The Annual Opening Day Starting Pitcher Roundup

Will three be the magic number for Tarik Skubal? Fresh off back-to-back Cy Young Awards and a record-setting $32 million arbitration win, the 29-year-old lefty will take the ball for the Tigers against the Padres on Thursday afternoon at Petco Park, the third year in a row he’s had the honor of an Opening Day start. He’s vying to become just the third pitcher to win three straight Cy Youngs — after Greg Maddux (1992–95) and Randy Johnson (1999–2002) — and the first American League pitcher to do so.

Though he didn’t repeat as the winner of the AL Pitching Triple Crown, Skubal was actually slightly better in 2025 than in ’24 by most key measures. He trimmed his ERA, FIP, and walk rate slightly, while improving his strikeout rate, innings total, and WAR:

The major difference between Skubal’s seasons was that his offensive support fell from 5.3 runs per start to 4.5, so his win total dropped. Even so, the Tigers went 21-10 in his starts in both seasons en route to claiming wild card berths.

This could be Skubal’s last time around with the Tigers, as he’s poised to hit free agency and secure a significant windfall. Both before and since his arbitration victory, rumors that the team might trade him have swirled, but between the additions of Framber Valdez and Justin Verlander on short-term deals and the decision to promote 21-year-old shortstop Kevin McGonigle (no. 5 on our Top 100 Prospects list) to the majors after just 44 games at Double-A, the Tigers appear to be all-in. Our Playoff Odds cast them as the favorites to win their first AL Central title since 2014, with a 45.6% chance.

Skubal is one of four former Cy Young winners who will start on Opening Day; his reigning counterpart in the NL, the Pirates’ Paul Skenes, will go up against the Mets. This is the third time in the past five years that both of the previous year’s Cy Young winners will make Opening Day starts:

As has been the case for longer than I’d care to check, Opening Day is not exactly a monolith. Thursday is actually Opening Day, Part 2… of 3. It’s confusing, and maybe slightly anticlimactic, but as usual, Major League Baseball has chosen to inaugurate the new season with a staggered start. The Giants and Yankees got things going on Wednesday night — and in doing so became the first teams to use the new Automatic Ball-Strike Challenge System in a regular season game — while 22 more teams will play their first games on Thursday, and the final six will kick things off on Friday within a slate that includes five other games. Among that Friday group are Sale and Alcantara, who respectively rank third and fourth (tied) among active pitchers in Opening Day starts, Sale with six and Alcantara five; both are looking up at Verlander (12, most recently in 2020) and Scherzer (seven, most recently in 2021).

Back to Skenes for a moment. When he won the Cy Young last year at age 23, he became the youngest pitcher to do so since 20-year-old Dwight Gooden in 1985. He also joined Gooden as just the second pitcher to win Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards back to back in his first two seasons (though Fernando Valenzuela won both in the same year in 1981, after a cup of coffee the previous season). Unlike Skubal, Skenes won’t be joined by his team’s top prospect on Opening Day. Over the weekend, the Pirates decided to send shortstop Konnor Griffin, the consensus no. 1 prospect in the game, to Triple-A to start the season, a sensible move given that he’s played just 21 games above A-ball, is still shy of his 20th birthday, and scuffled during spring training. Still, this is a hopeful season for the Pirates, who have added second baseman Brandon Lowe, right fielder Ryan O’Hearn, and designated hitter Marcell Ozuna to upgrade the majors’ most anemic offense in baseball last year, aside from the Rockies. Their forecast for 83.5 wins, with 45.9% odds of making the playoffs, is the highest for any year for which we have our odds archived — which is to say, back to 2016, when the Pirates were coming off 98 wins and their last playoff appearance.

Speaking of high hopes, Skenes will square off against the Mets, with Freddy Peralta making his regular season debut with the team — the only one of the 30 starters in a new uniform — and his third consecutive Opening Day start overall. Acquired from the Brewers in a January trade, Peralta was one of several key additions in president of baseball operations David Stearns’ offseason overhaul of the Mets after last year’s disappointing 83-79 finish. Gone are mainstays Pete Alonso, Edwin Díaz, Jeff McNeil, and Brandon Nimmo, while Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco, Luis Robert Jr., Marcus Semien, Luke Weaver, and Devin Williams are among their other high-profile arrivals; New York has also chosen to promote its top position player prospect, 23-year-old Carson Benge, to join its new-look outfield. At this writing, the Mets are slight favorites to win the NL East, with a forecast for 89.9 wins and 39.1% odds of winning the division.

Back to the subject of threes, the Dodgers will begin their quest for a third consecutive championship with the same man on the mound as the one who closed out Game 7 of the World Series: Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who recorded the last eight outs of that epic after throwing 96 pitches over six innings the night before; fortunately, he’s gotten some rest since then. According to MLB.com’s Sarah Langs, Yamamoto will be the sixth pitcher since 1969 to get the final out of a World Series and then start the next Opening Day, following Mike Torrez (1977 Yankees, ’78 Red Sox), Scott McGregor (1983–84 Orioles), Josh Beckett (2003–04 Marlins), Madison Bumgarner (2014–15 Giants), and Sale (2018–19 Red Sox).

Below is the full slate of starting pitchers; you can see their statistics from last year here:

About half of this group reflects the cream of last year’s crop. Of the top 10 pitchers in WAR, nine have drawn Opening Day assignments, with the Phillies’ Jesús Luzardo the exception, as he’s been forced to wait his turn behind Sánchez. Extend the count further and you get 12 of the top 16 in WAR, and 15 of the top 22, all with 3.4 WAR or more. Fourteen of these starters were on last year’s All-Star teams. Skenes is one of three pitchers coming off an ERA below 2.00 (1.97), along with Eovaldi (1.73) and Rogers (1.81), though neither of those two had enough innings to qualify for the ERA title. Alcantara had the highest ERA (5.36) among this group, but he’s not the only one trying to rebound from a disappointing season. Gallen didn’t pitch up to his usual standards, posting a 4.83 ERA and 1.1 WAR, the lowest of any ERA qualifier among this bunch; rather than settle for a suboptimal free agent deal, he chose to return to the Diamondbacks on a one-year deal matching the value of a qualifying offer ($22.025 million). Ragans was limited to 13 starts and a 4.67 ERA (but still a respectable 2.1 WAR) due to a rotator cuff strain.

Some other extremes: Sale, who will turn 37 on March 30, is the oldest of this year’s group, while Skenes is the youngest at 23; he’s about eight weeks younger than Misiorowski. While the Miz has just 14 starts under his belt, Cavalli is the least experienced here, with just 11. A first-round pick in 2020, he had made just one start before being called up last August, following an arduous road back from March 2023 Tommy John surgery. Gausman has the most starts among these pitchers, with 322 to Sale’s 312, but the latter has a massive lead in WAR (57.6 to 37.8). Pivetta is this year’s oldest Opening Day first-timer at age 33, as well as its most experienced, with 209 career starts.

Webb, who was dinged for seven runs (six earned) in five innings on Wednesday night, has the longest active streak of consecutive Opening Day starts with five, while Alcantara and Eovaldi each have five in the past six seasons. The former missed out only in 2024, after undergoing Tommy John surgery, while the latter yielded to deGrom in ’23.

All told, 12 pitchers are making their first Opening Day starts, down from a Wild Card-era high — and, I believe, an all-time high — of 15 in 2024. Last year, by comparison, nine pitchers (including Skenes) made their first such starts. This year’s count of first-timers includes Bibee, who was scheduled to start last year’s opener but was scratched in favor of Ben Lively due to food poisoning.

Five of last year’s Opening Day starters are on the injured list to begin this year, including the Cubs’ Justin Steele and the Twins’ Pablo López, both of whom underwent UCL internal brace surgery. Steele, who had his last April, recently faced hitters for the first time since surgery and is working toward a return this year, while López underwent surgery in February and won’t be back until 2027. Both the Yankees’ Carlos Rodón and the Reds’ Hunter Greene underwent surgeries to remove bone spurs and bone chips from their elbows, while José Berríos is also on the injured list due to a stress fracture in his elbow. If that sounds like a heavy toll, recall that when I did this tally just two years ago, the count from among the 2023 Opening Day starters was four Tommy Johns plus Shohei Ohtani’s UCL hybrid surgery, and Scherzer’s back surgery.

Hopefully, things work out better for this year’s crop, and while we’re going down the wish list, let us keep our fingers crossed that when we revisit the topic of Opening Day starters next year, it will be on schedule, with a freshly inked Collective Bargaining Agreement in the rearview mirror. Hey, if the Pirates can look to the possibility of making the playoffs, we can all retain some optimism.