The Tarik Skubal trade rumor went from background noise to something louder this week, and a big reason is that the manager of the team everyone fears just leaned into it.
Asked about the Dodgers pursuing Skubal, Dave Roberts acknowledged Los Angeles could chase a blockbuster and may be one of the few organizations capable of pulling it off. Around the same time, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman put the chances of a Skubal trade at “90 percent.”
Why Detroit is even here
The Tigers went all in for 2026 and then fell apart, going 6-21 since May 4 to turn a postseason hopeful into a likely deadline seller. Skubal is a back-to-back Cy Young winner, a free agent after the season and a Scott Boras client expected to reset the market for pitchers, which makes an extension in Detroit close to impossible.
When a team this far out has the best pitcher in baseball on an expiring deal, the math starts making the decision for them.
What Roberts is really saying
Roberts stopped short of confirming active talks, but the message was that the Dodgers have the prospect capital to win a bidding war almost no one else can enter.
A rotation that already runs through Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Blake Snell adding Skubal would be the kind of thing that gets the rest of the league filing complaints. That is exactly why a manager floating it so casually carries weight.
The catch in the timing
Skubal has been on the injured list following elbow surgery, which complicates any sell-high pitch, since contenders will want to see him healthy before committing a package.
A clean return to the mound likely pushes a deal toward late July. Heyman’s 90 percent reflects how the industry reads Detroit’s situation, but the Tigers still control the timeline, and the healthier Skubal looks, the bigger the return they can demand.
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