As the Aug. 3 MLB trade deadline creeps closer, Tarik Skubal has become one of the biggest names to watch, and the Detroit Tigers suddenly find themselves at the center of the conversation.
The left-hander hasn’t been at his sharpest since coming back from his NanoNeedle procedure last month, but that hasn’t dimmed the appeal. When Skubal is right, he’s the kind of arm that changes the shape of a rotation. For any club trying to load up for the stretch run, he’d be a major get.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have been mentioned as a possible landing spot, and that idea comes with obvious weight given the injuries that have hit their starting staff. Still, San Diego Padres All-Star Mason Miller doesn’t see a Skubal move to L.A. as some kind of excess.
“I mean, it would certainly help,” Miller said. “He’d help any team he went to.
But yeah, they’ve got a strong rotation, a lot of guys that are going to get healthy and help them out. So I don’t necessarily consider it overkill.
You know, anybody, any given night.”
The Dodgers opened the 2026 season with a rotation that looked loaded on paper, headlined by Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow. But Snell and Glasnow have both missed a significant portion of the season because of injury, which has changed the picture.
With both expected back at some point, Los Angeles could decide its best deadline move is to address another area instead of piling even more talent onto the mound.
Even so, Skubal would be a nightmare addition for the rest of the league. He’s one of baseball’s best pitchers when healthy, and putting him with the two-time defending World Series champions would only make October tougher for everyone else.
Whether Detroit actually moves him is still very much up in the air. Skubal is headed toward free agency after the 2026 season, which is a big reason his name keeps surfacing in trade talk. But the Tigers have played better lately and climbed back into the playoff race, so a deal is far from a lock.
There’s also the price tag. Landing Skubal would cost a fortune in talent, and that kind of outlay may give teams real pause. Add in the looming lockout and the possibility of a salary cap in the next collective bargaining agreement, and it’s easy to see why some clubs might hesitate before making a massive swing for a pitcher like Skubal.
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