Tigers’ hold-up on Lucas Giolito makes Tarik Skubal arbitration more exasperating

It's been days since Jon Heyman first reported that the Detroit Tigers had interest in free agent pitcher Lucas Giolito, yet he still remains unsigned.

The Tigers aren't wrong to be cautious with the former Boston Red Sox starter. He’s 31. He’s coming off an internal brace procedure. His velocity dipped late last season. He was scratched from a playoff series with elbow soreness. The MRI didn’t show structural damage, but in a sport where arms are currency, every front office is trained to flinch.

Detroit has reason to slow-play this. A mid-rotation starter with medical question marks is exactly the kind of contract that can age poorly. Scott Harris has built this organization on patience, restraint and long-term thinking. Waiting out the market, pressing for medical protections, and trying to buy low is smart baseball.

And yet — this is precisely what makes the Tarik Skubal arbitration saga so exasperating.

Because the Tigers are demonstrating, in real time, that they understand risk. They understand uncertainty. They understand how thin the line is between health and heartbreak for pitchers. They’re acting accordingly with Giolito.

But when it came to Skubal, they chose confrontation.

Skubal isn’t a gamble. He isn’t a reclamation project. He isn’t coming off surgery. He isn’t a bounce-back play with a faded fastball. He is the best pitcher in baseball, the first American League arm to win back-to-back Cy Young Awards in a quarter-century, and the singular force behind Detroit’s rise from irrelevance.

The Tigers treated that certainty like a debate.

They balked at $32 million. They countered with $19 million. Now, they're dragging the franchise ace into a room where lawyers will argue his worth as if his dominance were theoretical, not empirical. They are making him prove, on paper, what he has already proven on the mound.

Meanwhile, Giolito — a pitcher with far more medical and performance volatility — is being approached with extreme care. That contrast is the problem.

Tigers' caution with Lucas Giolito contrasts sharply with their treatment of Tarik Skubal

It’s not that Detroit is being prudent with Giolito. It’s that they weren’t equally decisive with Skubal. The message, intentional or not, is jarring: the Tigers are more comfortable betting against their superstar than they are betting on a rehabbing mid-rotation arm.

One of these pitchers represents uncertainty. The other represents the very identity of this era of Tigers baseball.

Skubal didn’t ask to be the face of the franchise. He became it by being historically great. He carried a young team. He legitimized a rebuild. He turned hope into expectation. And when the moment came to reflect that reality financially — even for one season — the organization chose to test him.

Now, as the Tigers weigh medicals and velocity trends and elbow histories on Giolito, fans can’t help but feel the dissonance. This front office knows how fragile pitching is. They know how fast it can disappear. They know that windows don’t stay open forever.

So why did they treat the one pitcher who isn’t fragile — who isn’t hypothetical — as negotiable? That’s what lingers.

Giolito might still wind up in Detroit. The Tigers might get their innings-eater. The rotation might deepen. On paper, everything could still work. But the optics remain: the organization is tiptoeing around a risk while having already pushed its sure thing into an arbitration fight.

For a fanbase that just watched Skubal redefine what this franchise can be again, that disconnect is hard to swallow.