DETROIT -- The indelible image from Tarik Skubal’s 2025 season will be his 102.6 mph final pitch to strike out Cleveland’s Gabriel Arias and finish off a two-hit, 13-strikeout shutout of the Guardians on May 25 before a raucous crowd at Comerica Park.
“I’m an emotional player. I feed off of energy in the stadiums,” Skubal said after that game. “When everyone’s on their feet, special things kinda happen when you’re in my shoes.”
Now imagine Skubal doing something like that, pitching for his country.
Skubal likely did, with encouragement from Team USA general manager Michael Hill and manager Mark DeRosa. It was part of their pitch to get the back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner to take part in the World Baseball Classic, and it worked. With a social media post from Skubal and an announcement from Major League Baseball, Skubal put his name in the competition and gave the Americans a 1-2 punch alongside NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes to throw at the rest of the world.
The announcement was the culmination of months of recruiting, sometimes subtle.
“We got to visit with him at the [MLB] Awards ceremony in Vegas,” Hill said at last week’s MLB Winter Meetings. “We've been honest that it's an honor to put the red, white and blue across your chest. Like, how many times as a player do you get that opportunity? And I think that's what we really tried to impress upon every player that we're talking to. It's an honor to don that uniform. We're hopeful that America's best want to be a part of that, because it's a special tournament, and we want our best to help us complete the job.”
It’s something Skubal has never had the opportunity to do.
Some stars grow up as top prospects and represent their country at the amateur level. Skubal's Tigers teammate Riley Greene talked fondly last summer about winning a gold medal for Team USA at the 2018 COPABE U18 Pan-American Championships with a roster that included fellow future stars Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll, CJ Abrams and Pete Crow-Armstrong.
Skubal had none of that. He had one Division I college offer, from Seattle University. Making a national team wasn’t even conceivable at the time. That made DeRosa’s initial contact last spring quite a moment.
“I think I called Tarik in April,” DeRosa said last week. “I've been very respectful to the season. I know, if I was a player of that ilk, I would not want to be getting blown up by the manager of Team USA while I'm trying to win a World Series. Just every once in a while, a text, a 'Hey, I'm thinking about you' kind of deal.”
Admiration has been building for a while.
“I think the biggest thing for me, getting to know Tarik and then watching him, he really leans in,” DeRosa said. “The stuff, two-time Cy Young throwing 102, all of that, he leans into being an entertainer. He soaks in the moment, something that very few big leaguers can do because they're so nervous. He is past all that. And I just love watching him compete, because there's fun. There's like a backyard Wiffle ball style to the way he goes about it that I truly like.”
That entertainment aspect is something that rarely shows during Spring Training, when Skubal's outings are more about progression than competition. He will go into a Grapefruit League start with a goal to work on a particular pitch or two, or on sequences, or on simply building his arm.
That will obviously change this spring. Skubal won’t go the distance in a WBC start, but the level of intensity will be unlike anything he has encountered in Lakeland, Fla. He will have to prepare himself for that, physically as well as mentally. That he’ll be doing so in what’s shaping up to be a contract year for potentially next year’s biggest free agent adds another level of intrigue.
Fortunately, the WBC has a pretty flexible schedule for pitchers. Starters don’t necessarily have to spend the entire tournament with the club, and they can build their outings within their Spring Training plan. Team USA is scheduled to open pool play on March 6, two weeks into the Tigers’ Grapefruit League schedule.
“That's the tricky thing about handling that team,” said former Tigers manager Jim Leyland, who led Team USA to the WBC title in 2017, “because you have to know how to handle your pitching. You really take a lot of pride in that.”
The travel will be greater for Skubal, since Team USA’s pool -- which includes Mexico, Great Britain, Italy and Brazil -- plays in Houston rather than Miami. But a big factor in Skubal’s favor is Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, who is detail-oriented in building out pitching schedules with pitching coach Chris Fetter. Hinch, too, knows what it means to play for country. The former MLB catcher played for Team USA in the 1996 Olympics, the same summer he was drafted by the A’s out of Stanford.
Given that, a WBC stint should not have a big impact on Skubal’s season. But it has the chance to give him memories he’ll carry for a lifetime.