Tarik Skubal’s Injury Leaves Him (And the Tigers) in Uncertain Territory

There are no “good” injuries in baseball. Losing a player to the IL is never a fun time. But there’s still a relative hierarchy – not every injury is an equally big bummer. On Monday, we got one of those big bummers. The Tigers placed Tarik Skubal, the two-time reigning AL Cy Young winner, on the injured list. He’s slated to undergo surgery to remove loose bodies in his pitching elbow, as Evan Woodbery of MLive first reported.

Skubal had dealt with occasional pains in his arm throughout the season, as The Athletic’s Cody Stavenhagen reported. In his start last Wednesday, Skubal grimaced and grabbed his elbow in the seventh inning, sending a bevy of concerned Tigers staffers to the mound. He waved them off and struck out the side, but when his arm didn’t recover as much as expected in the aftermath of that start, the team had imaging done, revealing the need for surgery. This injury could alter the balance of power in the AL Central this year. More than that, it could change the trajectory of Skubal’s career. So let’s walk through the implications for the team, league, and player as we try to make sense of this unfortunate bit of news.

The Tigers could ill afford to lose another pitcher, let alone their best pitcher. Their injured list looks like a good pitching staff all on its own. Skubal, Casey Mize, and Justin Verlander were members of the Opening Day rotation. Reese Olson, Troy Melton, and Jackson Jobe are all either intriguing youngsters, effective major leaguers, or both. When analysts say “you can never have too much pitching,” this is the type of situation they’re hedging against.

Detroit built this rotation around two principles: an ace at the top and huge redundancy. That means that its much-diminished rotation still has a surprising amount of juice. Framber Valdez, the team’s big winter signing, is doing just what you’d expect. He doesn’t get a ton of strikeouts, but that’s because he’s busy racking up grounders. His ERA, FIP, and whatever advanced run prevention metric is your favorite all agree: Valdez is performing right around his career average, and that’s a high level.

Behind him, the Tigers rotation starts hitting question marks quickly, but it’s still not without promise. Jack Flaherty is off to the worst start of his career, and his big problem has been walks. He’s issued multiple free passes in every game he’s pitched this year, and has had trouble commanding his fastball, particularly when behind in the count. But it’s not hard to imagine what a better version of Flaherty looks like; he’s been a competent, if inconsistent, starter for a while now. Before the season, I felt like Flaherty was a nice fit in the no. 4 spot in the rotation. Now, he’s their no. 2 starter despite performing like a no. 5 so far this season. It’s not ideal, but let me put it this way: After Detroit’s streak of injury misfortune, still having a guy with Flaherty’s track record available is definitely a bonus.

Keider Montero, who worked in a swingman role for the Tigers in the past, has been starting full-time this year, and he’s been sneakily effective so far. He has the kind of game that plays better on the field than it looks on paper. He doesn’t miss many bats and doesn’t induce many chases, but he’s extremely aggressive in the strike zone, and his kitchen-sink array of fastballs and secondaries keeps batters guessing. He’s allowing a career-low rate of home runs per fly ball at the moment, and that seems unlikely to continue, but if you’re looking for a starter who can eat some innings, you could do much worse.

Ty Madden was called up from the minors to replace Skubal in the rotation. He missed all of 2025 with a rotator cuff injury, in what was set to be his rookie season, though this won’t be his first taste of the big leagues. He debuted in 2024 and made Detroit’s postseason roster that year. He throws six pitches and works heavily on the fastball/cutter/slider spectrum, giving batters subtly different looks that keep them off balance before using slower secondaries to end at-bats. Our prospect team likes him as a fifth starter or swingman, and it appeared that the Tigers were interested in putting him in a relief role before this spate of injuries. He’s off to a middling start in Triple-A in his return from injury, but given the attrition, Detroit has little choice but to put him in the big leagues and see what happens.

Astute readers will note that I’ve only listed four starters. The Tigers surely hope that they won’t be without the services of at least a few of their injured hurlers for much longer, but in the meantime, they’re in a pickle. Drew Anderson was a starter the last two years in the KBO and looked very good, but he’s been working as a long reliever so far this year. He’s probably not stretched out for a full workload, but who cares? He looks better than the other options available, and he’s missing bats in the major leagues already. Honestly, the Tigers might stick with him even if he struggles mightily; Sawyer Gipson-Long, the team’s other reasonable option in the upper minors, was scratched from his latest start with “undisclosed discomfort,” an ominous phrase, particularly when you consider that he already missed the entire 2024 season due to injury and hit the IL twice last year despite not being activated until midseason.

Skubal’s injury puts Detroit’s playoff chances in doubt, and those odds get worse the longer he’s out. There aren’t a lot of players who can singlehandedly move the needle from no hope to competing, but Skubal might just be one. Replacing the rest of his 2026 season with the aggregate efforts of Montero, Anderson, Madden, and Gipson-Long would be a 5-WAR downgrade. It would take Detroit from one of the top three projected rotations in baseball to one of the bottom 10. If Skubal returns for the second half, on the other hand, you can roughly halve that estimate; they’d be a mid-pack rotation in the aggregate.

The AL Central is a tight race; before Skubal’s injury, we projected Detroit to be about five wins better than the field, with the Guardians, Royals, and Twins all jockeying for second place. That’s easy math – losing Skubal pushes the Tigers into a four-way scrum for the division, and the longer he’s out, the tougher things get. Sure, the AL has started slowly this year, but this doesn’t look like a division that will send two teams to the playoffs.

In fact, the AL Central might now be the most interesting division in baseball. The presumed doormats, the White Sox, have held their own so far. The Twins have a flammable bullpen, but their offense is legit, and even if they don’t contend for the playoffs, they have the personnel to play spoiler. Cleveland and Kansas City are both battle-tested squads with superstar leaders. And now, the expected favorites are missing their best player. What’s more, the division now feels so wide open that the trade deadline will likely have a lot to say about the eventual finishing order.

While the ramifications of this injury will reverberate across the Midwest all season, they’ll echo even further into Skubal’s future. He was – and still is, in fact – the marquee free agent of this winter’s class. Pitchers this good don’t often hit the open market. Skubal received the highest arbitration salary in history this winter, and he was headed for a likely record-breaking contract. Now that payday is up in the air, and to get a better idea of what this might mean for his future, it’s worth understanding a little more about what exactly “loose body removal” means.

Loose bodies are bone chips, little shards of bone (or occasionally cartilage) that have been abraded or otherwise broken off one of the bones in the elbow. It’s likely that every pitcher in baseball has them to some degree; pitching puts a ton of strain on the elbow, and particularly on the hinge where the upper and lower arm connect. The ulnar collateral ligament bears a lot of this strain, but not all of it, which is why not every elbow injury requires Tommy John surgery. Some of that strain gets borne by bones, and when they wear down, voila: bone spurs and loose bodies.

While every pitcher has some amount of elbow damage, the specific degree of loose body buildup varies heavily from one arm to the next. That makes estimating a recovery time complicated; clean loose body removal surgery can be a fairly quick procedure with a recovery timeline in the area of two to three months. But it’s the kind of surgery that also involves some exploration; until the surgeons actually cut in (arthroscopically, generally), the amount of removal, bone spur shaving, and other corrective work remains unknown.

It’s too soon to know how Skubal’s case will evolve. A return to the mound in 2026 is highly likely. But there’s still plenty of uncertainty around the timeline of that return, even though both he and the Tigers would love to have him back on the mound as soon as possible. It comes down to balancing uncertainties. For Skubal, there are plenty of unknowns. He doesn’t know how his arm will respond to surgery and rest; some pitchers have returned from similar procedures no worse for wear, while for some it’s a precursor to more elbow injuries. That makes good sense – if your throwing motion is causing this kind of small-scale bone damage, it might be causing small-scale damage elsewhere, as well.

On the other hand, re-establishing his effectiveness before reaching free agency is important. Consider things from a team’s perspective: It’s hard to hand out a nine-figure contract to a guy who just had elbow surgery and hasn’t pitched (or at least, hasn’t pitched well) since. In any other year of Skubal’s career, patience would be the clear best course; there’s always next year. But mere months before he might sign the biggest contract of his life, the calculus isn’t so clear.

One fascinating subplot: Would Skubal be interested in a one-year contract, or perhaps one of those two-years-with-an-opt-out structures, just to prove that he’s healthy and allow him to regain his value? Every team in baseball would be interested in taking a short-term shot at Skubal, in my estimation, even at a high average annual value and even with injury uncertainty added to the mix. If he’d be willing to look at short deals as a fallback, that makes this winter’s negotiations less pivotal for him.

I don’t know what Skubal would think of this option. I’m not sure he knows, candidly. When you’re busy winning two straight Cy Youngs and setting salary records, you probably don’t spend that much time considering prove-it contracts. But life comes at you fast, and now it’s a meaningful decision. I imagine he’ll be spending plenty of time working out a plan for the future while his arm recovers.

I expect Skubal to prioritize a return at full strength over the fastest possible return. The timeline of loose body recoveries is quite variable. Hurston Waldrep and Spencer Schwellenbach each had similar procedures this February, and Waldrep is near a return while Schwellenbach hasn’t begun throwing. Setting a return date now isn’t feasible given how broad of a range of injuries “loose body removal” covers. Against that backdrop, I don’t think prospective Skubal suitors care particularly much about how many innings he throws after his return; I assume they’re far more interested in how good those innings are.

Playing it cautiously requires at least a little on his openness to a bridge deal, however. The later Skubal returns, the less information teams will have about him come the offseason. If he looks rusty in his first two starts back, and those are also his only two starts post-surgery, his market might end up meaningfully softer than expected. Heck, if he plans on a late-season return and then takes longer to ramp up than he hoped, he might not even be able to pitch in the big leagues this year. That would almost certainly necessitate some kind of short-term contract.

It’s also worth remembering that Skubal is a competitive human being, not a profit maximization algorithm. You only get so many cracks at the World Series. The Tigers have lost in the ALDS in each of the last two years, but before that, they hadn’t been to the postseason since 2014. Skubal has never played for another organization, and the team is full of players with whom he advanced through the minor leagues. Money is nice, but so is success, and baseball players measure success in the playoffs. They’re also, in general, the kind of maniacal competitors who think they can win every game, and have spent their entire life being proven correct. This is a really hard puzzle to balance, particularly given how much is still unknown.

We have Skubal down for 15 or so starts the rest of the way, which is something like a no-complications timeline. That makes the Tigers still the division favorites, though by a smaller margin than before this injury. I urge caution about that estimate, though, because this is an asymmetrical situation. It’s not like Skubal is likely to return unexpectedly quickly; he has to have surgery, rehab, and build his arm strength back up. On the other hand, the right tail, a lengthy absence, could extend meaningfully longer.

At the end of the day, the exact date of his return isn’t that important – one start probably won’t be the difference between making and missing the playoffs. The bigger story is that the best pitcher in baseball is injured and can’t pitch, and we don’t know exactly when he’ll return. For everyone’s sake, let’s hope for the best.