Tarik Skubal is a Dodger and I am out on this sport. Not the season, the sport. There is no reason to watch this anymore and I’m not going to sit here and pretend otherwise for four more months.
Every Skubal trade salary cap argument you’re going to read this week is going to get pointed at the wrong thing. It’s going to be about whether Los Angeles is bad for baseball. That’s not it. Los Angeles is playing by a rulebook that everybody agreed to, the same way they always are. The thing that actually matters is that this happened four months before somebody flips the switch on the whole sport, and now there’s nothing left to watch for.
They Didn’t Even Need Him, Which Is The Whole Thing
Yoshinobu Yamamoto is already there. Blake Snell and Shohei Ohtani are on the way back. Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki, Justin Wrobleski, all sitting right there. The arms that team has left over would start for half the league.
They went and got Skubal anyway. Zyhir Hope, River Ryan and Brady Smith to Detroit, per Jeff Passan and Jon Heyman, for a pitcher who hits free agency in about three months and who they were going to back a truck up to in November no matter what happened this weekend. Three prospects for a head start on a conversation they’d already won.
That’s what having $390 million does. You stop making decisions and you just start collecting.
The Skubal Trade Salary Cap Fight Is Not Even Close Anymore
Here are the numbers, and they’re worse than the yelling.
The Dodgers are at $390.5 million this year. Miami is at $78.1 million. Add up the four cheapest rosters in the sport, Miami and Cleveland and Washington and Tampa, and you get $383.4 million. One team outspends four teams put together.
The owners want a $245.3 million cap with a $171.2 million floor, which the Boston Globe laid out last month. Do that math and the widest the gap could ever get is about $74 million. The gap right now is $312 million. Their own proposed fix is four times too small for the hole they keep pointing at, and they’re going to shut the sport down over it anyway.
Nobody in this fight is even offering to fix it all the way, and they’re both willing to burn a winter over the half version.
December 1 Is The Part That Actually Kills It
The CBA expires December 1. ESPN’s reporting is that the league locks the players out that night and everything just stops, no free agency and no trades and no winter meetings, no hot stove, no rumors, no signings, nothing at all until somebody blinks, and both sides have spent all summer telling anybody with a microphone that they aren’t going to.
Rob Manfred said before the All-Star Game that he has an ownership group more united than any group in his entire time in baseball. Bruce Meyer, running the union on an interim basis since Tony Clark got pushed out in February, keeps saying a cap is never happening and that every team in baseball can afford to compete and a bunch of them are choosing not to. He’s right about the second part. He’s also not moving on the first part.
Last time owners put a cap on the table was 1994 and it cost us the World Series. 1994 is the only year since 1904 that there wasn’t one. That’s the precedent, that’s the room, and this trade just handed the owners the best commercial they could have asked for.
Milwaukee Is 68-41 And Nobody In That Room Cares
I’ll give the other side its one real point. The Brewers have the best record in baseball at 68-41 and they’re doing it on the 21st payroll in the game at $129 million. Cleveland is 29th and hangs around every year. Money is not destiny and anybody telling you it is has been ignoring Milwaukee all summer.
It doesn’t matter. Not one person in that negotiating room in December is going to hold up a Brewers box score. The owners have their Dodgers footage now and the players have their $312 million gap, and both of them are going to walk in there thinking they already won the argument, which is exactly how you get a lockout that eats a season.
We need a cap and we need a floor and we’re going to get neither one, and the sport is going to sit there dark while they figure out which flavor of nothing they can agree on.
Somebody give me one reason to watch October. I’m asking for real, because I’ve got nothing.
