"Every Team Could Trade for Me"
So says the Damn Dodgers's newest marquee name. He isn't wrong, either.
Pregame Pepper
. . . Loyal Order of Ranger Dept.—Jacob deGrom exercised his no-trade clause before the trade deadline for one simple reason: “I want to be here. I believe in this group,” said the former two-time Cy Young Award-winning Mets superpitcher.
. . . Madly for Adley Dept.—Injured often though he is, Adley Rutschman is still one of the top three catchers in baseball this year, says The Athletic’s analyst Keith (Smart Baseball) Law, who also says both the Red Sox landing Rutschman and the Orioles getting four delicious enough prospects in return.
. . . Snakes in the Pass Dept.—The Diamondbacks needed bullpen help and more offense while chasing the Padres for their division and a postseason slot at all. What they got was a veteran Cardinal, Lars (Sometimes You Feel Like a) Nootbaar, whom more than one analyst considers a fourth outfielder at best.
Leading Off
“Every Team Could Trade For Me”
So says the Damn Dodgers’s newest marquee name. He isn’t wrong, either.
By Jeff Kallman
The only thing more tiring than hearing yet again how the Damn Dodgers are wrecking baseball is hearing yet again the demands over why Tarik Skubal went there when there were clubs who could have offered the Tigers better than what they accepted for the defending American League Cy Young Award winner.
What you might (and should) prefer hearing is that, if the Tigers decided they had less chance of extending Skubal or re-signing him as a free agent, at least they weren’t brain damaged enough to just let him walk into free agency this coming fall without getting anything resembling value in return.
You know. The Tigers at least didn’t make the mistake the Angels made when owner Arte Moreno elected, approaching two consecutive trade deadlines, not to trade Shohei Ohtani for value in return. The kind of value with which the Angels might have begun retooling far sooner than they’ve finally begun to do.
The Tigers aren’t as close to the postseason yet as people including their most devoted fans want to believe. Remember, too, that if you wanted real evidence that the Tigers as constructed now weren’t going to be a team their now-former best pitcher could be proud of, you had only to watch Skubal’s final start as a Tiger and its net result. He left the game with a 7-1 lead and long after becoming the fastest Tiger to a thousand strikeouts. The Orioles thanked the Tigers for lifting Skubal by turning the Tiger bullpen into a landfill so hideous that seagulls didn’t want to plunder it.
Skubal himself acknowledged that that 10-9 Oriole overthrow meant his days in Detroit were numbered at last. At least the Tigers showed him the respect he earned by dealing him to a team who’d won two straight World Series and has its sights on a potential third.
And it wasn’t as though the Tigers were really saying it’d be the Dodgers as their trading partners or it’d be no trade, Jade.
“Every team could trade for me,” Skubal told reporters in Chicago, where his new team fell to the Cubs, 10-5, opening a set on Monday.
Every team could make that acquisition. And I don’t really sympathize with people that blame the Dodgers for anything they’ve done.
They’ve developed a really good organization. They draft well, they acquire talent really well, they retain talent. It’s a winning organization. Now the complaints seem to be because they’ve won the last two World Series. I don’t think it was like that three years ago. So I don’t really sympathize with people that are complaining because the Dodgers do all the right things.
More than one observer said what should have been obvious to everyone not bound by hook, crook, formal pledge, or mental blocks to the salary cap enough owners plus baseball’s tunnel-visioned commissioner insist is baseball’s sole salvation. With a mere $9.4 million left on his 2026 contract, any of the season’s known contenders could have afforded to bring him aboard for a little extra postseason race insurance.
So he would have been a rental? Maybe. Until or unless one of those other contenders saw a real postseason entrance coming. You might be surprised at how swiftly such contenders found heretofore unsuspected dollars with which to extend him. Don’t think for one moment that extension isn’t on the Dodgers’s minds, either.
Now, for the part everyone blinded by the light of that L.A. gold and platinum fails to consider. “They are the industry standard, or close to it, in scouting, developing, trading and every other aspect of a baseball operation,” observed The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
They also possess a singular quality that most other teams do not, a fearlessness that could help them become the first team to win three straight World Series since the 1998 to 2000 Yankees.
. . . [H]ere’s something else the Dodgers exploit: the risk-averse nature of so many other clubs in today’s game . . . [T]he dirty little secret of a salary cap and floor system is that it would not guarantee small-market teams success. Many would need to develop more of a killer instinct, an instinct the Dodgers demonstrate time and again.
Skubal had his own way of saying what Rosenthal said. “They understand what it takes to win so I'm going to lean on these guys and help them guide me and lead me," he began.*
I'm just excited to take it all in, the day-to-day, routine stuff. I'll be watching a lot of guys and people probably will think I'm a little weird staring at guys. But it's just because I'm trying to learn and get better and watch these guys throw bullpens and prepare to play catch every day and how they go about their business.
That should tell you that these Dodgers would be a threat to re-take the Promised Land even with the payroll ($60-70 million) of this year’s Guardians. It’s a shame baseball’s leadership needs a bogeyman more than brains.
Jeff Kallman edits the Wednesday and Thursday editions of Here’s the Pitch. He lives and works in Las Vegas. You can reach him at easyace1955@gmail.com or easyace1955@outlook.com.
* Tarik Skubal’s first outing for the Dodgers Tuesday, against the Cubs in Wrigley Field, saw him cruise more or less through five innings, his only blemish a solo home run by Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson opening the bottom of the third.
Then he ran into trouble in the sixth. He struck Pete Crow-Armstrong out swinging to open. But he walked Seiya Suzuki and surrendered a double to Alex Bregman. He got Michael Busch to ground to second with Suzuki thrown out at the plate.
But Nico Hoerner reached on an infield hit to score Bregman, before Skubal got new Cub acquisition Tyrone Taylor (from the Mets) to fly out for the side.
Skubal’s final debut line: six innings pitched; six strikeouts, two walks, two earned runs, and four hits; his ERA risen from 2.79 to 2.81. The Cubs scored two runs on RBI singles in the seventh and another when Hoerner hit one solo into the left center field seats.
The NL West-leading Dodgers have lost the first two of a three-game set to the NL Central’s second-place Cubs, and their fifth in a row, their longest losing streak of the season thus far.
—Ed.
Extra Innings: They Said It, We Didn’t
On the gambling habit of Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter Ippei Mizhuara
He was absolutely bananas, the amount of bets he was making. He was trying to dig out a hole, and that hole made him even more poor of a gambler because he’s betting big payout stuff . . . Listen, I gambled bigger than most, right? I sleep, you know, I have a life too. He definitely was betting all night long, all the time. I've never seen anything like it.
—Mathew Bowyer, Mizhuara’s former bookie, in a new episode of the ESPN 30 for 30 podcast series, “The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani.”
I am not convinced [Mizhuara] was just a gambling addict and had no choice. I think it's more he got this great opportunity, but then he saw a bigger opportunity to enrich himself and took advantage of that opportunity.
—E. Martin Estrada, former U.S. Attorney for California’s Central District, same episode.
Multiple disciplinary complaints have been filed against Nevada casino licensees stemming from the activities of Mr. Bowyer. Mr. Bowyer used illicit funds obtained from his bookmaking activities to wager millions of dollars at casino properties while concealing the source of those funds and purporting to be a legitimate business owner.
—Nevada Gaming Commission, in its April 2026 order barring Bowyer from returning to Nevada casinos.
Know Your Editors
Here’s the Pitch is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@outlook.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.