The Athletic has live coverage of the 2026 MLB Trade Deadline.SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The first time I interviewed Tarik Skubal, I was 26 and he was 23. He had a temporary locker in the center of the Detroit Tigers’ 2020 spring training clubhouse. He was quiet and deeply intense. Believe it or not, he even came off as a little timid.On the mound, though, something about him was dynamic. I had started to hear from people who had watched in Double-A Erie that it was Skubal — not Casey Mize or Matt Manning — who was actually the Tigers’ best pitching prospect. From only a few spring bullpen sessions, my eyes confirmed exactly that. Curious to learn more about this big left-hander, I got in touch with Elliot Cribby, the pitching coach who plucked Skubal out of a random tournament in Arizona. At the time, Cribby worked at Seattle University. He told an incredible story of discovering an intriguing talent who no one else knew about. He left him a business card, and Skubal almost didn’t call him back. They eventually met at In-N-Out off a dusty highway in Kingman.“The one thing that drew me to Tarik was he was kind of a quiet individual, but you knew he was going to outwork everybody,” Cribby said. “You knew he had that confidence in himself.”I talked to Skubal that day about his journey to pro ball — the fact that he only had one Division I offer, the fact that he’d had Tommy John surgery in college. Most of his answers were short and to the point. He did not seem like he particularly enjoyed the interview. For all I know, I might have been stumbling through it, too. But I’ll never forget watching Skubal throw a live bullpen session on a spring backfield and hearing Tigers great Kirk Gibson watching from the tower above that overlooked the field. “Yellowhammer!” he said when Skubal threw a dastardly curveball, echoing the late Jim Price’s signature radio call for nasty breaking balls.More than six years later, I was talking to Skubal in the back of the Tigers clubhouse. I was 32, probably still too introverted to be very good at this job but at least a lot more confident in what I was doing. Skubal was 29. He was a two-time Cy Young Award winner making $32 million. He was at the center of the sport and had been there ever since January. The dynamic fascinated me. Everything Skubal had worked for, all the doubters he had proven wrong, led him to a point of both extreme notoriety and extreme scrutiny. We talked through that, and what it was like. Skubal kept insisting criticism — whether from fans, media, whatever, didn’t bother him. It had been fascinating to see Skubal blossom from the kid in 2020 to the open, accessible, opinionated man he had become. In the course of that conversation, talking about the loose body in his elbow that eventually required surgery, he said the quote that would go on to cause a local firestorm.“If I could go back, I probably should have got an MRI in January and hammered it out to where I was done with it in the offseason,” Skubal said, “But there were also other factors in play. I was going through arbitration. The decision by the organization to take me to court, I think that probably had some impact subconsciously.”