The Los Angeles Dodgers acquired Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers minutes before the August 3 trade deadline. Two weeks later, the results are exactly as scary as everyone predicted.
Skubal has made three starts in a Dodgers uniform. His line: 22 innings pitched, 30 strikeouts, four walks, one earned run. That is a 0.41 ERA and a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 7.5. In the middle of a pennant race. Against playoff-caliber lineups.
The Dodgers now have Skubal, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Blake Snell in the same rotation. Everyone else in the National League is trying to figure out how to plan an October pitching matchup against that. The answer, so far, seems to be that you cannot.
The prospect cost was real. The Tigers got a huge package, headlined by pitching prospect Jackson Jobe and infielder Kevin McGonigle. Both are expected to be everyday major-league contributors within a year. Detroit made the right call. Skubal was going to walk in free agency after 2027, and the Tigers were not going to pay him $40-plus million a year to be an ace on a team not ready to win.
None of that helps the National League right now. The Dodgers were already the favorites in the NL West and a leading World Series pick before the trade. With Skubal, they are the clear favorite to represent the NL in October. The oddsmakers agree. LA opened as minus 140 to win the pennant the day after the trade.
The larger question is how the Dodgers plan to deploy this rotation in the playoffs. You cannot start all four of Skubal, Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Snell in a five-game division series. Someone has to move to the bullpen. Someone has to eat innings in a piggyback role. The math is not clean.
The best guess: Skubal, Ohtani, and Yamamoto start the three games in the NLDS, with Snell available for long relief on regular rest and to open Game 4 if needed. Dave Roberts has been mixing and matching pitching for years. This is more of the same, just with better toys.
The Tigers, meanwhile, have hit the reset button in earnest. They are 12 games back in the AL Central and clearly rebuilding around Riley Greene and their prospect haul. That is fine. Detroit fans understood that trading Skubal was inevitable. What they wanted was value. They got it.
The rest of the league has to deal with this now. San Diego and Philadelphia are the two most likely teams to have to face this Dodgers rotation in October. Neither has an offense built to score four runs against Skubal in a single game, let alone three or four games in a series.
The Dodgers spent big to build this. They gave up prospects to add to it. They now have the deepest, hardest-throwing, most complete rotation in baseball. Someone is going to have to beat all of them in October to win a title.
Good luck.
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.
