The "two most obvious suitors" line is a sales pitch, and the only thing it's actually built on is who has the biggest checkbook. Jeff Passan reported Tarik Skubal is expected to sign before the December 1 lockout, and named the Dodgers and Mets as the obvious landing spots because they carry the two highest payrolls in baseball. It's arithmetic, and the laziest kind there is.
Passan's own copy doesn't stop at two. He wrote that "there are bound to be others" and flagged that the Cubs "badly want" Skubal. He floated the Padres, too, who have Michael King and Nick Pivetta hitting free agency and a rotation to patch. So the same report that hands you a tidy Dodgers-or-Mets binary quietly keeps at least two more teams in the room. The headline says certainty; the paragraph underneath it says the market is wide open.
And that's before the other voices chime in. Ken Rosenthal has thrown cold water on the Cubs, saying flatly, "Do I expect (the Cubs) to play on Skubal? I don't." Jim Bowden put the White Sox in his top three alongside the Dodgers and Mets. Rosenthal also wondered aloud whether Scott Boras might want to drag the Angels into it once their new ownership is formally approved, which can only happen after the lockout. That's Dodgers, Mets, Cubs, Padres, White Sox, and Angels, six teams named by credentialed reporters within a few days. "Most obvious" is carrying a lot of weight for a field of six.
You've seen this movie. Last winter the "obvious" homes got attached to the top free agents and the ball kept landing somewhere else. Bo Bichette was the slam-dunk Toronto reunion. He signed with the Mets. Kyle Tucker had his "obvious" fits pinned on a couple of contenders depending on which outlet you read. He signed with the Dodgers. When the reporting defaults to "obvious," it has a nasty habit of being wrong by the end.
There's probably no mystery team coming out of nowhere. But the top two are being sold to you as inevitable, even though the reporters doing the selling have already hedged inside their own stories. That's the con: a frame that flatters the obvious names and buries the live wires three sentences down.
There's a real case for the Dodgers. They're the team Skubal finished 2026 with after the deadline trade out of Detroit, where he won two AL Cy Young Awards. Alden Gonzalez said his sense is that, money being equal, Skubal would love to go back to Los Angeles.
The Dodgers are less of a lock than the "obvious" tag suggests. Andrew Friedman's public line was that the Dodgers have "a tremendous amount of respect for him," and that "he and his family have to make a choice." Friedman isn't guaranteeing he'll match anyone's offer. The Mets are called the favorite by their own beat because they need arms after dealing Freddy Peralta and David Peterson and missing the playoffs at 74-88, yet David Stearns has a documented allergy to handing $300 million-plus to any starting pitcher. Boras is reportedly aiming at $325 million, with Passan framing the eventual deal as well north of $300 million and possibly past $400 million. The Mets' boss hates the price, and the Dodgers won't commit to it either. It's a staring contest.
The reporters aren't making this up. The Dodgers and Mets really do have the money and are plausible landing spots. The problem is the billing. Give the Cubs, Padres, White Sox, and Angels equal space in the headline and the story reads as what it is: unsettled. Shrink it to two and you've sold readers a certainty the market hasn't earned. Until Skubal actually engages bidders outside the top two, treating "obvious" as "inevitable" just repeats last winter's whiff with a new name on the jersey.
