The Rays or Brewers Must Trade for Tarik Skubal

On Wednesday afternoon, Tarik Skubal threw what looked for all the world to be his last pitch as a member of the Detroit Tigers.

Skubal fanned six Orioles — including his 1,000th career strikeout — and held the Orioles scoreless into the seventh inning. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, wanting his ace to finish on a valedictory note, let Skubal pitch himself into some trouble in the seventh, but lifted him once Leody Taveras singled in Baltimore’s first run.

The Tigers led 7-1 when Skubal left the game, needing just seven more outs to seal the victory. The bullpen let six more Orioles score (with two of those runs charged to Skubal) by the time it recorded three outs. The Tigers ultimately lost 10-9 in 12 innings to drop to six games out of first place in the AL Central and 4.5 games out of the last AL Wild Card spot. They entered Thursday’s action with a 24.4% chance of making the playoffs, and with so many teams to climb over in the standings, I’m shocked their odds are that good.

Skubal is, by an enormous margin, the best player considered to be available at this year’s trade deadline. And in a rare blessing from the gods of microcosm, his last start illustrated perfectly why this is the case.

With all of Monday’s games coming after the 6 p.m. EDT trade deadline (and Detroit idle on Monday anyway), Skubal’s spot in the rotation won’t come up again until that milestone is past. Unless the Tigers reverse their fortunes in a hurry, Skubal won’t have another chance to meaningfully improve their championship odds, as the 29-year-old lefty will hit free agency this offseason. And re-signing him will cost… honestly, I don’t even want to guess. Lots. “Highest-paid pitcher in history” feels like where the bidding starts. And if they were going to pay the however many hundreds of millions of dollars it’ll take to keep him around, they would’ve done it already.

Having made those two assumptions — the Tigers are cooked, and Skubal won’t re-sign — the only rational move left, painful as it may be, is to trade the big lefty. Even so, declaring a preferred destination feels unseemly. If I were a Tigers fan, I would’ve been annoyed as hell at years of headlines declaring Skubal a future Dodger or Met or Phillie.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think the Dodgers or Phillies (or Braves, or Red Sox, or Yankees, or any other big-budget contender) should trade for Skubal.

If Skubal moves this weekend and comes to the park on Tuesday dressed as anything other than a Ray or a Brewer, something will have gone massively wrong.

A team that aims to win the World Series needs to achieve two goals. First, it has to have the depth to get through the regular season and into the playoffs. Second, it has to have the high-end talent to get through the playoffs. Those two categories don’t always overlap; a club that’s shopping on the bottom shelf of the trade deadline package store might have to choose between a high-leverage reliever and a no. 5 starter.

Skubal, a high-volume starting pitcher with some of the best pure stuff in baseball, is one of the few players who can be integral in both pursuits. Over the past two postseasons, he’s started six of Detroit’s 15 playoff games, and thrown 28.7% of its total playoff innings.

He went at least six innings in all six of those starts, and in five of them he also allowed two runs or fewer; in total, he has a career playoff ERA of 2.04. There is no type of player who can exert such a profound influence on one team’s postseason fortunes.

Unfortunately for Skubal, only throwing a quarter of his team’s innings leaves quite a bit to chance. The Tigers have never scored more than three runs in any of his postseason starts, so they’ve gone 3-3 in them.

Both the Brewers and Rays are better now than the Tigers have ever been during Skubal’s tenure; both teams are currently in line for a bye. However, neither is in an unassailable position, and adding Skubal would go a long way toward consolidating a top-two seed.

And in contrast to some big-market contenders — including but not limited to the Dodgers — Skubal represents a step change over the pitchers he’d be replacing for both the Rays and Brewers. That holds true in both a five- or six-man regular-season rotation or a four-man playoff rotation.

As if to drive that point home, McClanahan left his start on Thursday with a back injury while I was writing this.

Trading for Skubal wouldn’t guarantee anything, of course. His own postseason record shows that even great pitchers need run support. And while the difference between Skubal and Gasser or Seymour would be enormous, I’d rather have another bat if I were either of these teams, especially the Brewers. They scored exactly one run in each of their four NLDS losses last year, and that isn’t exactly a new problem.

Since the Brewers got to Game 7 of the NLCS against the Dodgers in 2018, they’ve made the playoffs six times out of seven chances. But once there, Milwaukee is 5-16 in individual games and 1-6 in playoff series, having averaged just 2.52 runs scored per game.

And yet, there is no bat comparable to Skubal on the market. This is, for all intents and purposes, the guy.

Still, why should these two teams outbid the Dodgers (“Dodgers” being understood to mean any high-payroll recidivist contender)?

Two reasons. First: They can.

The Brewers and Rays are considered to be two of the better-run franchises in baseball. Having been to both Milwaukee and St. Petersburg, I can say that I like both cities quite a bit. But my personal ranking of America’s cities seems to prioritize cheap beer and fried fish more than the national consensus does. More’s the pity; suffice it to say neither the Rays, nor the Brewers play in one of the league’s glamor markets.

I’m usually one to make the argument that most owners can spend more than they do. Both Brewers owner Mark Attanasio and Rays owner Patrick Zalupski became billionaires not by the sweat of their own brow, but by managing and brokering stocks and real estate, respectively. And both of their clubs are heavily subsidized by national TV money and revenue sharing.

All the same, even I’ll concede that the Brewers and Rays play the free agent market from a position of disadvantage. Perhaps not as great a disadvantage as Rob Manfred and the owners are claiming in the leadup to the seemingly inevitable lockout, but a meaningful disadvantage nonetheless.

But while the Brewers and Rays could be outbid for Skubal in free agency, money is not an issue here. If Skubal gets traded at the deadline, the team that picks him up will have to pay the last $9.4 million and change of his 2026 salary. Even Attanasio or Zalupski could scare that cash up on short notice.

The currency that matters for a Skubal suitor, right now, is prospects. And both the Brewers and Rays are rich in young talent.

The Brewers have the no. 1 prospect in baseball, Jesús Made, who’s not moving for a rental. But the Brewers also have five other Top 100 Prospects who can be traded without knocking the head off their farm system.

The top of the Rays system has a few awkward fits for a Skubal trade. Top prospect Grady Emerson, this year’s no. 2 overall pick, can’t be traded until after the season. Tampa Bay also has tremendous top-end catching depth: Caden Bodine and Nathan Flewelling are two of the top 12 trade-eligible catching prospects in the entire minors. But that might not be too enticing for the Tigers, who have Dillon Dingler under team control through 2030 and probably won’t follow up a Skubal trade with a teardown.

Nevertheless, the Rays have other Top 100 Prospects to deal with, and more depth than any other system in baseball. There are 24 prospects in the Tampa Bay system with a future value grade of 45 or better. No other team has more than 15 such prospects; only nine other teams have 10. The Tigers aren’t going to trade Skubal for 10 future platoon bats or no. 5 starters, but the Rays could offer Detroit’s scouts their pick of that middle tier rather than trying to force a fit.

The second reason the Rays or Brewers should outbid the Dodgers, or any Dodger-like suitor, is more normative.

If the Brewers stay on their current pace, this will be the ninth consecutive full season in which they’ve won at least 86 games. The Rays are on course to return to the playoffs after a two-year hiatus, but before that they made five straight trips to the postseason. And despite how people talk about this team, the Rays are always competitive. Since 2008, the Rays have had 12 winning seasons and nine playoff appearances in 18 seasons — soon to be 13 and 10, respectively, in 19 seasons. Over that time, they’ve had just one season with more than 85 losses.

From a diehard fan’s standpoint, I actually think that a consistent record of competitiveness is massively underrated. Rays and Brewers fans show up to Opening Day every year with a reasonable expectation of being in the pennant race. Therefore, when they turn on the TV or go through the turnstile six nights a week, they do so knowing their team has a good chance of winning, and that each game will mean something.

Having lived through hopeless slogs of losing seasons across many sports, there’s something to be said for the knowledge that your team is unlikely to embarrass you on a given night. The consistent microdose of joy over a winning regular season sometimes outweighs the peaky highs of the playoffs.

But every so often, you’ve got to make a serious run at a championship. I’ve mentioned the Brewers’ difficulty in getting over the hump; outside of the Rays’ two runs to the World Series, they’ve won a total of two playoff rounds in franchise history, both one-game Wild Card matchups.

Making the playoffs is great, but it starts to get monotonous when you lose quickly every year. An occasional deep run keeps existing fans invested and draws new ones in. And while trading for Skubal guarantees nothing, making the effort often has a similar effect. Since we’re talking about the Brewers: Milwaukee lost in the first round in 2008, and CC Sabathia did not pitch well in his only postseason start. But where does Sabathia’s half-season in Milwaukee place him on a ranking of popular Brewers of the 21st Century?

Don’t believe me? Ask Blue Jays fans about the David Price trade. Or older Astros fans about Randy Johnson. Ask Phillies fans about Roy Halladay, even though they accomplished less in his two prime seasons with the club than they had in the two years prior.

Small market has nothing to do with it. Rental has nothing to do with it. There is only the cost in prospects, the question of whether the team is good enough to make a trade worth it, and the will to capitalize when opportunity presents itself.

Both the Brewers and Rays have those first two criteria in abundance. Whether one of them has the third is the question that could define this season for everyone.