The Dodgers Traded for Tarik Skubal Los Angeles Just Added the Best Pitcher in Baseball
The Dodgers were already the best team in baseball. They just added the best pitcher.
Los Angeles acquired Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers less than 48 hours before the trade deadline, and it is not close to being a fair fight anymore. Skubal is a back-to-back Cy Young Award winner. He is the best left-handed starter in the American League. Now he is going to be the best left-handed starter in the National League.
The return going to Detroit is significant. Outfielder Zyhir Hope, one of the top prospects in the Dodgers system, is headed to the Tigers along with pitchers River Ryan and Brady Smith. That is a real haul. Hope is a legit five-tool outfielder who scouts have been projecting as a future All-Star. Ryan has already pitched in the majors. Smith is another arm with upside.
None of it is going to feel like enough for Tigers fans. Skubal is that special. He is 29 years old, controllable through 2027, and coming off a season where he posted a 2.39 ERA with 228 strikeouts across 192 innings. He was already going to be the biggest name on the block. The bidding was going to be aggressive. Detroit could not keep him without paying him $250 million on his next deal, and they were not ready to commit to that.
So they traded him. And Los Angeles won the bidding.
The Dodgers rotation, on paper, is now video game numbers. You can basically pick any five of Skubal, Shohei Ohtani (whenever he pitches again), Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, and a bunch of other arms. This team was already the World Series favorite. Adding Skubal turns them into something closer to the 1998 Yankees.
The Tigers, meanwhile, have to figure out what they are. Detroit is 60-51, in the mix in the AL Central race. Losing Skubal takes a huge chunk out of their ceiling. Riley Greene and Colt Keith and the young lineup are still there. Jack Flaherty was already a rotation piece. But Skubal was the ace. Without him, this team is a wild card team at best.
The return does help long term. Hope in particular has a chance to be a legitimate cornerstone player. If he develops into what the Dodgers thought he would be, this trade will look better in three or four years than it does today.
For now, though, this is a huge win for LA and a hard pill to swallow in Detroit. The Dodgers are pushing all their chips into the middle. They have won multiple recent titles and clearly do not care about long-term prospect capital anymore. They will spend what they have to spend and trade who they have to trade.
Skubal makes his LA debut this week. He will pitch every fifth day in a rotation that is going to devour opposing lineups. His fastball plays. His slider is elite. His changeup makes right-handed hitters look silly.
The rest of the National League should be scared. The rest of Major League Baseball, honestly, should also be scared. The team that has already been the best in the sport for the last half-decade just got even better.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
