Tarik Skubal still has not picked up his first win in a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform, and the timing couldn’t be more pointed. His next scheduled start could come Sunday against the Milwaukee Brewers, the club that finished behind Los Angeles in the Skubal sweepstakes at the trade deadline.
The Dodgers and Brewers open a four-game series this weekend in Los Angeles, and Skubal is lined up for the finale. If that holds, it would give the Dodgers one more chance to turn a deadline decision into a very public reminder for Milwaukee.
The backdrop is starting to tilt toward Los Angeles. The Dodgers appear to be getting back on track, while Milwaukee has stumbled.
The Brewers have split their last 10 games and were just swept by the San Diego Padres. They had been expected to run away with the National League Central, but now the Chicago Cubs are only three games behind them.
There’s also a bigger prize in play for the Dodgers. They enter the series just one game behind the Brewers for the best record in the National League. That matters because handling business this weekend could put Los Angeles right back in position for a first-round bye, which would ease the path that has been shadowed by talk of a Wild Card series.
The ideal way for the Dodgers to finish the series would be with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Justin Wrobleski, and Skubal lined up to pitch the final three games. But Roki Sasaki deserves attention too. Over his last four starts, Sasaki has posted a 1.88 ERA while striking out 26 in 24 innings.
Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy has had to keep reminding everyone that the Brewers still have the best record in baseball, and the club also held a meeting after Wednesday’s loss to the Padres. Even so, that hasn’t changed the reality that Milwaukee’s deadline approach left them without the kind of rotation upgrade Skubal would have represented.
The Brewers did add Dustin May, but that move doesn’t carry the same weight. The expectation was that this would be the summer Milwaukee went all in, and the reporting around the Tigers’ trade talks with both the Dodgers and Brewers showed that didn’t happen.
Now the Dodgers have a chance to make that decision sting even more. This weekend is a live look at why Los Angeles made Skubal such a priority, and if Sunday lines up the way it’s supposed to, the Brewers may get one more painful reminder of the move they didn’t make.
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