Inside Tarik Skubal’s last two days as a TigerplayTarik Skubal emotional after trade to Dodgers (0:51)Tim KeownAug 2, 2026, 03:54 PM ETClose
- Senior Writer for ESPN The Magazine
- Columnist for ESPN.com
- Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)
TARIK SKUBAL SPENT much of his final day as a Detroit Tiger expertly deploying a relatively new skill: pretending everything is perfectly normal when nothing is.
Being the lead actor in the MLB trade deadline can feel like an out-of-body experience. The hours tick down, the world contracts, the periphery ceases to exist. Everyone seems to have an opinion or a source or a prediction, and none of it makes sense to you. It’s both flattering and maddening, and sometimes detachment is the only path to inner peace.
And so, in his unflinching pursuit of sanity amid chaos, Skubal sat at his locker late Saturday afternoon in the communal cell that is the visiting clubhouse in West Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park and spoke to a small group of reporters about something of utmost importance in his life right now: true-crime documentaries.
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In a few hours, his life would be upended. He would walk across the field after the second inning, from first-base dugout to center-field clubhouse, and receive a phone call informing him he’d been traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the most predictable result of an unpredictable trade-deadline weekend. He would remove his Tigers uniform, remain in the clubhouse — “it didn’t feel like it was the right time to go back there,” he stated — and call it a night after nearly nine years in the Tigers’ organization.
But for now, with all of that both unknown and unknowable, he wanted to talk docs: Ted Bundy; Bryan Kohberger and the University of Idaho killings; South Carolina’s Murdaugh murders. He watched a documentary just that morning. You ever wonder about the mild-mannered, innocuous neighbors who harbor horrible secrets and hidden bodies? Skubal does, too.
The more he talked, the wider his eyes grew, the atrocities stacking up like recommendations in a Netflix queue. He got up to leave, headed out into the oppressive heat to get his work in, but before he did, he told the group he’s aghast at the number of depraved people who walk among us.
“Now I look at people I pass on the street,” he stated, eyes widening. “And I wonder.”
WHAT BEGINS NOW is something entirely different. As a Tiger, Skubal was a fun story of a ninth-round draftee who, through hard work, determination and phenomenal talent, became a back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner. As a Dodger, with the game approaching a near-certain lockout when the collective bargaining agreement expires in December, Skubal has unwittingly become a soldier for multiple sides in this particular culture war.
Joining Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Kyle Tucker and Blake Snell and Freddie Freeman, he is a symbol of the game’s injustices. How can the Reds and the Twins compete when the Dodgers have their pick of the game’s biggest stars? Why should they even try?
Skubal is, of course, a sign that baseball needs a salary cap, as the owners insist, and that a lockout is now inevitable. Or maybe he’s a sign that smaller-market teams like Detroit simply refuse to expend the resources to compete. He is, of course, going to sign with the Dodgers in the offseason, further upending baseball’s uneven salary structure, even though the only preference he expressed before Saturday night was to remain a Tiger. He is, of course, a sign of a greedy player who won’t give a hometown discount to the team that drafted and developed him, even though that team did not offer a competitive long-term contract for him to turn down.
When Skubal dons that L.A. jersey for the first time, he will become just about anything you want him to be.
THE TIGERS SENT out flares. They pulled Casey Mize, another trade candidate, from his scheduled start on Friday. Manager A.J. Hinch revealed Saturday afternoon that the team would not post probable pitchers for the Seattle series, which begins Tuesday. “For obvious reasons,” he stated.
Skubal tried to stay away from his phone, or at least make a valiant effort.
“There’s no point in worrying about it,” he told me the day before the trade. “I have no say in what’s going on.”
It had become a familiar refrain, the only one that makes sense, but sometimes the current is too strong and the dam too weak, and the water makes it through.
“I try not to pay attention,” he stated. “I don’t believe anything I see anywhere. That’s how I operate. But I see some things where they use my name, like I told someone something and I haven’t talked to them in months. Through all of this, I haven’t stated anything about any other team but this one. I just wonder, Where did you get that?“
He spent months in the same position as his team, trying to pretend everything is fine. Are the Tigers contenders? They definitely weren’t in April and May, but they definitely have been ever since. At five games under .500, 5½ games back in the division and trailing four teams in the wild card race, is it too late? Today’s answer could be different than tomorrow’s, and Skubal rode the waves along with everyone else.
“It is interesting,” he stated. “Yeah — interesting. It’s your life, right? You have to figure out where to live, where your family can go, but the focus is still baseball. It’s definitely a weird place to be.”
JUST HOW WEIRD? When the front office pulled Mize from his start against the A’s in favor of a bullpen game, it was seen as the unfurling of the white flag. The Tigers took the ball from one of their best starters and handed it to a sketchy bullpen and hoped for the best. They won 13-1.
It would turn out to be Skubal’s last normal game as a Tiger. It came after he helped celebrate his son’s first birthday over FaceTime. (“It’s hilarious to watch a 1-year-old demolish a whole birthday cake,” he told me.)
He sat in the dugout next to his friend Mize, his teammate nearly every day since they were drafted together in 2018. They clapped and laughed when 21-year-old phenom Max Clark flicked his bat at a Jeffrey Springs slider and dinked it into left field for his first big league hit. They whooped it up in the dugout when Dillon Dingler’s grand slam made it 9-1, and again when Ben Malgeri’s first big league homer made it 13-1, proving there’s nothing like a trip through the grim streets of the A’s bullpen to promote the myth that there’s nothing to see here.
For something that seemed ordained from the moment Skubal won his arbitration hearing in the offseason, earning $32 million instead of the Tigers’ offer of $19 million, the end happened quickly. The Dodgers pulled two top outfield prospects, Zyhir Hope and Kendall George, from the lineup Saturday night in Tulsa at roughly the same time Skubal was in the clubhouse learning of the trade.
Word of the trade began filtering from the stands into the Tigers’ dugout around the seventh inning. Nobody talked about it, Hinch stated, but everybody knew. Hinch, for months tasked with acknowledging the reality of the situation while simultaneously attempting to defuse it, had a brief struggle with his emotions when asked after the game to describe what it was like to manage a unique talent like Skubal.
“As much as I’ve been wondering if this is going to happen, I don’t think you’re prepared to answer the massive question like that,” he stated. “Obviously, it’s been incredible. I’ve watched this guy rise to the top of the sport. I’ll forever be grateful that our paths crossed. His presence, his work ethic, his dominance — there’s so much to go through it’s hard to capture it in one quote or one setting. But very grateful I was able to manage him for the time that I did.”
After the win Friday night, music ricocheted from one wall to the other. “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” made an unexpected appearance. The mood was light. The Tigers looked and sounded like a team with hope, with dreams that might extend beyond 6 p.m. ET on Monday. Two 21-year-olds, Max Clark and Kevin McGonigle, looked exactly like a promising future. Maybe this would be enough to keep it all together. Everyone laughed and joked and tried to stay out of each other’s way in the cramped quarters.
After the win Saturday night, Skubal stood in a room outside the clubhouse and choked up as he tried to articulate what it meant to leave the only organization he ever knew. He stopped for a full 13 seconds at one point, apologizing as he worked to compose himself. He went from there to the clubhouse, where he made his way around the room, hugging his now-former teammates.
There was music, but the air seemed heavy, inert. Skubal hugged Javy Baez for a long time, neither saying a word. The mood was far from victorious. The time had come to stop pretending any of it was normal.
