ESPN’s Jeff Passan Talks Dodgers/Skubal & MLB Trade Deadline with Rich

Jeff Passan showed up the morning after the trade deadline to talk a frustrated Yankees fan off a ledge, then spent the rest of the hour dismantling the idea that baseball is broken.

Rich went first with the obvious grievance. What did the Yankees do, or not do?

Passan's answer was warmer than expected. New York got power, and he appreciated the logic behind it, which was that with the lineup they have been running out there, offense matters more than position. Luis Garcia Jr. is relatively redundant on paper and adds thump in practice. Adding a right-handed hitting outfielder in Elier Ramos was a good move.

The catcher complaint he waved off, since the offensive supplement addresses the vacuum Austin Wells has left this year, and Wells has been good defensively.

His real concern was the part nobody added.

"I'm more concerned that there was not bullpen depth that was added," Passan said. There simply was not much impact inventory in the relief market, so the Yankees went light.

Rich pushed, and he had the receipts. New York is 4-4 in its last eight, and by his count held a lead in the seventh inning or later in all of them, including another bullpen implosion the night before.

Passan turned it around and asked who, specifically, Rich wanted.

The honest answer is Luke Weaver, and Passan granted it completely. Weaver would have fit. The complication is what Pittsburgh got for him, a shortstop prospect with more than 20 home runs this year, plus the tax that comes attached to any Yankees and Mets trade.

"If you think that the Yankees should have gotten Luke Weaver, that's a super reasonable thing to think," Passan said.

He also noticed something telling about the Garcia deal. Most of the players New York sent out were relief pitchers, which suggests the Yankees believe they can solve the bullpen internally.

Whether that works is the season.

"Down the stretch we're going to look back on August 3rd and say, was this the day that the Yankees did not need to do it, or is this the day that the Yankees missed their opportunity to cement themselves as potentially the best team in the American League," Passan said.

He does not consider it a failed deadline, and he offered a caution about the calendar itself. There is a tendency the day after a deadline to overreact, and angry Yankees fans are probably doing exactly that.

On the internal options, Passan wanted the thinking to go bigger than one inning at a time. Multi-inning roles could bridge the gap to David Bednar.

George Lombard Jr. is the other arrival, coming up to play shortstop with big minor league numbers behind him. Passan is measured there, expecting solid rather than transformative, with good defense and good on-base skills and room to climb the lineup.

His caveat was a useful one for anybody expecting instant returns. Aaron Judge stunk in his first September call-up, then came back and hit 52 home runs and won Rookie of the Year.

Then Rich turned to Skubal and asked whether the pitcher had put a thumb on the scale, steering himself to Los Angeles.

"He had nothing to do with this at all," Passan said. Skubal was out of the loop and did not know where he was going.

The money was equally irrelevant. Roughly $10 million was owed for the rest of the season, which the Brewers or the Rays or anyone else would have covered.

What decided it was evaluation, not economics. Detroit did not necessarily get the best package available, it got the package it liked best, because organizations value prospects differently. That is why trades happen at all.

Passan walked through the return, and he likes it more than the consensus does. Zavier Hope gives the Tigers an outfielder who can handle center and probably settles in right, alongside Riley Greene and Max Clark. River Ryan is older, a shortstop convert without much pitching mileage or health, and he throws 100, which puts him alongside Jackson Jobe and Troy Melton in a rotation Passan compared to Pittsburgh's, young and full of gas. Brady Smith has an unsightly record and 113 strikeouts in 74 and a third innings, which plays.

His defense of the haul came down to one word.

"Rentals never get enormous returns," Passan said. The Juan Soto trade is the comparison people reach for, and it does not apply, because Soto came with years of control beyond the rental. For roughly ten starts plus a postseason, he thought Detroit did perfectly fine, and doubted waiting until Monday afternoon would have improved it.

Rich then asked what he flagged in advance as the tin foil hat question. Could someone in Detroit have wanted Skubal in Dodger blue, precisely because it would be red meat for the broken-baseball conversation and help owners win a salary cap?

"I don't think that this was a grand conspiracy to try and leverage the Dodgers into winning a World Series for a third consecutive season so that fans can then get angry and everyone can say we need a salary cap," Passan said. He allowed it might have come up in conversation as a worry, not a strategy.

He also corrected Rich on a premise along the way, and the correction is the whole argument.

"It's not that they can't, it's that they choose not to," Passan said of Detroit paying Skubal. "That is an active choice by every team."

His actual position is more interesting than either camp's. Baseball is not broken and is not in a bad place, but the system needs to change, and he does not believe a salary cap is the required answer. He understands why owners want one, since it is cost control and franchise values jump 25 percent the moment it exists.

What bothers him is that the penalties do not deter the teams they were built to deter.

"What money buys you is the ability to make mistakes," Passan said. The Dodgers can miss in free agency or in a trade and paper over it. The Brewers and Rays cannot, because young talent is the lifeblood of how they built juggernauts on small payrolls, and Milwaukee currently owns the best record in baseball with Tampa Bay third.

Which produced the cleanest statement of what he actually wants.

"I want the Brewers and the Rays of the world, these teams that are so good at what they do, not to be scared at the deadline," Passan said. "I want them to operate with the same sort of freeness that the Dodgers do."

Not a hard cap. A system that pushes the bottom teams to do more while penalizing the top ones in ways that bite, whether through draft picks or the ability to transact. In other words, what the competitive balance tax was supposed to do before it stopped preventing runaway spending.

The lockout is coming December 1, he said flatly, with nothing likely to move until February and real risk of missed games after that.

Rich, still looking for comfort, pointed out that the Blue Jays nearly beat the Dodgers without the payroll, and the Red Sox just swept them.

Passan declined the assignment.

"ESPN pays me to be a baseball reporter, not to be your psychologist."

Asked for the trade nobody is discussing, he went to Clay Holmes and the Cubs, and specifically to velocity. Holmes normally sits around 94 with the sinker and was at 91 in his last rehab start. If the full version shows up, Passan sees the best possible marriage of a ground ball pitcher and a defense, with Alex Bregman, Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner and Michael Busch behind him.

He would happily take any National League Championship Series that combination produces.

"American League, you got work to do."