on what historical averages have said.

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