(CNN) — “Of course, the Dodgers got their guy.”
That was the prevailing reaction when LA landed the trade deadline’s biggest prize, two-time reigning Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal – an ace pitcher who could be the difference-maker in October when the Dodgers go for a third-straight title.
The trade struck many fans as further evidence that baseball has become, in a word, unfair – a case of the rich get richer. The Dodgers, beneficiaries of a massive TV rights deal which is partially shielded from revenue sharing and enjoying the major marketing boon that is global superstar Shohei Ohtani, sign all the best free agents (convincing them to defer portions of the payout, a tactic that technically any team can employ) for the most money. They take big swings at the deadline, and no amount of success seems to satiate the chase for rings.
And yet, the financial might shouldn’t have mattered here. Trades are done not with deep pockets but with prospects and audacity. According to different rankings, either the Tampa Bay Rays or the Milwaukee Brewers have the best farm system in baseball. They could have blown the Tigers away with their offer. In other words, as The Ringer put it, “This Time, Teams Could Have Stopped the Dodgers.”
Why they didn’t is something of a Rorschach test for how you feel about the economic structure of the sport.
You could argue the Dodgers are playing at a different level than most other teams. October is often random and rewards mercurial qualities like “getting hot at the right time.” Most front offices, then, are trying to make the postseason as often as possible to increase their chances that, eventually, the stars align – their roster is healthy, the ball bounces their way, and they emerge with a World Series ring. (This is the “win 54% of games” model espoused by Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto – a philosophy he had to apologize for saying out loud.)
The expanded postseason field – now at 12 teams – has made this even more viable. Teams don’t have to be much better than middling to sneak into October and hope to ride the variance of tournament baseball to a title. This strategy requires balancing the needs of now with plans to contend next year and three years from now and five years from now.
That is not the philosophy coming out of Chavez Ravine, one that is turning the sport on its side.
The Dodgers, clearly, aren’t content to simply contend. They’re building a super team that cruises from championship parade to preseason favorites to formidable force every October. They’re trying to win the World Series now – the future be damned – but then they’ll do that again next year.
Players like Skubal aren’t just about gilding the lily. Skubal is an undeniable- difference maker – in a playoff series. The reality is a single starting pitcher can’t swing a team’s regular season fortunes all that much down the stretch. Skubal will likely make eight to 10 starts over the final two months of the season before becoming a free agent this offseason.
But come October, the importance of depth is replaced by the impact of a top-line starter, who can take the mound more often with the baked-in off days and cement his legacy while chasing down a ring. Skubal is the kind of pitcher who can change a series, change a postseason – and maybe win a title.
Going after those kinds of players constantly is either bold and brash or bad for baseball or the entire point of sports. Critics would say each iterative instance of making some kind of win-now move is possible because of their financial parachute. They can afford, literally, to take risks both in free agency and in dealing away prospects.
They don’t have to pay Skubal a penny more than any other team would to secure his services for the remainder of this season, but also, they can afford to replace the future production of the prospects they traded away if it comes to that.
Even the most successful small market teams, those that draft and develop so well and find so many ways to wring production out of the margins that they punch far above their weight in the win column, often have to act with more careful consideration for the ramifications.
On the day before the Dodgers acquired Skubal and broke baseball for the umpteenth time, they had a .627 winning percentage, 100% odds of making the playoffs according to FanGraphs, and the highest payroll in the sport. Their odds of winning the World Series – a famously finicky task prone to small sample size flukes – were over 25%, one-in-four for one of baseball’s 30 teams.
That day, the last of July, the Brewers had an essentially identical .642 winning percentage, 99.9% odds of making the playoffs, and a bottom-ten payroll. Last year, the Brewers had the best record in baseball during the regular season; they made the playoffs for the seventh time in eight years before being swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS.
Both teams were linked to Skubal as the trade deadline approached. For both, the pursuit of an ace despite their relatively cushy status in the standings represented admirable ambition. The Rays – another small-market perennial contender punching way above their 28th-place payroll to occupy the top spot in the American League – were linked to him as well.
Still, when news broke that Skubal was bound for Hollywood, it felt like the culmination of the inevitable. The Dodgers lost their game against the Red Sox the night before – the first in a seven-game skid – but still the acquisition of Skubal saw their World Series odds jump more than five percentage points.
The Brewers are an imperfect foil because they, too, have been great – in the regular season. Since the start of 2023, only the Dodgers have won more games. They’ve done this without household names or a big budget. (Consider: the Dodgers represent the top two best-selling jerseys in the sport and five of the top 20; the Brewers have one in that echelon, #20.)
Since the deadline, they’ve eked ahead of the Dodgers in the standings. Tonight, they’ll open a four-game series against one another in Los Angeles. Both are still essentially assured a spot in the postseason and yet the Dodgers’ World Series odds remain nearly three times that of the Brewers.
The simple reason is that the Dodgers have more talent. Even this far into the season, with well over 100 games of sample to draw from, the projection systems still believe the Dodgers are the better team.
If you consider playoff usage patterns – leaning heavily on stars and deemphasizing depth – that disparity is even more pronounced. Projections based on that modeling see the Dodgers as dominating the playoffs even more than they do in the regular season. The Brewers, however, are among the current contenders least suited to October baseball. (And that doesn’t even take into account how they have struggled against elite pitching while feasting on bottom-of-the-rotation arms in recent seasons.)
Milwaukee reportedly made a compelling offer for Skubal. The problem isn’t a lack of effort; it’s that they couldn’t afford to be reckless. The Dodgers, simply, can.
Whether that’s an issue of team temperament or a sign that baseball needs a salary cap depends on your perspective.
Either way, save your ire for the Tigers, who had playoff odds just over 25% when they decided to deal Skubal and shift focus to the future.
At the time, they professed to still believe they had a shot at October despite trading their top two starters. They were right. They’re 6-3 since the deadline and now hold a wild card spot. Their playoff odds are close to 40%.
If they do get in, they’re unlikely to go far. It’s been more than 40 years since their last title and their odds of taking it this year are under 2%.
If they do make it to October, they’re going to wish they had that ace back.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.