Crazy to say it, but Matt Beaty and Michael Busch have ruined baseball.
Who are they, you might ask?
Oh, just a couple dudes with pretty left-handed swings who found their way to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ organization, benefited from their tutelage, and eventually were traded to the San Diego Padres and Chicago Cubs for a couple of much younger players in River Ryan and Zyhir Hope, respectively.
Who are they, you might ask?
Perhaps you know of Ryan and Hope by now, or, as they could call them in the Motor City, Ryan’s Hope. Ryan and Hope and a young man named Brady Smith were traded by the Dodgers to the Detroit Tigers late on the evening of Saturday, Aug. 1.
In return, the Dodgers received the greatest left-handed pitcher since Clayton Kershaw.
Tarik Skubal is a Dodger, and perhaps more significantly the avatar for All That Is Wrong With Baseball, he and his new team the whipping boys for a looming lockout whether or not L.A. wins a seemingly inevitable third consecutive World Series title.
It almost doesn’t matter, now. The odds just got increasingly longer that an Atlanta or Philly or Milwaukee will upset the Dodgers in the National League playoffs. As for the dozen-plus dregs that might emerge from the American League quagmire?
Hah. Get over .500, and then maybe we can talk about a World Series.
Yet whether or not the Dodgers hoist the piece of metal come October, the narrative is well-established, that the Dodgers are buying championships, that their methods are as potentially nefarious as those of their kingpin, that no one else stands a chance because of All That Money.
Which simply isn’t true. (Well, some of it is).
The more accurate truth: The Dodgers are kicking everyone’s behinds in every facet of the game: Drafting, player development, scouting (which includes assessing internal talent) and providing a workplace players want to be.
And they probably just got over on the Detroit Tigers, in the same manner they got over on the Cubs and Padres to acquire Hope and Ryan, who along with Smith stood on each other’s shoulders in a trenchcoat and convinced the Tigers that this was sufficiently equal to Tarik Skubal.
Not to denigrate the players headed to Detroit. Ryan has roared back from Tommy John surgery in August 2024, more muscular and now eight starts into a strong stint at Class AAA Oklahoma City. He could impact the Tigers rotation next spring, if not sooner.
Hope, 21, is “built like a running back,” as MLB Pipeline puts it, has 23 homers and an .899 OPS at AA Tulsa this year, but swing-and-miss concerns exist, as he has a 25% K rate. Smith, a third-round pick in 2023, just got promoted to high A; he’s struck out 14.9 batters per nine in his brief minor league career.
But it’s hard to believe Detroit couldn’t have aimed higher.
It’s quite possible the Tigers rate Hope higher than other Dodgers outfield prospects; player evaluation is insanely subjective. Yet why not hold out for Josue DePaula (a consensus top four overall prospect) or Mike Sirota (top 15) instead of or in addition to Hope, who ranks closer to 25 or 30 overall.
Particularly since they pulled the trigger nearly two days before the trade deadline. Let the Dodgers fester a bit and see how badly they want the great Skubal.
The other problem for Detroit, to borrow a phrase that has been beaten to death by New Age baseball sorts: Will these young men become the best versions of themselves in Detroit’s system?
Nothing against the Tigers, but probably not to the extent they would as Dodgers. Which brings us back to Beaty and Busch.
Beaty was a 12th-round pick of the Dodgers out of Belmont College in 2015. He was a solid contributor on 2019 and ’21 Dodgers teams, posting a .363 OBP in 120 games in 2021.
And then the Dodgers traded him to San Diego for Ryan – and Baty promptly batted .093.
Busch’s path was a little more normal – 31st overall pick in 2019, brief major league debut in 2023. Yet he was expendable because the Dodgers signed Freddie Freeman for relative pennies on the dollar once Atlanta deemed him replaceable.
So Busch was traded for Hope and pitcher Jackson Ferris in 2024. And Busch has been… pretty good as a Cub, smacking 34 homers last year, though he’s only slightly better than a league average hitter this year.
Point is, the Dodgers got him at the back of the first round, developed him into a consensus top 50 prospect – and used him to plant a trade tree that eventually branched out to Skubal.
Not to bum the Tigers out, but in the Andrew Friedman era, the Dodgers tend not to get burned with their deadline deals.
Exactly 24 hours before the Dodgers acquired Skubal, the Baltimore Orioles quietly traded Dean Kremer and his 6.50 ERA to the Minnesota Twins. That closed the book on a 2018 deal in which the Dodgers got Manny Machado and a trip to the World Series and the Orioles got Rylan Bannon, Yusniel Diaz, Breyvic Valera, Zach Pop and Kremer – the lone playable asset from that deal.
Perhaps you remember Willie Calhoun? Dealt in 2017 to acquire Yu Darvish, who helped them to the World Series.
You’d think dealing for Max Scherzer and Trea Turner in their prime might help your trading partner reboot its entire organization. Yet the Washington Nationals received adequate catcher Keibert Ruiz (ranked higher as a prospect than another catcher named Will Smith) and oft-injured pitcher Josiah Gray.
Sure, the Dodgers aren’t perfect, and not necessarily out to destroy the trading partner.
Miguel Vargas has developed into an All-Star third baseman after he was acquired in a deal for Tommy Edman in 2024. Yordan Alvarez (for Josh Fields) and Oneil Cruz (for Tony Watson) were massive misses, though both were teenagers at the time of the deals.
None of this augurs well for the Tigers, and before you insist that they simply had no choice, keep in mind that by the end of this weekend, the Tigers will likely be within two games of a playoff berth.
Don’t let the talk of controllable assets and the need to reboot the system fool you: The Tigers simply forfeited a chance at a playoff berth and possible World Series.
Sure, it’s possible they get there anyway. The AL is that bad, and the Central eminently winnable. But holding Skubal would have obviously enhanced those chances significantly.
Now, Skubal is a Dodger, not because they lavished money on him, but because the Tigers chose to send him there, and they believed they had the most to offer in return.
Funny how it always seems to work out that way.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dodgers scored Tarik Skubal because they win every mind game | Opinion
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