The New York Mets have a meeting scheduled with the prize of this winter’s free-agent crop, two-time AL Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal, per Jon Heyman of the New York Post. The two parties will sit down to chat this week. Heyman adds that Skubal is hopeful of getting a deal done before the league imposes a lockout and transaction freeze on Dec. 2 amid collective bargaining negotiations with the players union. Heyman’s colleague, Joel Sherman, wrote just a few minutes prior that rival agents and executives have framed the Mets as one of the more “aggressive” teams in the early stages of the offseason, both with regard to free-agent pursuits and trade talks.
A fit between Skubal and the Mets is an obvious one. The Mets were probably the National League’s most disappointing team in 2026, floundering through a disastrous first half and eventually waving the white flag ahead of the trade deadline. President of baseball ops David Stearns traded nine players — David Peterson, Clay Holmes, A.J. Minter, Freddy Peralta, Tyrone Taylor, Huascar Brazoban, Luke Weaver, Brooks Raley and Ben Rortvedt — ahead of the Aug. 3 trade deadline.
The reasons for the Mets’ 2026 downfall were plentiful, but shoddy starting pitching was near the top of the list. Holmes missed months with a fracture in his leg after being struck by a comeback liner. Veterans like Peralta, Peterson, Kodai Senga and Sean Manaea didn’t pitch anywhere close to their capabilities (though Peralta rebounded following a trade to Tampa Bay). Young, controllable arms like Nolan McLean, Christian Scott and Zac Thornton give the Mets some reason for long-term optimism, but the in-house options beyond that trio aren’t particularly inspiring.
Barring a trade, Manaea will be back for the final season of his three-year, $75M deal but is coming off a middling 4.78 ERA in 150 2/3 innings. Jonah Tong was once one of the game’s top pitching prospects and viewed as a core piece of the long-term rotation, but he posted a 4.54 ERA with a 12.6% walk rate in 23 Triple-A starts. Tylor Megill will be back after missing the 2026 season due to UCL surgery, but it’s hard to know what to expect from him after a lengthy absence.
Bringing in rotation help is a natural target for Stearns & Co. — and Skubal is clearly the most impactful means of doing so. He’s going to command the type of high-salaried, long-term commitment to which Stearns (like most front office leaders) is typically averse, but contracts of this magnitude tend to be negotiated directly with the owner. Steve Cohen, baseball’s wealthiest owner, dealt directly with agent Scott Boras on negotiations with Juan Soto and Carlos Correa (who agreed to a $315M deal with the Mets before concerns with his physical scuttled the contract). Skubal, like Soto and Correa, is a client of the Boras Corporation.
As shown in MLBTR’s Payroll Tracker, the Mets finished the 2026 season with the highest cash payroll of any team in the sport and trailed only the Dodgers in terms of their luxury-tax obligations. MLBTR contributor Ethan Hullihen projects more than $276M on the Mets’ books already (including projected arbitration salaries), with a CBT number north of $289M. Neither is likely to serve as a deterrent for Cohen, who signed Soto for a record $765M after finishing up the 2024 campaign with a payroll in the range of one-third of a billion dollars.
By now, Skubal’s accolades need little explanation. He’s a two-time Cy Young Award winner who’s posted four straight seasons with a sub-3.00 ERA, a strikeout rate north of 30% and a walk rate shy of 5%. Overall, he carries a 2.47 ERA, 31.1% strikeout rate and 4.5% walk rate over his past 626 1/3 regular-season innings. No pitcher in the game is within even one point of the 26.7-point gap between Skubal’s strikeout and walk rates. Since 2023, Skubal is second among qualified starters in ERA (trailing Blake Snell’s 2.46 by the smallest amount possible). He’s third in swinging-strike rate and walk rate while sitting in a fifth-place tie for strikeout rate.
It wouldn’t serve as a deterrent anyhow, but the fact that Skubal was traded midseason also rendered him ineligible to receive a qualifying offer. As such, whichever team signs him won’t need to expend any draft or international amateur capital. Thus far, the incumbent Dodgers and ever-aggressive Padres have already been tied to Skubal. The Cubs, despite their status as a big-market team with a dire need for rotation help, rarely play at the top of the free-agent market and reportedly aren’t planning to make a serious run at him.
