John Niyo: Tigers dealt Tarik Skubal, now MLB has to deal with Dodgers

DETROIT — Hope is a strategy, it turns out.

But only because baseball requires it these days. Insists on it, really.

Saturday night’s surreal scene in Sacramento, Calif., only reinforced that notion, as a major-league trade played out in real time in a minor-league ballpark. And as a would-be World Series contender effectively threw in the towel by trading its best player — a reigning two-time Cy Young Award winner — to the two-time defending champs, who seem to be operating in a league of their own.

That’s the bigger picture that everyone sees now, in the aftermath of the Tigers’ blockbuster deal sending Tarik Skubal to the Los Angeles Dodgers for a healthy package of prospects headlined by an aptly named outfielder, Zyhir Hope. And quite frankly, it’s the portrait MLB owners want everyone to stare at from now until sometime next year, whenever baseball’s inevitable work stoppage finally ends.

They’d prefer that fans ignore the relative parity the current standings suggest: As of Sunday morning, 23 of the 30 MLB teams were within four games of a playoff berth. Never mind that the teams with the best record in each league — Milwaukee and Tampa Bay — have the 20th- and 28th-highest payrolls, either.

Instead, they want everyone to see the Dodgers for the Death Star that they are and rally around the rebellion. And that’s fine. Battle lines were drawn long ago, and nothing that happens between now and the end of October was going to dramatically change that script.

Not when the Dodgers have the built-in advantages they do, thanks in large part to a massive media market and a sweetheart TV deal. And certainly not when their projected luxury tax bill ($180 million) is more than a dozen MLB teams are spending on their entire 40-man rosters.

Making matters worse

The league even ratcheted up the rhetoric earlier this summer by launching a “Level the Playing Field” ad campaign, arguing that “too many fans in markets across the game have too little hope that their team has a fair chance to win.” A three-peat for the Dodgers, who’ll now trot out a playoff rotation featuring a pair of two-time Cy Young winners (Skubal and Blake Snell), a four-time league MVP (Shohei Ohtani) and last year’s World Series MVP (Yoshinobu Yamamoto), would only help that lobbying effort.

“Look, there’s a problem there,” former MLB GM Jim Bowden told CBS Sports on Sunday, as the aftershocks from Saturday night’s seismic Skubal swap reverberated around the league. “This is exactly why Major League Baseball owners want to put a hard (salary) cap into the collective bargaining agreement. They want the same systems that we’re seeing in the NFL, the NBA and the NHL to prevent this from happening.

“And I think this particular trade, it’s just gonna make matters worse. There’s a lot of owners that are going to be willing to shut the game down in 2027 — literally — if it means getting a system where one team can’t just go out and get all the best players because they have more money than you do.”

Money talks, obviously. But hope sells, doesn’t it? And like it or not, that’s what the Tigers are investing in here, after their sizeable gamble last winter — holding on to Skubal as he entered his walk year, then doubling down by signing veteran lefty Framber Valdez to a record-setting free-agent contract — went bust this spring after Skubal went on the injured list and the team went into a tailspin.

AJ Hinch’s team is still plausibly in contention in an anemic AL wild-card chase with 50 games remaining in the regular season. But the front office led by team president Scott Harris felt it had no choice but to pivot after this team dug itself a deep, deep hole this spring — 16 games below .500 at the end of May and still 14 games underwater in late June.

After Saturday’s unofficial surrender, the biggest remaining question was just how far they’d go in turning expiring assets into future gains before Monday’s 6 p.m. deadline, particularly with pending free agents in Casey Mize, Gleyber Torres, Kenley Jansen and Jack Flaherty. But whatever happens next, the Tigers’ future did get brighter this weekend.

Look, mining for prospects is a risky proposition; we all know that. And with hope — and, yes, Hope — comes an understandable fear among fans that’s rooted in past failures. But it’s foolish to try to draw comparisons between the return for Skubal now and the one Al Avila got for Justin Verlander nearly a decade ago, for example, or the one Dave Dombrowski got for David Price a couple years before that.

A realistic view

For one thing, the Tigers under Harris are light-years ahead of where they were before when it comes to prospect evaluations and player development. For another, this new age that’s about to dawn on MLB will likely put an even greater emphasis on those analytically driven areas where the Tigers have been investing so heavily the past few years.

And with a talented young core starting to take shape in Detroit, there was a pressing need for the Tigers to start replenishing a top-heavy farm system that's graduating some of its best talent. Kevin McGonigle is the odds-on favorite to win AL Rookie of the Year, and No. 1 prospect Max Clark just made a loud MLB debut this weekend against the A’s.

Hope, a powerhouse corner outfielder who’s crushing it as a 21-year-old at Double-A this summer, probably slots in as the new No. 1 just above 2024 first-round pick Bryce Rainer. River Ryan, a high-upside starting pitcher who has battled injury issues, becomes the top-rated arm in the system, ahead of 2026 first-rounder Cameron Flukey and lefty Ben Jacobs. Brady Smith, the other lottery ticket the Tigers acquired from the Dodgers, is a second-year pro with mid-rotation potential and the kind of profile this current regime clearly covets.

That’s a respectable return for Skubal, who’ll give the Dodgers perhaps 60 regular-season innings, plus three or four more starts in the playoffs. If nothing else, a pair of top-50 prospects — and two controllable arms — far outweigh the alternative for the Tigers: a compensatory pick next summer when Skubal signed elsewhere in free agency, as expected. (Probably in Los Angeles, of course.)

That’s not a rationalization, either. It's simply a realistic assessment of the Tigers’ view of their own contending window, which is framed by one of the majors’ youngest position-player groups. And if you consider for a moment what this roster could look like in a year or two, once the dust has settled following the looming labor war, maybe it'll be easier to watch Skubal pitching in the World Series wearing Dodger blue a few months from now.

Dillon Dingler, arguably the best all-around catcher in the game, is only 27, yet he’d be one of the grizzled vets on that squad. Around the horn in the infield, you might have Rainer, McGonigle, Colt Keith and Josue Briceno. In the outfield, you’d find Riley Greene, Clark and Hope. A starting rotation could feature Jackson Jobe, who’s nearing a return to the majors a year after his Tommy John surgery, Troy Melton, Ryan, Flukey and Valdez, if he picks up his player option. Or perhaps Reese Olson or Keider Montero or Ty Madden, if not.

Again, that’s a lot of projection there. But as Hinch noted Sunday, while trying to turn the page, "The game moves on fast.” And in a league where not everyone is running the same race, that's really the only place to start.

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