{"id":849251,"date":"2026-11-09T10:18:24","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T10:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/849251\/"},"modified":"2026-11-09T10:18:24","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T10:18:24","slug":"free-agent-poll-tarik-skubal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/849251\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Agent Poll: Tarik Skubal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1bij9g79 _1bij9g78 _1mt21p01\">Skubal is the obvious star of this free-agent class, a No. 1 starter on any club when he\u2019s healthy, although we didn\u2019t see that version of Skubal as much in 2026 as we did in 2024 and 2025, when he won back-to-back Cy Young Awards and was worth 6+ WAR each season (using either version of WAR). He can show three plus pitches \u2014 his upper-90s four-seamer, wipeout changeup with excellent arm speed and some fading action, and a slider that plays above its \u201cshape,\u201d due in part to its velocity, up to 92-93. He\u2019s posted walk rates below 5 percent in four straight seasons, consistently limits hard contact, and doesn\u2019t let hitters pull the ball in the air that much, so his BABIPs have come in better than league average in every year of his career \u2014 he\u2019s at .281 overall and has never allowed a BABIP of .300 in any season, which is Clayton Kershaw-level pitching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Skubal is the obvious star of this free-agent class, a No. 1 starter on any club when he\u2019s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":849252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2378],"tags":[5,377,2554,4,282,70,80077,38962,2553],"class_list":["post-849251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto-blue-jays","tag-baseball","tag-blue-jays","tag-bluejays","tag-mlb","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-blue-jays","tag-toronto-blue-jays-analysis","tag-toronto-blue-jays-opinions","tag-torontobluejays"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117585975951419219","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/849252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}