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Tarik Skubal is a … Los Angeles Dodger?! Late Saturday night — two days before Monday’s MLB trade deadline — the Dodgers were finalizing a trade for the Detroit Tigers’ ace in exchange for three of their top-30 prospects. It felt shocking but also inevitable after the Tigers’ July collapse left them looking to move Skubal. Multiple teams were in on the two-time American League Cy Young winner, but the Dodgers got the deal done. Who got the better end of the trade — and what does this mean for October? Bradford Doolittle breaks down both sides of the deal.
Los Angeles Dodgers get:
LHP Tarik Skubal
Detroit Tigers get:
OF Zyhir Hope
RHP River Ryan
RHP Brady Smith
Dodgers grade: A
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Let’s consider this from the Dodgers’ overall big league level of talent, measuring the period from 2023 to the present. The Dodgers have the hitters ranked Nos. 2, 7, 15, 25, 30 and 33 by wins above average, per Baseball Reference. (That’s Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Kyle Tucker, Max Muncy and Will Smith.) They have the relievers ranked Nos. 14, 28, 32 and 38 by ERA+. (Tanner Scott, Evan Phillips, Alex Vesia and Edwin Diaz.) Their rotation, also by ERA+, has Nos. 2, 4, 5, 7 and 24. (Skubal, Ohtani, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow.) It is very much an All-Star roster — stuffed with potential Hall of Famers who are all producing at a high level.
It’s amazing, it’s an abomination, and it has become a rallying cry for the owners in the CBA talks. And it’s very bad news for anyone hoping to topple the Dodgers this October and prevent what now feels increasingly like an inevitable three-peat.
Skubal is the best pitcher in the sport, going to the best team in the sport, and the worst of it for non-Dodger fans is that the team you were hoping would land Skubal did not get him.
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Here is the essential thing to impart: The Dodgers did not need Skubal. They are the World Series favorites with him, and they would have been heavy favorites without him. The biggest short-term gain for the Dodgers is that by having Skubal, he can’t beat them this October in the uniform of the Brewers, Rays, Braves, Yankees or any other team that might confront the L.A. steamroller in a few months. Los Angeles also has been dealing with Ohtani’s knee injury, a malady somewhat shrouded in mystery, but it might limit him as a pitcher for the near term. For most teams, the loss of a pitcher putting up Cy Young-quality numbers would open a yawning chasm of a roster hole. But the Dodgers aren’t most teams — and they bolstered their rotation anyway.
So, yes, the Dodgers get an A, and that grade holds true whether they ink Skubal to an extension and prevent him from reaching free agency. It holds true even before we consider the players L.A. gave up to land him. The Dodgers, the best team in baseball, the two-time defending champions, have acquired the best pitcher in the sport. In doing so, they enhance championship odds that were already by far the highest in MLB. What more do you need to know?
Tigers grade: D
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Detroit’s return in this deal feels like a bad dream. OK, let’s calm down. Skubal, as good as he is, was on an expiring deal. There is only so much value that can be extracted from a trade partner for a player who might be a free agent in four months. The fair-value matches you can conjure in these scenarios won’t make the hearts of Detroit fans go pitter-patter, though you can always hope that the real-world outcome is that with multiple teams vying for a true difference-maker, those fair-value assessments might go out the window.
Zyhir Hope is a top 30-or-so prospect across baseball. That’s a valuable prospect. But on most prospect lists, he’s the fourth-best outfield prospect in the Dodgers’ system. So for the best pitcher in baseball, the Tigers could not command the Dodgers’ best prospect out of their amazing surplus of promising outfielders?
River Ryan has stud potential, but he’s 27 and blew out his elbow after his 2024 debut for the Dodgers. He didn’t pitch last season, and this season, he has a 4.46 ERA over eight outings for Oklahoma City. Smith, 21, was a third-round pick as a prep righty in the 2023 draft. He’s 0-10 over 30 professional starts with a 4.72 ERA. The prospect wonks like him as a top-30 prospect for L.A., so maybe we have to look past the ugly superficial results.
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Hope, Ryan and Brady Smith can all help the Tigers at some point. Hope and Ryan can be All-Star-level, impact performers. But there is also an annoyingly large chance that, as a group, these players compile less championship probability added for Detroit than Skubal will for the Dodgers between now and the end of this year’s World Series. That’s a cynical way to look at it, but this whole thing is mildly depressing.
Maybe this is truly the best the Tigers could do. Though the Brewers seem to have the kind of prospect depth to trump this deal, maybe Milwaukee wasn’t willing to go there. Maybe it was too rich for any other team.
Still, from the Tigers’ perspective, it feels as if they could have waited longer before calling it a deal. We are still more than a day from the deadline, after all, and sometimes, teams get a little aggressive as the clock ticks down. Could the Tigers have gotten more if they had leveraged that? Alas, we will never know.
Non-Dodgers baseball fan grade: F
I don’t blame the Dodgers. If I were a gazelle, I wouldn’t blame the lion that’s biting into my flanks, either, because that’s what lions do. But I sure wouldn’t like it, and it would hurt like hell. At a certain point, the Dodgers’ accumulation of star talent becomes tiresome, and the coming postseason would be a lot more fun if Skubal were positioned to take down the Dodgers rather than aiding their quest for permanent domination.
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