The Trade That Broke Baseball

“Did you do it?”

“Yes.”

“What did it cost?”

“Everything.”

When the Los Angeles Dodgers acquired Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers for a package of minor league prospects on Saturday night, the Boys in Blue solidified their standing as the prohibitive favorites to win their third consecutive World Series.

They also almost certainly guaranteed that we’ll get a lockout in 2027 that could potentially cost us the entire MLB season.

For the Dodgers, the deal was a no-brainer. Not only is Skubal the reigning back-to- back American League Cy Young Award winner, but he also recently became the second-fastest left-hander in MLB history to reach 1,000 career strikeouts. And despite what some might say about LA’s bloated payroll, the reality of the situation is that

they’ve been holding their pitching staff together with glue and scotch tape for almost two-and-a-half seasons now. In 2024, the Dodgers entered the postseason with just two established starters (Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jack Flaherty). In 2025, three of their ‘Four Aces’ (Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow) had just 43 starts combined during the regular season. This season, Snell and Glasnow have just eight combined starts as of this writing and Ohtani, in all likelihood, won’t pitch at all again this season. To be clear, the Dodgers didn’t trade for Skubal just because they could, they did it because they legitimately need him.

Unfortunately for baseball fans outside of Los Angeles, not everybody sees it that way.

The perception around MLB for at least a year now has been that the deep-pocketed Dodgers are bad for baseball. In January 2025, New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner publicly lamented the Dodgers’ spending when he said, "It's difficult for

most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that they're doing”. A few months later, Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort told the Denver Gazette, “The competitive imbalance in baseball has gotten to the point of ludicrosity now”. Most recently, one high-ranking ream official told ESPN’s Jeff Passan that other MLB owners are “ready to burn the f---ing house down” if they can’t institute a salary cap to curb LA’s spending.

For better or for worse, the prevailing narrative around the sport seems to be that you can literally buy championships in baseball.  The only problem with that line of thinking? It’s just not true. Only four times since 2001 has the team with the biggest payroll that season gone on to win the World Series. As recently as 2023, the teams with the two biggest payrolls - the Mets and Yankees – missed the postseason altogether. Even these Dodgers, the supposed juggernauts of the sport, needed heroic plays from three of their lowest-paid position players (Miguel Rojas, Enrique Hernandez and Andy Pages) to steal Games 6 and 7 of the World Series last season in Toronto after falling behind 3-2 in the series. In short, a massive payroll means almost nothing in a high-variance sport like baseball.

But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story.

Look, an MLB lockout after the season has seemed like an inevitably ever since the owners proposed the institution of a salary cap during labor negotiations for the first time since 1994. But given how much vitriol we’ve seen from the baseball community in the last 24 hours, the idea that the 2027 season gets wiped out entirely is well within the realm of possibility. 

By trading for Skubal, the Dodgers may have just broken baseball.