Tarik Skubal is far and away the best free agent on the market this off-season. (Photo by Nicole Vasquez/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

MLB Photos via Getty Images

By all accounts, the 2026-27 Major League Baseball free agent class is pretty weak. There is one headliner: two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. His impending free agency was the talk of baseball all summer, as his original team, the Detroit Tigers, had to decide if they were going to keep him and risk losing him for only a compensation pick (if he stayed, Detroit would have made him a qualifying offer), or trade him for long-term assets. The club waited as long as they could, but in the end, they took the two (actually three) in the bush, and sent the lefty to the Los Angeles Dodgers at the trade deadline.

Skubal is predicted to make anywhere from $352 million (Kiley McDaniel, ESPN), to $405 million (Tim Britton, The Athletic), to $425 million (MLB Trade Rumors). You can find all sorts of other guesses on various websites. Suffice it to say, Skubal will get paid. But what about everyone else?

Since the 2014-15 off-season, 64 free agents have received nine-figure contracts. That is an average of just more than five per year. What will this year’s tally be?

First off, there is the question of how willing owners will be to commit extraordinary sums on the eve of a lockout and with the future financial system of the game totally unknown. However, the owners acknowledged that any salary cap would need to be phased in, so they may take this opportunity to sign big contracts such that they may be “grandfathered” in to the new collective bargaining agreement. But, there just are not that many players in this year’s free agency pool worthy of those types of deals. And yet, if the owners get their way with a salary cap, they will also have to contend with a salary floor, which means that at least 15 of them will be required to increase (in some cases, substantially) their payroll. All of which begs the question: how many nine-figure deals will be signed between now and midnight December 1^st or immediately after the lockout ends and players need to report to (an abridged) spring training?

The aforementioned Tim Britton thinks we will hit the average, with five players getting at least $100 million. He predicts Adrián Morejón will get five years, $110 million; Randy Arozarena and Seiya Suzuki will each get four years, $108 million; and the latest Japanese star, Teruaki Sato, will pull in five years and $105 million.

Kiley McDaniel of ESPN is considerably less optimistic, as he believes that – other than Skubal – only Sato will cross the nine-figure threshold, with five years and $115 million.

MLB Trade Rumors is with The Athletic at five deals, but the Venn diagram is not a perfect circle. They have Arozarena very close at four years, $100 million, and Suzuki even closer, with him getting $105 million over four years. But the MLB site includes Trevor Rogers getting 5/$115 million, and Freddy Peralta just below at 5/$110 million.

Suffice it to say that there is a great deal of variance in all of these predictions, and it is simply impossible to know what owners are willing to spend and/or how front offices view each of these free agents.

Before the 2026 season, Ben Clemens of FanGraphs did a full breakdown of the previous year’s predictions. If nothing else, it is fun to see who got what wrong. For instance, McDaniel did well, but his projections were 9% higher in total dollars. He chalked up the variance to players taking 6% fewer guaranteed years than he anticipated (e.g., Kyle Tucker got $240 million from the Dodgers over four years, rather than taking $350 million over ten 10 years with the Blue Jays).

In the end, as the late, great screenwriter William Goldman once said, “nobody knows anything.”