Jeff Passan clarifying Tigers-Tarik Skubal contract extension buzz puts fans at ease

Whether or not the Tigers are going to trade Tarik Skubal will remain a question from now until the 2026 trade deadline. Even the intervening time in the regular season won't be fully safe, after the Red Sox came out of nowhere on a random day in mid-June to trade their franchise star this past season. The chatter will keep Tigers fans on edge until it literally can't anymore — unless, of course, the Tigers extend him.

Skubal has made it clear he wants to be a Tiger "for a very long time" and Scott Boras has said that he's willing to hear any offers Chris Ilitch or Scott Harris want to make (though "listening" really means nothing coming from Boras).

Reports that Skubal and the Tigers were hundreds of millions of dollars apart on the club's last extension offer are misleading; the Tigers reportedly made a sub-$100 million offer to him, but that was before he even won his first Cy Young Award.

Jeff Passan, one of the biggest believers that the Tigers will/should hang onto Skubal, further explained, "the chasm between the parties is wide, though in reality not anywhere close to the quarter-billion-dollar figure some reports said."

Jeff Passan clarifies that Tigers and Tarik Skubal are not as far apart in extension talks as previously believed

Passan added that there's no industry consensus on whether or not the Tigers will deal Skubal, which is pretty obvious to fans who read even a small variety of national outlets. Skubal could net Detroit the trade package of the century if Harris plays his cards right, but the Tigers are going to contend in 2026. Even if, as Harris believes, there's no such thing as a Skubal window, it's undeniable that trading Skubal would take some of the luster off of the team, and a trade couldn't possibly be good for morale (or making fans very happy, for that matter).

Speculation on what it might take to get Skubal and Boras to agree to an extension will also continue, but what we can say for (almost) certain is that he won't accept anything less than a record-breaking deal, with Yoshinobu Yamamoto's $325 million deal with the Dodgers as a baseline.

And the thing is — the Tigers of not too long ago might not've let this become such a debate in the first place. Detroit had the fourth-largest payroll in baseball over an entire decade (2007-2017). If they're serious about winning, they'll bring back some of that mentality and pony up to pay the one guy on their roster who deserves it most.