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Sometimes, the trade deadline doesn’t need to be complicated. Sometimes the best team in baseball goes out and gets the best player available, perhaps the best pitcher in the game. The Dodgers, two-time defending World Series champions and tied with the Brewers for the most wins, are upgrading their rotation as much as it’s possible to upgrade it. On Saturday, they acquired Tarik Skubal from the Tigers in exchange for prospects Zyhir Hope, River Ryan, and Brady Smith, as Jeff Passan first reported.

The entire trade deadline has revolved around Skubal, the best player available time of year in ages. And who better to trade for him than the Dodgers, who have one of the deepest farm systems in baseball in addition to their major league riches? Oh, other teams can see Skubal’s magnificence just as plainly as Los Angeles can, and they have prospects too. But Andrew Friedman and the Dodgers make a habit of winning trade sweepstakes like these, with Manny Machado, Max Scherzer, and Trea Turner being the best other examples.

One ancillary effect of paying a bunch of stars to play for you is that you have fewer available roster spots for your minor leaguers to graduate into. That cuts both ways – there also aren’t enough at-bats to go around for young players – but the benefit is that the Dodgers don’t need to build their playoff lineup with three or four slots filled by pre-arbitration players. It naturally leads to trades; the Dodgers don’t have as many opportunities to hand to their own minor leaguers, because they keep having such good major leaguers. That means that they’re incentivized to go out and make trades just like this one, which leaves even less room for the good minor leaguers, which leads to…. well, you get the idea.

Another way of thinking about it: The Dodgers are doing this because they’re rational, championship-odds-maximizing actors. Last year, they won the World Series, didn’t get rid of any notable outfielders (apologies, Michael Conforto), and signed Kyle Tucker. It’s not always Tucker, and it’s not always the outfield, and players do leave. But year after year, the Dodgers bring in stars to shore up weaknesses. That makes it hard for any individual prospect in the system to make a big impact on the major league club’s fortunes. But you know what will make a big impact on the major league club’s fortunes? Tarik Skubal taking the ball in the playoffs.

I’m not sure if Skubal is the current Best Pitcher In Baseball (caps intentional); that might be Jacob Misiorowski. I’m also not sure if he’s the guy I’d most want for the next five years. But Skubal is a reasonable claimant to both of those titles. He’s a superstar at the peak of his powers. Since the start of the 2024 season, he’s on an absurd tear, with a 2.40 ERA and gaudy numbers across the board. He’s one of the best strikeout pitchers in baseball, and he has some of the best command in the majors. He’s even been spectacular in the playoffs, with 56 strikeouts and a 2.04 ERA in 39.2 innings over the past two years.

Skubal missed just over a month earlier this season with loose bodies in his elbow, which seems to be the only thing that can slow him down. But even then, he beat expectations; an innovative surgery sped his recovery time. After shaking off some rust, he looks every bit himself again, and he’s turning on the gas as the calendar flips to August; he has 27 strikeouts over 21 innings in his last three starts (1.71 ERA, 0.96 FIP).

The Dodgers already had a rotation built for the playoffs, but now they’ve added extra layers of redundancy. Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell are both on the IL and targeting returns this month. Shohei Ohtani isn’t pitching either, thanks to some knee inflammation and bicep discomfort. But Yoshinobu Yamamoto is humming along with a 2.72 ERA and a 3.31 FIP, and it’s not even like they were in poor shape depth-wise; Emmet Sheehan and Justin Wrobleski are excellent options for where they fall on the depth chart. But now they fall even lower on the depth chart, and the Dodgers rotation is even more formidable.

Adding Skubal improves Los Angeles’ odds of winning a championship tremendously, and they were already the highest in the majors to begin with. He’s going to pitch about a quarter of the Dodgers’ games come October. He pitches deep into games. He allows few runs, few baserunners even. Last year, the Dodgers innovated by trying to build the whole rotation out of number one starters. This year, they got a rare opportunity to get yet another mega-ace for three months, no strings attached, and their team looks absurdly stacked as a result.

Our playoff odds model, which doesn’t account for the concentration of innings in the playoffs, thinks the Dodgers are around five percentage points more likely to win it all now than they were before acquiring Skubal. I came up with a similar number when I tried to tweak roster assumptions for every team – a 5.5 percentage point increase in odds, to be precise. That’s an enormous number, hard to wrap your head around almost, but the models are just rules for turning projections into expected winning percentages, and the projections are basically drooling awkwardly, rendered speechless by how much they like Skubal.

The Tigers liked Skubal too, of course. But pretty much everything else about their situation is different. Unlike the Dodgers, the Tigers aren’t in a position where they can start thinking about how Skubal lines up in the playoffs, because they weren’t in a playoff position in the first place. And even more unlike the Dodgers, the Tigers have some roster spots they’d love to fill with talented youngsters. Only three members of their starting rotation are signed past this year. Zach McKinstry and Matt Vierling probably aren’t a long-term solution in right field, as much as I enjoy both players. More generally speaking, the Tigers’ roster just doesn’t quite look finished; they need to find a few more contributors somewhere to keep the good times rolling into the next few seasons, and adding some minor league talent is a great way to get started on that front.

Enter Hope, Ryan, and Smith, who are headed Detroit’s way in the deal. Eric Longenhagen will have far more detail on them soon, but a quick overview is still in order. Ryan is the highest-rated prospect of the three, no. 22 on our updated Top 100 with a 55 FV grade. Injuries have prolonged his stay on prospect lists long past when we expected him to graduate; he debuted in 2024 and is already 27, but he hasn’t spent enough days on the active roster to end his prospect eligibility. He underwent Tommy John surgery in August of 2024, and this year suffered a hamstring injury, his second of the season, as he was building back to a typical starter’s workload. He is currently on the Triple-A IL, but he should be back in time for the stretch run. He has obvious durability questions, but there’s no doubting that his stuff plays; he looked like he belonged in the big leagues when he debuted. He slots in as Detroit’s no. 2 prospect.

Hope, a lefty corner outfielder, was one of a logjam of Top 100 outfield bats the Dodgers have stashed in the minors. He’s hitting well in his first full year at Double-A, with plus power the calling card here, and swing-and-miss the hurdle he’ll need to overcome. We have him ranked fifth in the Tigers system and 52nd overall with a 50 FV grade. Smith is more of a project than the two headliners of the deal. He’s a 21-year-old starter with huge strikeout rates and huge relief risk; we have him projected as a multi-inning reliever, a 40+ FV. But Smith is more than your average throw-in, and Ryan and Hope are both worthy headliners. This is a meaningful prospect return for the Tigers, the kind they had to get if they were going to trade Skubal.

This will be the biggest deadline deal of the season, surely. It’s one of the biggest deadline deals of the last decade; it’s not quite the Juan Soto trade, but it’s in the next level down. The Dodgers paid a hefty price in prospects to get a three-month concentrated hit of pure pitching talent. The Tigers turned Skubal’s last year into what they hope will be years of valuable contributions. And inevitably, I find myself feeling that both sides won.

It’s something like the economic idea of comparative advantage. Hope, Ryan, and Smith are more relatively valuable to the Tigers than they are to the Dodgers; Detroit wants to build a roster of controllable young players to surround Kevin McGonigle, while Los Angeles is trying to threepeat. Skubal is more valuable to the Dodgers than to most; they improve their rotation, improve their depth, and keep their opponents from getting him in one fell swoop, and they know for certain that they have plenty of players to back his good performance with good ones of their own. So it makes sense that the Dodgers would offer a valuable package of prospects, one that exceeded what any other team could, and it makes sense that the Tigers would accept it.

No one else was going to top an offer like this. The Brewers and Rays can’t trade away their versions of Ryan and Hope; they’ll need those guys for years to come. They have the prospect capital to do it, they just can’t, because the players they’d trade are also necessary for their goal of competing in the future. They’re relying on their farm system to keep the perpetual motion machine going. Today’s prospects are tomorrow’s contributors; they can’t also be the trade chips sent out for Skubal. Taking a big swing by trading for a rental player stings if you’ll feel the absence of the players you dealt down the road. Good as he is, Skubal is no guarantee of success, because nothing in baseball is guaranteed. The Milwaukee and Tampa Bay (and Cleveland and…) front offices don’t operate by taking swings like that, much as we might sometimes want them to.

But the Dodgers are in the unique situation of not feeling that pinch so sharply. And while this trade will surely raise the ire of fans who think the Dodgers are ruining baseball, there’s no need to dwell on that too much today; after all, we have a whole locked-out offseason ahead of us. Instead, I like to think about it in terms of the Dodgers understanding that you have to trade away good players to make your team good in the present day. Miguel Vargas is an All-Star this year, and the Dodgers would do the Tommy Edman deal again in a heartbeat. Trading for Skubal is just a way of taking some of the value they’re racking up on the farm and getting it into the majors right away. It’s Detroit’s gain in the long run, for sure – the guys they got are likely to contribute for years to come – but that won’t bother the Dodgers too much. They just got Tarik Skubal!