Rich on the Big-Picture Impact of the Dodgers Landing 2-Time Cy Young Winner Tarik Skubal

Tarik Skubal is a Dodger, and the number that should terrify the other 29 clubs is not the $400 million he is expected to command in his next contract. It is what Los Angeles actually paid to get him.

Three prospects. Two pitchers, one outfielder. Plus the nine and a half million dollars left on his deal this year.

That is the whole bill.

"Where's the rest of Major League Baseball to try and get Tarik Skubal for the rest of the year?" Rich asked. "Where's the rest of them? That's all this deal cost."

The reflex has been to call this the moment baseball broke. Collective bargaining agreement is up, the nuclear winter is coming, and the Dodgers did it. Andrew Friedman, asked directly about the blowback, did not flinch.

"Passionately disagree," Friedman said, crediting the scouting staff, the player development group and the front office analytics department for building a farm system deep enough to make these conversations possible in the first place.

He has a point, and it is the uncomfortable one. Nobody else raised a hand at that price.

Detroit's side of it is a franchise doing arithmetic it did not want to do. The Tigers drafted Skubal, kept running him out there, and watched him turn into a superstar they could not afford. In arbitration this year he set a record with a $32 million one-year contract. The Tigers argued for 19. The arbitrators said 32.

Skubal himself was not built for the business end of this.

"Ever since that '24 game five, the failure that I experienced on the mound, I've used that as fuel to try and bring a World Series to the city of Detroit," he said after the trade. "I truly did. That whole offseason, I was never more motivated. And then we lose game five again."

He got them to the divisional round twice and lost a game five both times. That is the closest Detroit has been in a while. The Tigers have reached the World Series twice since Sparky Anderson won it for them in 1984, swept by the Giants in 2012 and beaten in five by the Cardinals in 2006 with Jim Leyland managing.

Now Skubal joins a rotation that already looks unfair. Of the five pitchers with the lowest ERA in baseball since 2022, the Dodgers now employ four of them. Blake Snell sits third, Shohei Ohtani fourth, Yoshinobu Yamamoto fifth. Paul Skenes is the only one left, and Rich suggested setting your watch on that one, given that Skubal is about to reset the market and the Pirates are already checking couch cushions.

Here is where the Dodgers defense gets harder to make. Los Angeles opened the season with a $323 million payroll, which triggered a $163 million tax, for $487 million before this trade. Another nine and a half million is a rounding error to them and a dealbreaker to almost everyone else.

Then there are the deferrals, which is the part that should actually worry the league. The Dodgers are on the hook for $1.064 billion to nine players through 2047. Ohtani alone is deferring $680 million between 2034 and 2043. Mookie Betts has $120 million coming, Snell $66 million, Freddie Freeman $57 million, Will Smith $50 million. The peak years, 2038 and 2039, pay out $102.3 million.

They are also working off an $8 billion television deal signed in 2013 that pays roughly $330 million a year.

Rich, a lifelong Yankees fan, is not about to pretend this is new. Steinbrenner outspent everybody, and those were the rules at the time. These are the rules now, and the Dodgers are driving a truck through them.

The trouble is what it feels like from the outside. It feels rigged to fans and it feels rigged to most of the league, and if the other 29 clubs answer that by shutting the sport down, they will have done the ruining, not Los Angeles.

Although the Red Sox just swept the Dodgers and are the hottest team in baseball. So anything can happen.