LAKELAND, Fla. — Soon after Justin Verlander arrived at the TigerTown complex this week, the ace of the team’s current generation asked a question.
“Hey,” Tarik Skubal said, “do you need a tour?”
Skubal, it turns out, made the comment as a joke. The Tigers drafted Verlander in 2004. He pitched for 13 seasons with an Olde English D on his cap. He long spent his offseasons right here in Lakeland, Fla., so Skubal figured he knew the terrain.
But like so much else, the Tigers’ facilities have changed since Verlander departed in 2017. Soon, Skubal was leading Verlander through doors and down hallways. The training room here. The best way to the fields there. Eventually, they turned outside the clubhouse. There on the wall, a picture of Verlander stared at them.
Strange, perhaps, to see your old self lingering in a place you left long ago.
“Hey,” Skubal said, “this is you!”
All that time, all that change, all that perspective lived at the heart of Verlander’s Thursday morning press conference in the 34 Club at Joker Marchant Stadium.
Perched on a chair, with a microphone in hand, Verlander spent nearly 30 minutes looking back on all that has shaped him and how it led him back to where his career began.
“I’ve got two kids, I’ve been married for a while now, and I’m just a different person,” Verlander said. “To come back around and have another chance as a different man to embrace the city that I grew up in front of … People look at athletes and think that they’ve got it all figured out. I look back, I was 22 years old, 23, 24, early on. I was a kid and trying to figure things out. I happened to be really good at baseball. But now it’s just such a different experience, and I’m in a different place and just excited to re-experience Detroit in a new mindset.”
Seated with his fellow rotation mates on a plastic chair behind a row of cameras, Skubal looked on with a childlike twinkle in his eye. He and Verlander have become inextricably linked, two Tigers aces who have captivated crowds, each won Cy Young Awards and dominated like few in this franchise ever have.
Now, at the dawn of a season with the highest expectations, they’re together on the same pitching staff.
“If you would have told me 10 years ago,” Skubal said, “that I’m going to be lockermates with Justin Verlander and we’re gonna be in the same rotation, I would have called you f—’ crazy.”
As the 2025 season neared its end and Verlander’s San Francisco Giants fell from competition, the future Hall of Fame pitcher confronted increasingly common moments of introspection.
After a season in San Francisco, he concluded he did not want to spend his final years as a mercenary, bouncing from team to team, taking paychecks and chasing wins where he could find them. He realized he wanted to play somewhere that would hold meaning. That meant either the Houston Astros or Detroit, the two franchises where he crafted his most formative and most memorable triumphs.
“I was sitting there thinking about where I wanted to be,” Verlander said, “and Detroit just kept coming to my mind.”
At the outset of the offseason, Verlander said he reached out to Tigers manager A.J. Hinch and president of baseball operations Scott Harris to express his interest. He got the impression the Tigers would not have room for him. But offseasons are long, and circumstances change. After learning Reese Olson would need surgery on his right shoulder, the club signed Framber Valdez to a three-year, $115 million deal. They furthered their commitment to pitching by giving Verlander a one-year, $13 million contract, with $11 million of that money deferred until 2030.
Many Tigers players were caught off guard as they scrolled their phones Tuesday. Dillon Dingler was in the training room when he saw the news on Instagram.
“Ten minutes later,” Dingler said, “I saw him (in the clubhouse).”
Perhaps because of his status as the team’s ace, Skubal was one of few who had an idea the Verlander move was coming.
“I was giddy as a kid,” Skubal said. “This is a childhood idol that I get to be lockermates with.”
Skubal has long admired the game’s greats, mostly from afar. Over the past two-plus years, Verlander began developing his own admiration for the big left-hander who was dispatching hitters in his old stomping grounds.
Last season, before a Tigers-Giants game, Verlander stopped Skubal in the outfield.
“I just wanted to introduce myself and say hi,” Verlander said.
That type of meeting is the very thing a younger version of Verlander might not have prioritized. Now one week shy of his 43rd birthday, Verlander has become known as a softer, more open version of himself when away from the mound. The pitcher who once arrived to the park with headphones on and a look that practically said talk to me at your own risk has slowly evolved from heat-seeking missile to a more three-dimensional man.
“My daughter really changed me to the core,” Verlander said. “Just wanting to be more present is something I’ve really worked hard on. I was always like the horse with blinders on. I’ve been trying to pitch and all the noise was just exactly that. Noise. I probably missed a lot of things along the way, and I think I learned to remove those blinders and take in the bigger picture.”
This new Verlander — still a pitcher chasing down 300 wins, still a driven veteran who has asked the likes of Tom Brady and Tiger Woods for advice on maintaining performance as the years mount — returns to the Tigers in a fascinating position. This is a club that has made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons, forging its own identity with a young cast of hitters and homegrown pitchers, including Skubal and Casey Mize.
Adding a player of Verlander’s stature still fundamentally alters the energy of any clubhouse. But more so than ever, the Tigers are built to win. And Verlander is in a better position to teach, lead and guide.
“It’s something that I’ve actively worked on, my communication in the locker room,” Verlander said. “That mindset I talked about earlier wasn’t really conducive to being the best teammate when I was younger. I don’t regret it because I think I needed that mentality to be the pitcher that I was. But that perspective shift has really changed things. Proactively going to talk to guys, making sure that they know I’m available at any time and not too scary to talk to, hopefully. That’s something I relish now.”
Two weeks ago, Skubal and Tigers brass sitting across from each other in an arbitration hearing was the biggest story in this team’s orbit. You probably know the deal. The Tigers, with influence from MLB’s Labor Relations Department, filed at $19 million. Skubal, advised by agent Scott Boras, filed at $32 million.
A three-person panel of arbiters sided with Skubal, blasting past the record for highest arbitration salary and potentially changing the way young star pitchers are compensated in the future.
Thursday at his locker, Skubal had much to address. As a member of the MLBPA’s executive subcommittee, he admitted he played an active role in the arbitration filing.
“First off, it was a great process,” Skubal said. “I have a great agent, a team of 40-50 people that had been working on this for over a year and knew that this was going to happen and were prepared for it. They were able to present and prove to a panel of three arbitrators that I’m worth the amount of money that I’m worth and my value. That was a great process, and that’s something I’ll never take for granted from my agency.”
Skubal stood in front of a group of reporters, the nature of the questions far different than they might have been had the Tigers not signed Valdez and then Verlander.
Ever the competitor, Skubal said he did his best to block out the noise that came with offseason trade rumors that never materialized.
“The business for ’26 is done, and that’s what it is,” Skubal said. “As far as competition, you can never let anything like that impact you. I want to win, and I want to win as bad as anybody.”
With contracts and controversy over for now, Skubal mostly awed at the prospect of playing on the same team as the man who was the last great Tigers ace. Only one locker separates them in the spring-training clubhouse.
Wednesday, Verlander traversed his old-and-new home wearing black Brooks running shoes with extra cushioning, grinning even as he partook in pitchers’ fielding practice. Skubal roamed the spring backfields in Nike spikes, practically attached to Verlander’s hip.
At one point this week, Skubal observed Verlander throwing his fastball. He asked him what sort of cue he uses upon release.
“He gives me a cue, I tried it, and it doesn’t resonate with me,” Skubal said. “But that’s the thing — something will. That’s the best takeaway. He’s gonna have an impact on a lot of guys here, just with his presence.”
Turns out Skubal isn’t the only one eager to observe.
“I’m just excited to learn,” Verlander said, “see (Skubal’s) routines, see what he does behind the scenes, if there’s anything I can help with, if there is anything he can help me with.”