Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
Hello and good morning, if you somehow hadn’t heard the news yet, Tarik Skubal is now a Dodger, which was analyzed on this site yesterday. Unsurprisingly, I thought that was #VeryGood.
Aside from people online incessantly crying about the Dodgers now, there has been some other takes on it.
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There hasn’t been a ton of reaction in terms of anybody involved with the trade yet, probably because it isn’t officially announced, but Skubal did briefly talk about it.
California Post: Notably, he seemed understandably emotional about leaving the Tigers.
“I’m excited to be a Dodger,” he said. “I’m excited to get down there and meet all those guys, and chase three championships in a row. That’s hard to do. So I’m excited to be a part of that. But yeah, it’s a lot of different emotions. Definitely kind of a roller coaster a little bit.”
Over the next several minutes, Skubal detailed those dueling feelings, fighting back tears as he reflected on his decade in Detroit.
Tarik Skubal GETS EMOTIONAL after trade to the Dodgers (?ESPN) pic.twitter.com/Heo0egmQs0
— Darren M. Haynes (@DarrenMHaynes) August 2, 2026
The Athletic: One unnamed Dodgers player was amusingly smug about it at least.
“Did you expect anything else?” one Dodgers player asked as the news filtered through the clubhouse Saturday night.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto also expressed surprise when informed after the game.
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In terms of analysis, you won’t be surprised, but people like this for the Dodgers. They also mostly like it for the Tigers, as well, despite the crying over the package.
MLB: Starting with a wider view of things, Mike Petriello looks at where Skubal fits among the best aces ever traded midseason, and he’s unsurprisingly one of the best.
FanGraphs: They talk about the Dodgers likely losing the $/WAR game handedly and having to come to terms with that not mattering before doing trades like this.
But the Dodgers are in the unique situation of not feeling that pinch so sharply. And while this trade will surely raise the ire of fans who think the Dodgers are ruining baseball, there’s no need to dwell on that too much today; after all, we have a whole locked-out offseason ahead of us. Instead, I like to think about it in terms of the Dodgers understanding that you have to trade away good players to make your team good in the present day. Miguel Vargas is an All-Star this year, and the Dodgers would do the Tommy Edman deal again in a heartbeat. Trading for Skubal is just a way of taking some of the value they’re racking up on the farm and getting it into the majors right away. It’s Detroit’s gain in the long run, for sure – the guys they got are likely to contribute for years to come – but that won’t bother the Dodgers too much. They just got Tarik Skubal!
Baseball Prospectus: They mostly focus on the external stuff this will lead to, but also pinpoint what made this common sense for them Dodgers.
But what made the move so easy for Los Angeles to make, as opposed to other clubs, is that they have so many other prospects to fall back on if this deal goes sour. They can always make more, and that, more than money, is what divides baseball. None of this has anything to do with payroll, or unequal revenue, or any bogeyman on hand. It’s just a sports team being the best sports team at making a sports team. You can hate them for it—one could argue, there’s great pleasure, and narrative weight, in doing just that—but you can’t legislate it away. It’s what the whole thing is supposed to be about.
The Athletic: The Dodgers get two A+ grades and one A, while the Tigers get an A, B, and B-. Tim Britton also provided a nice reminder about the reality of how baseball works.
As inevitable as the Dodgers feel in the moment, it’s important to remember how close they’ve come to elimination in each of the past two postseasons. They needed to win a bullpen game to get past the Padres in the 2024 NLDS, and they needed Yoshinobu Yamamoto to submit a historic performance (and, you know, a pretty memorable home run and some clutch defense) to come back and seize last year’s World Series from the Blue Jays.
And in 2025, that was with the full complement of their rotation healthy. Yes, L.A. can slow-play it with Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani all regular season to give those guys the best chance to be healthy when it matters in October. But they still might not be. And rather than upgrading their biggest right-now need with a right-handed backup infielder to help Tommy Edman at second base, the Dodgers filled their biggest plausible October need.
ESPN: Bradford Doolittle perhaps gave the only real negative analysis of the deal from a writer for the Tigers, giving the Dodgers an A and the Tigers a D, questioning if it was the best deal they could get. All of this also gets an F from the baseball fans perspective because they would want things to be more even or whatever.
I don’t blame the Dodgers. If I were a gazelle, I wouldn’t blame the lion that’s biting into my flanks, either, because that’s what lions do. But I sure wouldn’t like it, and it would hurt like hell. At a certain point, the Dodgers’ accumulation of star talent becomes tiresome, and the coming postseason would be a lot more fun if Skubal were positioned to take down the Dodgers rather than aiding their quest for permanent domination.
I’d argue this is better. Now if the Dodgers lose, they get to pretend they were even a 50/50 favorite to win the title and claim they choked horribly. But if they win, well they were already favorites with or without Skubal, so there’s no difference for them there. This just makes things much more defined for most, and more exciting, really. Also, it allows them a cope where if the Dodgers three-peat they can use it to pray Rob Manfred and their billionaire ownership daddies save them.
Baseball America: Amid all the outcry about the return, they make the point that the perception differs from the reality of these deals, and that this is right in line with historical valuations of aces.
The trade return is right in line with the normal cost of acquiring an ace on an expiring contract at the trade deadline, but it’s also a prospect cost light enough that the deal seems like a no-brainer for the Dodgers.
The Tigers got a normal level of return for Skubal, but if he dominates for LA in the postseason, it will leave many wondering if it would have been wise for someone else to overpay a bit in prospects to keep the back-to-back World Series champs from adding one of the best pitchers in baseball.
The Athletic: Keith Law also likes the return for the Tigers.
The return is surprisingly good for a two-month rental (plus October) of a pitcher who was elite as recently as last year. And OK, fine, he’s still elite, but he’s not quite at his Cy Young-level in stuff, and he missed time already this season with loose bodies in his elbow that required surgery. The Tigers obtained two prospects from my midseason top 70, both high-upside players with significant risk factors, and a third who’ll be a top-20 prospect with the Tigers even though he was overshadowed by the crazy depth in the Dodgers’ system. That’s a lot for a rental.
Bless You Boys: From a Tigers perspective, they believe the return isn’t quite what they wanted, but it’s fine.
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In terms of dramatic reactions, well … the usual suspects.
USA Today: Shouldn’t surprise anybody that Bob Nightengale thinks this guarantees the Dodgers a World Series.
Los Angeles Times: Unsurprisingly, Bill Plaschke did the same.
California Post: Dylan Hernandez focuses on the pressure now on the Dodgers and how there’s no excuses to not win.
As baseball’s financial behemoth, the Dodgers are used to operating in a world in which anything short of a World Series title is considered an abject failure.
But with the overwhelming advantages they have now, blowing this particular chance at a three-peat would be viewed as one of the greatest choke jobs in sports history.
The Sporting Tribune: Less dramatically, Arash Markazi says the Dodgers had already started leaning into being the bad guy, and the trade only locks that attitude in.
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The Athletic: Ken Rosenthal wraps all of it up rather nicely, honestly. While talking about the inequalities in the game that should be looked at and addressed in the off-season, he also explains that it’s not the whole picture and the reality of things will make the haters bristle.
So yes, a third straight World Series title seems quite possible, if not as inevitable as MLB would like you to believe.
The hysteria is coming. The lockout is coming. And amid all the noise, something important will be obscured.
The Dodgers are good at this. Better than everyone else.
They’re writing paragraphs to you on social media if you say this. Great theater.
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Surely more stuff to come as he actually arrives and the deal is finalized.
Anyway, enjoy it.
