The Dodgers were already the best team in baseball. Then they went and got Tarik Skubal.
Los Angeles acquired the two-time reigning AL Cy Young winner from Detroit for outfielder Zyhir Hope, right-hander River Ryan and right-hander Brady Smith. The news broke Saturday night and the Dodgers confirmed on Sunday.
Depth is not the point. The reigning back-to-back World Series champion just added a top-two pitcher on Earth for a two-month rental.
The Rotation Is Absurd Now
Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani. That is a five-man rotation stacked with All-Stars and Cy Young hardware.
Andrew Friedman has been assembling this kind of pitching staff for a decade and this might be the peak version. Every starter can go seven innings. Every one of them can headline a playoff series.
Nobody in the National League is throwing five arms like that in October. Nobody in the American League is either.
Detroit Punted the Season
The Tigers stayed in the AL Central race for most of the summer, then decided the return package on Skubal was too good to pass up. Zyhir Hope is a legitimate top outfield prospect. River Ryan and Brady Smith are polished arms.
Trading your ace as a pure rental usually stings for the fan base. Getting three real pieces back softens it considerably.
Detroit is going to be better in 2027 because of this trade. That is the calculation Scott Harris made and it is a defensible one.
Skubal Is About to Get Paid
Skubal hits free agency after this season and he is expected to command a larger contract than Yamamoto’s 12-year, $325 million deal. That is the market for a two-time Cy Young winner entering his prime.
The Dodgers get his services for the stretch run and October. They may or may not keep him after that. Either way, they got a legitimate playoff ace for a couple of months without giving up a franchise-altering package.
That is the benefit of being the Dodgers. The prospect capital never runs dry.
The Trade Deadline Math
The August 3 deadline came and went with plenty of deals, but this is the one that reshapes the postseason. The Dodgers lead MLB in team ERA and run differential and they just added the best pitcher available.
Every other contender has to reassess. The Phillies pitching depth suddenly looks less imposing. The Braves and Yankees know what a Dodgers-led World Series looks like from painful recent memory.
Los Angeles is the runaway favorite to three-peat and it is not particularly close.
Repeats Are Hard, Three-Peats Are Harder
No team has won three consecutive World Series titles since the Yankees dynasty of 1998-2000. The historical difficulty is real.
The Dodgers do not appear to care about historical difficulty. They lead every major team metric that matters. They have the deepest pitching staff in baseball. They have Ohtani. They have Mookie Betts. They have Freddie Freeman.
The Dodgers did not need Skubal. They wanted to send a message anyway. Los Angeles is trying to win the whole thing again and they refuse to leave anything to chance.
Good luck stopping them.
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.
