ESPN’s Jeff Passan: Dodgers are Team Best Positioned to Trade for Tarik Skubal

Tarik Skubal is back on the mound throwing 99.9 mph barely a month after surgery, and Jeff Passan says that's about to set up one of the wildest trade deadlines in recent memory.

The speed of the recovery comes down to technology. Passan explained that removing a bone chip used to mean an arthroscope, itself a huge advance over slicing the elbow open. Now there's the nanoscope, a tiny camera on the end of a needle that does so little trauma to the area that recovery time collapses. Skubal came back in a month and change, topping out near 100, and showed teams his stuff is intact.

That changes everything for Detroit. Passan admitted he thought the Tigers were done dealing Skubal after they held him last offseason, especially with Framber Valdez signed and Kevin McGonigle on the way. But the Tigers are 14 games under .500, and the only thing keeping Skubal in Detroit, Passan joked, is that they reside in everybody's favorite, the American League Central.

So who's in on the back-to-back AL Cy Young winner? Passan said the net covers the entire baseball ocean. Position players draw shallow markets because you need a specific need at a specific spot, but everyone can use a pitcher, and Skubal is the guy you'd pick for a single must-win game. He's been up to 103 with arguably the best changeup in baseball.

The Dodgers, Passan said, are best positioned, even with a rotation that already includes Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and a sharp Justin Verlander, plus Blake Snell. The Yankees would love him too, despite their own staff, and would pay a hefty sum.

The complication is the bill. Rich raised the obvious worry: why surrender top prospects when you don't know the rules for re-signing him, with a potential lockout, a "nuclear winter," on the horizon? Passan's answer was clean. Skubal is not signing an extension. He's going to be a free agent, so teams have to approach this as a two-month rental plus October, priced accordingly. The cost to sign him long-term will be north of $400 million whether or not a salary cap ever exists, and Passan argued it's imprudent to make decisions now based on a system that has never existed in sports history. He noted the show recently had Tom Glavine on to discuss the eerie parallels to the 1994 strike.

Tigers general manager Scott Harris, Passan said, will simply shop it and take the best offer. And the reason the Dodgers can win that bidding cuts against the idea that they're baseball's evil empire. They own one of the top farm systems despite picking at the end of the first round every year, because they draft, sign, and develop as well as the Brewers, Rays, and Guardians do. He pointed to the Gavin Lux trade that netted Mike Sirota, now getting on base at a .480 clip. They just do it with the largest payroll in baseball behind them. That, Passan said, is how you create a dynasty.