Almost every baseball fan outside of LA woke up upset that the Dodgers landed Tarik Skubal late on Saturday. While Skubal’s fate felt inevitable to some, the Braves were involved late in Skubal’s trade market, and there were reasons to believe that Atlanta could be the one to make the strongest push for the two-time Cy Young Award winner.
However, there are real reasons why the Braves shouldn’t have pushed all their chips in on a Skubal trade. After all, Atlanta needs multiple starters, especially with Reynaldo Lopez’s status in question, and using a bunch of resources on a single rental pitcher is pretty dicey from a process perspective. There is also the matter that there is basically no hope that Skubal would stay with the Braves beyond this season and that he had an elbow procedure this season after having gone under the knife twice before.
Once you look at the package the Dodgers gave up for Skubal, it is actually pretty easy to understand why the Braves ultimately bowed out of the bidding.
Comparable Braves trade package for Tarik Skubal would have been a very heavy price to pay for a rental
The Dodgers sent prospects Zyhir Hope, River Ryan, and Brady Smith to the Tigers to land Skubal. For those that don’t know their Dodgers prospects, that means LA gave up a top-25 position player prospect with a big ceiling, a pitcher with a recent injury history that is close to big league ready, and an intriguing arm that ranked in the teens in LA’s top-30 prospect rankings.
If the Braves offered an equivalent trade package, it almost certainly would have had to include top prospect Eric Hartman. He is the only position player prospect that is in remotely the same ballpark as Hope, and that Hartman is further away from the majors than Hope may have still given the Tigers some pause. Nonetheless, including Hartman probably would have been mandatory in any Skubal trade.
After that, we get to the arms in the deal. If Detroit was willing to take on a pitcher further away than Ryan, then Cam Caminiti would have made sense in terms of prospect rankings (which is admittedly an imperfect comparison method). If the Tigers were insistent on an arm who was closer to the big leagues, but were okay with a recent arm injury, Owen Murphy could have made sense. As for a comparable pitcher to the Dodgers’ Smith, RHP Ethan Bagwell fits the profile pretty well.
See the problem? That means Atlanta would have to give up their best position player prospect, one of their best pitching prospects, and a fast-rising pitching prospect who is in high demand in other trades at minimum. That is a LOT to give up for two months of any pitcher, even the best one in baseball. One could have understood if the Braves only needed one arm to get over the hump. As things stand, they need more than that, so Alex Anthopoulos was right to pass this time.
