This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95
using your PayPal account or major credit card. (Zelle users, please email me for details.)
-
The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Rage
Vol. 18, No. 69
August 2, 2026
Be angry.
It’s good to be angry. As a baseball fan, waking up Sunday morning to this news, you should be angry. We have, once again, a shining example of baseball’s broken ecosystem. Tarik Skubal started Saturday a Tiger, and he ended it a Dodger. It’s a scathing indictment of a sport that cannot get its house in order, cannot ensure that 30 teams, when they choose to, will compete for a championship. Baseball fans should be furious today as they watch another hammer blow to MLB’s competitive integrity.
The Dodgers? Oh, the Dodgers didn’t do anything wrong. They paid the highest price any team has paid for a rental in a decade. They did so using players from their deep farm system, one they’ve painstakingly built for years through the draft and trades, one considered first or second in all of MLB by everyone who rates these things. Their depth allowed them to pay dearly in talent for nine starts from Skubal plus a playoff run.
No, fans should be angry at -- I am angry at -- the Tigers. When the trade was consummated, the Tigers were three games out of a playoff spot and on their way to making it 2 1/2. They’ve struggled, to be sure, with a 53-58 mark, but in the AL of 2026 that leaves them 5 1/2 out of the AL Central lead and 2 1/2 behind the Guardians and Twins, two .500 teams, for the last AL playoff berth.
If a team can be 2 1/2 games out of a playoff spot with 50 games left and trade away its best player -- one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball -- then why do we have 12 playoff berths? That’s something you see in the NBA, where the value of the final playoff berths is so small that teams would rather miss the postseason and fall into the draft lottery. That’s not the case in baseball, where we have seen, in just the four years of this format, teams make runs to the World Series from the wild card slots. Of the eight Series teams since 2022, two have been #6 seeds and one has been a #5 seed. The bottom seeds in the MLB playoffs have been so successful that it was considered a crisis just three seasons ago.
If I have said it once I have said it a million times. The results of short-series baseball between two teams qualified for the tournament are basically random. Just get in the door, and you can be the 2023 Rangers or the 2014 Giants, or even the teams they beat in those years, the Diamondbacks and Royals.
This trade is an embarrassment to the Tigers and to baseball. Since 1994, MLB has chosen to lower and lower again and lower still again the standard for making the playoffs, over the shouts of those of us committed to the value of the regular season. The league chased TV money and sold it as “hope and faith,” assuring us that expanding the pool of teams with a chance to make the playoffs would grow interest and excitement in the season’s final two months. The most recent expansions of the playoff field, in 2012 and 2022, were not embraced by front offices, though. Each July, some front offices, measuring the value of a one-game playoff or a road best-of-three against the medium- and long-term interests of .500ish teams, often decide against going for that playoff berth.
Now, we have witnessed that stratagem taken to its natural end, a playoff contender trading its ace, making itself worse, with a playoff berth well within reach.
Yes, the Tigers were a playoff contender, even at 53-58. Look just a little deeper, and you see a team with the best run differential (+52) in its division and third-best in its league. A little deeper than that? The Tigers have the third-best third-order record in the AL. They had underachieved for four months, in part because Scott Harris had the worst winter of anyone west of the Grand Central Parkway. Harris failed to upgrade a bullpen that ranks 22nd in FanGraphs WAR, and he bought into the peak performances of the team’s 2025 bench players, leaving the Tigers vulnerable to that group’s inevitable regression.
Harris’s moral hazard is evident in this deal. By trading Skubal, he shifts the focus from his terrible work this year to the 2027-29 period, resetting the clock for himself. He also takes the easy way out at this deadline, selling rather than buying. Remember, Harris’s first playoff team surfaced out of the blue after he, with reason, traded away Jack Flaherty, Andrew Chafin, and Mark Canha at the 2024 deadline. Last year, with the Tigers holding a comfortable lead in the AL Central, Harris added only depth pieces -- Charlie Morton, Kyle Finnegan, Rafael Montero, Chris Paddack.
Harris could have spent three days bolstering his team’s bullpen and maybe adding a hitter, but in doing so, he would have shifted the focus from the future to the present, would have put his ass on the line. Like many of his generation of GMs, Harris is more comfortable planning for the long term than winning in the short term. None of these guys, save Andrew Friedman, are wartime consiglieri. I’m convinced Harris completed the trade last night, with two days to the deadline and the Tigers three out, to avoid the chance that he’d have to complete it Monday with the team just 1 1/2 out.
The most common defense of the trade I’ve seen is that the Tigers couldn’t make the playoffs or win a World Series with this bullpen. That’s nonsense. For one, Harris still had time to rebuild the pen; last year the Yankees added four relievers at the deadline, and the Astros did the same in 2021. There will be dozens of relievers traded for minor leaguers -- not prospects, just minor leaguers -- in the next few days. Rebuilding a bullpen is the easiest thing to do at the deadline, but you have to actually want to win to do it.
Beyond that, though, absolutely no one can predict how any bullpen will perform in October. In recent years we’ve seen the 2018 Red Sox, the 2019 Nationals, the 2021 Braves all seem, in August, to have bullpens that looked like the team’s weak links, only for their relievers to post 50 great innings in the tournament on the way to a title. Last year’s Blue Jays had a below-average pen in the regular season, the 20th-ranked one in the second half, and even a mediocre one in the AL playoffs. Then that group posted a 3.06 ERA in the World Series. That was nearly enough to win a title. Get into the tournament, and anything can happen.
This trade is a microcosm of the real problem MLB has faced for decades. It’s not about haves and have-nots, but wants and want-nots. The Dodgers, and teams like them, want to win more than teams like the Tigers do, so they go out and acquire the Tigers’ best pitcher. MLB has built an entire labor strategy and media campaign around demonizing the Dodgers, when in fact it’s the Tigers who are wrecking baseball. You have to be through the looking glass to think the sport’s problem is the team that’s trying to win rather than the team that’s trading Tarik Skubal while sitting 2 1/2 games out of a playoff spot.
So yes, be angry. The Tarik Skubal trade undermines the premise that MLB is a competition to win a championship. Just be angry at the right team, the right front office. It’s not the Dodgers who are the enemy. It’s the Tigers.
-
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95
using your PayPal account or major credit card. (Zelle users, please email me for details.)
