Skubal Threw 97. The Tigers Lost Their Seventh Straight. Both Things Are True.
The sim game went well. The team situation is getting worse. Boras is watching.
Diddja catch the sim game results? Tarik Skubal threw 40 pitches Tuesday. Touched 97 on the gun. Struck out three. Allowed one home run to Jahmai Jones, which honestly is kind of funny — the reigning Cy Young winner getting taken deep by a guy hitting .211. But the velocity was there. The stuff was there. Hinch called it 'really encouraging.'
Here's what else happened Tuesday: the Tigers lost their seventh straight game. They're 21-33. They're 10.5 games behind Cleveland in the AL Central. They're in fifth place in a five-team division. The Kid ran those numbers and I'm still processing them.
Now listen to what Skubal said: 'I don't want to come back, say, two or three weeks from now and go right back on the shelf a month later. That's not the goal. The goal is to come back and pitch the rest of the season healthy and play postseason baseball.'
Postseason baseball. That's what the player said. He wants to compete. He wants to pitch in October. And his team is on pace to lose 99 games.
The timeline is visible now. Another sim session Sunday in Chicago. Then a rehab assignment — Hinch confirmed that's required. Then activation. Best case, Skubal is back mid-June. By then the Tigers will be what, 12 games back? 14?
This is where it gets interesting for the contract watch. Skubal is rehabbing from an experimental surgery that has him ahead of schedule. The arm looks good. The team looks bad. If Detroit isn't buying at the trade deadline — and why would they be, at this rate — Scott Boras has leverage. 'Extension or trade' becomes a real conversation when your client wants to pitch meaningful games and your client's team is eliminated from meaningful games by Memorial Day.
Position adjusts from 0.48 to 0.50. The sim game was good news for Skubal's health. It was bad news for the 'Detroit extends him before free agency' scenario. The player is pumping brakes on his return while the team is pumping brakes on relevance. Something has to give.