Ignore the noise, Dodgers trade for Tarik Skubal is great for baseball

The general public’s response to the Dodgers’ latest blockbuster deal was predictable.

The trade for Tarik Skubal invited another round of complaints about how the Dodgers are buying championships.

About how their broadcasting deal provides them with an unfair economic advantage over Major League Baseball’s 29 other teams.

About how they’re ruining baseball.

Good.

Great, actually.

The Skubal deal might evoke intensely negative feelings outside of Los Angeles and parts of Asia, but that’s the point. When was the last time a trade sparked this level of outrage?

“People are passionate,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.

The opposite of hatred is indifference, and if the Detroit Tigers had instead shipped Skubal to some podunk town like Milwaukee, most sports fans would have taken a couple of minutes to absorb the news and shifted their focus right back to NFL training camp.

When people say they want competitive balance in baseball, what they’re really saying is that they want their team to have a chance. But they don’t actually want parity. They don’t care about another random small-market team contending.

Consider what happened in 2023. The Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks played in the World Series, and it was the lowest-rated Fall Classic in history.

Advocates of parity in baseball ignore this reality, which is that only a handful of teams drive conversation on a national scale.

Baseball is a regional sport. Teams and their players are popular in their respective markets but rarely outside of them. What baseball player other than Shohei Ohtani has a national profile? Aaron Judge, maybe?

Skubal might be the best pitcher in baseball, but he’s probably less famous than the average NFL backup quarterback.

Baseball’s culture is part of the problem. Stoicism is considered a virtue, and players with personalities are encouraged to keep them under wraps.

With only a select few players capable of eliciting visceral reactions from the people who watch them, that role has to be taken on by the teams.

The Dodgers do that. 

Whether they’re loved or hated, admired or feared, they create an emotional center around which the sport can revolve.

What’s important isn’t whether the Dodgers are the heroes or villains of a story. That’s a matter of perspective. What’s important is that every game in which they’re involved has a story. 

Good versus bad. Rich versus poor. Hare versus tortoise. Anything to make a game more than a game.

The NFL is popular enough to thrive without an Evil Empire. Major League Baseball doesn’t have that luxury, and the commissioner’s office should be thankful that the Dodgers have taken the position that was vacated by the New York Yankees when George Steinbrenner died.

In the coming months, the Dodgers will be used as an example of why baseball should implement a salary cap.

The arguments won’t be made in good faith. Team owners have wanted a salary cap for some time, and it has never had anything to do with competitive balance and everything to do with increasing franchise valuations.

Because of how they spend, because of how they win, and because of how they have Ohtani, the Dodgers are a major reason why baseball has regained a degree of cultural relevance in recent years.

Their star players have gone from being baseball-famous to famous-famous. They have made casual fans aware of talented players on other teams. And in the last couple of days, they introduced Skubal to a large segment of the population that was previously unaware of his existence.

Certainly better for the sport than another Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series.

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