Winners and Losers of Dodgers' Seismic Tarik Skubal Trade

The Dodgers on Saturday night made baseball’s worst nightmare come true, as they swung a blockbuster trade for Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, surrendering a pair of top-100 prospects in Zyhir Hope and River Ryan, as well as the club’s 17th-ranked prospect, to net the back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner.

The deal will send rival executives scrambling to find ways to keep up with the clock ticking on the deadline, and has baseball fans sounding like Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad as they curse Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. He can’t keep getting away with it!

With a move so seismic, there are clear winners and losers. So let’s examine who ends up where as the dust settles on the Skubal deal.

Winners

Scott Boras

Baseball’s most successful agent had to be positively giddy when client Juan Soto landed in New York two years ago, as he knew a big performance in a big market could lead to big bucks. It did.

Now, imagine Boras’s reaction to the Skubal deal. The reigning back-to-back AL Cy Young Award winner will be pitching for the reigning back-to-back World Series champions in one of baseball’s two biggest markets.

Skubal was going to get paid big money, perhaps record money, this coming winter no matter where he landed this summer. But pitching in the big October moments for the Dodgers? Boras is going to be like Scrooge McDuck diving into a heaping pile of commission come November.

Tarik Skubal

See previous write-up. But in all seriousness, Skubal is a winner of this deal for more than financial reasons, of which there are hundreds of millions.

Skubal has only ever pitched for the Tigers, who have never advanced further than the Division Series. That’s been no fault of the ace lefty, who has pitched to a sparkling 2.04 ERA in 39 ⅔ career postseason innings. He’s been big-time.

Now, he’ll be pitching for the best team he’s ever played on with the best offense he’s ever had piling up run support for him. This will be Skubal’s best chance yet to win a World Series. And he'll get to enjoy the Dodgers' best-in-class player experience.

Oh, and it will be a homecoming for the Hayward, Ca., native, the cherry on top.

Super rotations

We’ve seen some truly special pitching rotations in baseball history. The Dodgers’ Koufax-Drysdale-Sutton triumvirate of the ‘60s. The Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz trio of the ‘90s Braves. The Randy Johnson-Curt Schilling duo of the 2001 Diamondbacks.

Look, it’s ridiculous to put these Dodgers in the conversation with those guys already. They’re not even healthy at the moment. But on paper, this has a chance to be one of the most talented rotations of this era. Skubal is a dominant lefthander with a bulldog mentality. Yoshinobu Yamamoto might be the best big-game pitcher in the sport. Blake Snell is a two-time Cy Young Award winner and somehow now the third-best starter on the team. Tyler Glasnow is an electric righthander who can rack up strikeouts with the best of them. Oh, and then there’s some guy named Shohei Ohtani, whose devastating fastball-sweeper combo had him in the running for his first-ever Cy Young Award before a pesky knee injury came into the equation. All-Star Justin Wrobleski—and his 2.88 ERA—is the odd man out.

Los Angeles rode its starting pitching to a repeat title last year. If healthy, there are few teams—if any—that can compete with the firepower in this pitching staff.

Dave Roberts

Roberts is one of the best managers in baseball and anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding themselves. No, you couldn’t just put anyone in the manager’s chair and watch this team win, contrary to popular belief.

But man, did Roberts’s job just get a whole lot easier with the acquisition of Skubal. After navigating much of the season without the likes of Snell and Glasnow, both hurlers are now working their way back, with Snell already on a rehab assignment. So there are reinforcements on the way.

Plus, importing Skubal allows Roberts to follow the same formula as last season. Load-manage Ohtani as a pitcher until the games really start to matter, then unleash the two-way monster.

But most of all, Roberts now has the envy of every other manager in the big leagues: a starting rotation with no weak spots.

3-peat trademark

Remember when the Chiefs advanced to Super Bowl LIX and Kansas City, perhaps in anticipation of the NFL’s first-ever three-peat, got together with nine-time NBA champion Pat Riley to make sure it was ok that they use his trademarked phrase ”Three-Peat” on merchandise if they won? You may not remember, because it didn’t age well.

I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, because it’s still only August after all. Heck, just last year, the Blue Jays pushed the Dodgers to the absolute brink, coming as close as a team can get to winning without actually winning. Maybe someone will knock off the Dodgers come October.

But with a Skubal-led rotation, it’s far more likely than not that Los Angeles will find itself in the Fall Classic and Riley will be getting a call from the Dodgers’ representatives this fall.

Losers

Tigers

If you looked at the return the Tigers got and felt underwhelmed, you were not alone.

Look, Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris didn’t get fleeced here. He landed the promising Zyhir Hope, a potential future All-Star at a premium position in the outfield. River Ryan debuted for the Dodgers in 2024 and showed immense promise, then blew out his elbow, missed two years and returned this year to the tune of a 4.46 ERA in 36 ⅓ Triple-A innings. Brady Smith is a lottery ticket who has pitched to a 4.72 ERA in two minor league seasons, though he has racked up 142 strikeouts in 95 ⅓ innings.

That's two top-100 prospects and another promising pitcher. The Tigers did well. But the club was likely hurt by the fact that Skubal is a rental and one who comes with nearly a $10 million price tag for the remainder of the season. Yet, reports were swirling that Detroit was seeking MLB-ready talent in return for Skubal.

As talented as these prospects are, this is not MLB-ready talent. And with the sheer number of buyers out there, it’s fair to wonder if Detroit could have waited things out and perhaps coaxed an even bigger offer out of a team more desperate than the Dodgers.

It’s also fair to wonder if the Tigers should even have been in this position. The club was unable to build a winner around Skubal, didn’t extend a serious long-term extension offer to the ace and then balked at trading him during the winter when his value was highest.

That's the biggest reason why Detroit ends up in the losers column.

Tigers fans

It stinks that the Tigers never won a World Series with Skubal headlining their rotation. It stinks that Skubal had to be traded. It stinks that it had to be this way. For seven seasons, Tigers fans had the pleasure of watching Skubal toe the rubber. They watched him blossom from an underwhelming rookie into the overpowering ace he is today. They watched him send batters back to the opposing dugout shaking ther heads in April and then again in October.

Skubal didn't want to leave Detroit. And judging by the warm ovation he received while walking off the mound during his last start as a Tiger this past Wednesday, the fans didn't want him going anywhere either.

Baseball is beautiful. It can also be a cruel mistress sometimes. The Skubal trade was a harsh reminder of the latter for Detroit fans. But with some talented youth incoming in the deal, and some talented young players already at the MLB level, perhaps Detroit fans will soon be seeing the beauty of the game once again.

Chances of baseball being played in 2027

Many people point to the Dodgers as a sign of everything that’s wrong with the modern baseball economic system. The deferred payments. The endless supply of television revenue. The star-studded roster.

Yet, the Dodgers are also player development wizards and one of the smartest organizations at drafting and scouring for talent. That’s why others insist it’s the system that allowed the Dodgers to get to this point, not the Dodgers themselves.

And that’s an argument you’ll hear this winter from MLB owners as they push for a salary cap once the CBA expires in December. And it may be especially convincing—particularly with the public—seeing as the Dodgers were able to add arguably the best pitcher in the game to baseball’s best roster using baseball’s best farm system that was hardly even depleted by the Skubal deal.

In the eyes of MLB, the Dodgers’ Skubal blockbuster only widens the perceived gap between the haves and have-nots. And that will only widen the gap between the players and owners at the end of the league year.

The Brewers and Rays

Was it money? Was it prospect hugging? The Brewers, armed with baseball’s best record and with vivid memories of last year’s dog-walking by the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, were rumored to be very much in the mix for Skubal. Ditto for the Rays, who boast baseball’s best record and one of the deepest farm systems in the game.

Maybe neither team wanted to surrender their top prospects, Jesús Made in Milwaukee’s case, Theo Gillen in Tampa Bay’s. But, as we saw with the Dodgers, it didn’t take your top prospect to pry Skubal loose from Detroit. Perhaps the roughly $9.4 million Skubal is owed in the remainder of the season made these two smaller market teams leery.

Or maybe it was a combination of both. The smaller market Rays and Brewers weighed the money, the inherent risks involved in the deal, and the prospect capital it would take to acquire Skubal, and simply determined it was too dicey a deal for their respective tastes.

Whatever the reasoning, it feels like a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was missed out on here.

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