Wants and want-nots

Yesterday, the Tigers traded one of the best pitchers in baseball despite being in playoff contention. Because teams have long stopped trading genuinely top prospects for even top-level rentals, the return was highly underwhelming — two pitchers with injury histories, neither pitching particularly well in the minors and one already 27, and a maybe B- outfield prospect. (As Doolittle says, it would be a pretty good bet that this collection of prospects earns less WAR for the Tigers than Skubal does for the Dodgers in 9 starts plus playoffs this year.) In a context in which the owners are likely to lock out players for much or all of next season to try to get a salary cap, a lot of dumb pundits are going to turn this into a propaganda dream for the plutocrats: see, nobody can compete with the Dodgers, we have to suppress salaries to allow teams to compete.

The problem, as Joe Sheehan observes in his invaluable newsletter, is that this is bullshit:

Be angry.

It’s good to be angry. As a baseball fan, waking up Sunday morning to this news, you should be angry. We have, once again, a shining example of baseball’s broken ecosystem. Tarik Skubal started Saturday a Tiger, and he ended it a Dodger. It’s a scathing indictment of a sport that cannot get its house in order, cannot ensure that 30 teams, when they choose to, will compete for a championship. Baseball fans should be furious today as they watch another hammer blow to MLB’s competitive integrity.

The Dodgers? Oh, the Dodgers didn’t do anything wrong. They paid the highest price any team has paid for a rental in a decade. They did so using players from their deep farm system, one they’ve painstakingly built for years through the draft and trades, one considered first or second in all of MLB by everyone who rates these things. Their depth allowed them to pay dearly in talent for nine starts from Skubal plus a playoff run.

No, fans should be angry at — I am angry at — the Tigers. When the trade was consummated, the Tigers were three games out of a playoff spot and on their way to making it 2 1/2. They’ve struggled, to be sure, with a 53-58 mark, but in the AL of 2026 that leaves them 5 1/2 out of the AL Central lead and 2 1/2 behind the Guardians and Twins, two .500 teams, for the last AL playoff berth.

If a team can be 2 1/2 games out of a playoff spot with 50 games left and trade away its best player — one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball — then why do we have 12 playoff berths? That’s something you see in the NBA, where the value of the final playoff berths is so small that teams would rather miss the postseason and fall into the draft lottery. That’s not the case in baseball, where we have seen, in just the four years of this format, teams make runs to the World Series from the wild card slots. Of the eight Series teams since 2022, two have been #6 seeds and one has been a #5 seed. The bottom seeds in the MLB playoffs have been so successful that it was considered a crisis just three seasons ago.

If I have said it once I have said it a million times. The results of short-series baseball between two teams qualified for the tournament are basically random. Just get in the door, and you can be the 2023 Rangers or the 2014 Giants, or even the teams they beat in those years, the Diamondbacks and Royals.

This trade is an embarrassment to the Tigers and to baseball. Since 1994, MLB has chosen to lower and lower again and lower still again the standard for making the playoffs, over the shouts of those of us committed to the value of the regular season. The league chased TV money and sold it as “hope and faith,” assuring us that expanding the pool of teams with a chance to make the playoffs would grow interest and excitement in the season’s final two months. The most recent expansions of the playoff field, in 2012 and 2022, were not embraced by front offices, though. Each July, some front offices, measuring the value of a one-game playoff or a road best-of-three against the medium- and long-term interests of .500ish teams, often decide against going for that playoff berth.

Now, we have witnessed that stratagem taken to its natural end, a playoff contender trading its ace, making itself worse, with a playoff berth well within reach.

Yes, the Tigers were a playoff contender, even at 53-58. Look just a little deeper, and you see a team with the best run differential (+52) in its division and third-best in its league. A little deeper than that? The Tigers have the third-best third-order record in the AL. They had underachieved for four months, in part because Scott Harris had the worst winter of anyone west of the Grand Central Parkway. Harris failed to upgrade a bullpen that ranks 22nd in FanGraphs WAR, and he bought into the peak performances of the team’s 2025 bench players, leaving the Tigers vulnerable to that group’s inevitable regression.

[…]

This trade is a microcosm of the real problem MLB has faced for decades. It’s not about haves and have-nots, but wants and want-nots. The Dodgers, and teams like them, want to win more than teams like the Tigers do, so they go out and acquire the Tigers’ best pitcher. MLB has built an entire labor strategy and media campaign around demonizing the Dodgers, when in fact it’s the Tigers who are wrecking baseball. You have to be through the looking glass to think the sport’s problem is the team that’s trying to win rather than the team that’s trading Tarik Skubal while sitting 2 1/2 games out of a playoff spot.

So yes, be angry. The Tarik Skubal trade undermines the premise that MLB is a competition to win a championship. Just be angry at the right team, the right front office. It’s not the Dodgers who are the enemy. It’s the Tigers.

Major League Baseball does have a competitive balance problem, but the problem is that most owners are profit-taking pikers who don’t care about winning, and a salary cap does exactly nothing to address that. The Tigers didn’t have to trade their ace for a collection of prospects unlikely to alter the trajectory of the franchise, in a year in which given Aaron Judge’s unclear injury status the AL playoffs will be even more of a chip-and-a-chair crapshoot than usual. And the Dodgers got him because other contending teams — and under the current playoff structure, there are a lot of them — either couldn’t or wouldn’t top a pretty meh package of prospects to rent an ace for the playoffs. Again, this is not an issue that can be solved with a salary cap.

But aren’t the Dodgers unbeatable in the postseason? Absolutely not! No matter how many apologists for ownership will claim otherwise, the lack of the salary cap wasn’t the reason that the Toronto coaching staff bafflingly told their runners not to take either a primary or secondary lead off third base with the third baseman playing well off the bag and a left-handed hitter at the plate. This extreme, terrible-percentage risk aversion which cost Toronto a World Championship was sort of a micro version of the macro refusal of most organizations to seriously compete.

The Dodgers may well win a third straight World Series this year. But if so it will be much more because they care about winning more than other teams than because other teams can’t win. And thinking that lowering player salaries will magically make other owners more interested in winning than maximizing their great-great-granchildren’s ivory backscratcher collection is painfully naive.