Cubs get first crack at Dodgers’ Tarik Skubal, but will there be another one in October?
On one side of the Great Dodgers-Cubs Gap now stands Tarik Skubal, the best left-handed pitcher on the planet, maybe the finest hurler of ’em all.
Skubal, the grand prize of baseball’s trade deadline, was on the mound Tuesday at Wrigley Field for the two-time-defending world champions, a colossus of an organization that takes whatever it wants, destroys everything in its path, spends insatiably on its roster and seemingly exists for the sole purpose of winning the final game of each and every season.
“The entire focus of this organization is on winning championships,” Skubal told reporters after arriving at Wrigley for a three-game series against a Cubs team the Dodgers could see again in October.
The Cubs can only hope to get another crack at Skubal in a Game 1 at Dodger Stadium when that time comes, not that facing the 2024 and 2025 American League Cy Young winner is ever a picnic.
Cubs fans booed Skubal as he stretched in right field before the game, and again as he emerged from the bullpen and walked to the dugout. History will show his first batter faced in Dodger blue was one of baseball’s biggest stars, Pete Crow-Armstrong, who watched strike three — a 99-mph sinker — blow by. Not on record will be the perceptible added pep in the steps of Skubal’s new teammates, a pair of whom, outfielders Andy Pages and Kyle Tucker, made three diving catches between them in the early innings as Skubal navigated his way through the Cubs’ batting order.
Is Skubal the missing piece the Dodgers needed to make it three titles in a row? No, they already had more than enough to pull it off without him. But now they might go into the postseason as one of the heaviest favorites ever.
And barring the unforeseeable, Skubal will be the Game 1 starter in a rotation that could be so strong come playoff time, it’s almost mind-boggling to contemplate. While other teams, including the Cubs, will hope to have three or four legitimately worthy arms to start the most important games of the season, the Dodgers — if healthy — will have to choose among Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Roki Sasaki, not to mention current 11-game winner Justin Wroblewski.
“I’m not going to sit here and say I’m the big piece,” Skubal said. “They’ve been a pretty good team without me.”
The filthy rich get filthy richer, and so it goes.
In the wake of the trade deadline, there are many questions being asked in regard to the Dodgers’ unsurprising acquisition of Skubal, who is 29 and a pending free agent.
Why were they able to land him from the Tigers in exchange for a prospect package that doesn’t seem to have wowed anybody?
Why wasn’t this the occasion of all occasions for the soaring Brewers, with their elite farm system, to go for the jugular and better position themselves — imagine a 1-2 of Skubal and Jacob Misiorowski — to at last win a World Series?
Oh, and this one: Are the Dodgers ruining baseball? When the team that leads all others in annual revenue — $850 million in 2025, according to Forbes’ annual valuations — adds a Skubal-size piece to what already was a mountainous collection of talent and a monstrous payroll, it’s bound to add fuel to MLB owners’ arguments for addressing competitive imbalance with a salary cap. Some already are envisioning a line from the Skubal trade to a shutdown of the 2027 season.
But back to the Great Dodgers-Cubs Gap, which is as evident as ever.
Since the Cubs eliminated the Dodgers in the 2016 NLCS, the Dodgers have averaged over 100 wins per season and 17 more than the Cubs, a massive difference. The Dodgers are on pace to finish with a better record than the Cubs for the eighth straight season.
Yes, the Dodgers easily outspend the Cubs on players — a $700 million contract for Ohtani, $365 million for Mookie Betts, $325 million for Yamamoto, $240 million for Tucker, $162 million for Freddie Freeman, on and on, all of it staggering. But their outlay for payroll and luxury-tax penalties also equals a significantly higher percentage of their total revenue than the Cubs spend. Again, the Dodgers are all in it to win it in a way almost nobody else is.
It’s a heck of a gap, though the Cubs, after their own excellent trade deadline, do have hope of getting to the World Series themselves. After all, five 100-plus-win Dodgers teams in the last decade have failed to win it all.
“It’s our job and everyone else’s job to try to make [a Dodgers three-peat] not happen,” Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said.
It’s going to require some kind of a heavy lift, that’s for sure.