The Dodgers just traded for Tarik Skubal, the best pitcher alive, and I need somebody at Major League Baseball’s offices on Park Avenue to explain to me with a straight face what the luxury tax is actually for. The Dodgers are the first team to repeat as champion in 25 years, and they’re chasing an honest-to-god three-peat, and in the middle of that run they went out and acquired the two-time reigning AL Cy Young winner like it was a Tuesday. I’ve watched this league let owners cry poor for a decade while writing themselves the exact loophole that lets one team pull this off every summer, and calling the result a “competitive balance tax” is bullshit dressed up in a suit.
Detroit’s return undercuts the idea that this cost the Dodgers anything real. Los Angeles sent outfield prospect Zyhir Hope — a legitimate top-100 guy, for what that’s worth — along with right-handers River Ryan and Brady Smith to the Tigers. That’s a real prospect package. It is not what a two-time Cy Young winner in the middle of his prime should cost. Skubal hits free agency after this season and is expected to command a nine-figure deal somewhere else next winter. The Dodgers didn’t care. They bought the season, not the player.
And he’s been every bit the pitcher his résumé promises: a 2.79 ERA with a 31% strikeout rate over 16 starts, added to a lineup that already includes Shohei Ohtani, who currently can’t even pitch. Ohtani’s a DH right now, working back from a knee and biceps issue, expected on the mound sometime between mid-August and September. Doesn’t matter. The Dodgers added the best available arm in the sport to a roster that was already unfair, in August, on top of everything else.
The Dodgers didn’t just win the deadline. They broke it.
Detroit sold a 2.5-games-back team for prospects nobody around the league fears. The Tigers had a real path to October and traded away a two-time Cy Young winner mid-chase anyway, because the return was worth more to the front office than the games themselves. Somewhere in Comerica Park this week is a kid who bought a Skubal jersey in April and is now watching him pitch for the presumptive three-time champs of baseball by August, and Detroit cashed the check instead of trying to compete for it.
This trade tacks roughly $11 million onto the Dodgers’ bill for what’s left of the season, pushing their luxury tax payroll past $440 million, a number large enough that it stopped functioning as a deterrent a while ago and started functioning as a rounding error. Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela reacted to the news the way most of the sport did: “No surprise, right? I knew they would do something.” Nobody blinked. That tells you the outrage ran out a long time before this trade did.
Boston Globe columnist Peter Abraham wrote that if the Dodgers win another World Series, this spending “will strengthen Major League Baseball’s call for a salary cap” — which is a polite way of saying the luxury tax was supposed to stop exactly this and instead let the richest team in the sport treat the fine like a cover charge. My brother works in a municipal budget office in Trenton, and if he blew past an approved number and just absorbed whatever penalty came with it, he’d be out of a job before the next council meeting. Baseball just gave the same move a parade.
MLB’s league office had nothing to say about any of it. The internet did:
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2083760124301123919
“The rich get richer,” Bleacher Report captioned it, like that’s a punchline and not a mission statement. This site laid out what Detroit should have demanded for Skubal back when the rumors started, and argued the Cubs needed him more than anyone would admit. Neither team got him. The team with two rings already did, because the tax was never built to stop the Dodgers. It was built to make everyone else feel better about losing to them.
None of this is broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work, for the one team that can eat the fine and still order dessert. Everyone else in this sport is still splitting the check.
