Tarik Skubal was visibly emotional outside the Detroit Tigers' clubhouse on Saturday night addressing reporters after his trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Even though he had expected the move, actually getting traded from the team that drafted him eight years ago was still a lot to process once it actually happened.
"It's tough," he told reporters as his voice cracked. "I love all those guys in there. They're some of my best friends."
He tried to talk about his new team, but could only muster out a few words as he fought back tears.
"Yeah, it's exciting," he said. "I'm excited."
On Monday, Aug. 3 at Wrigley Field, Skubal was officially introduced to the media as the newest member of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The reigning back-to-back Cy Young winner
mentioned that while it was tough to leave the Tigers, the opportunity to play for the Dodgers, a team that he's long admired from afar for "playing the game the right way," was all too easy to get excited about.
The social media backlash in the trade's aftermath has been fierce: the Dodgers are ruining baseball. The Dodgers assured a lockout in 2027. The Dodgers are cheating. None of that noise has penetrated the walls within the Dodgers' building. They're simply doing all they can to put themselves in a position to win, which should be the goal of every team. And Skubal was quick to defend his new home.
"Every team could trade for me," Skubal told reporters. "I don’t sympathize with people that blame the Dodgers for anything they’ve done. It’s a winning org ... I really don’t sympathize with people that are complaining because the Dodgers do all the right things."
Things like scouting. Player development. Analytics. The list things the Dodgers front office excels at goes far beyond Mark Walter's bank account. And they're things that have nothing to do with market size or payroll. That's why president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman "passionately disagreed" with his critics on Sunday.
"This is about the partnership that we have with our fans who come out 50,000 large and the passion they have for this team. The guys in that clubhouse who are doing everything they can to put us in position to win a World Series," Friedman said. "... All of our different departments have their fingerprints all over this, and so it's put us in position to not only be competitive here, but also to have a really strong farm system, which then puts us in position to be able to have these types of conversations."
The Dodgers front office is just as all-in on winning championships as the players are. It's why Friedman wasn't content to fall back on the success of the last two seasons but rather was motivated by just the possibility of adding Skubal to a rotation that, when healthy, already consists of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani. That culture, that hunger, is why Skubal had so much respect for the organization from the outside, and it's why he wanted to be a part of it.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tarik Skubal pushes back on notion that the Dodgers are ruining baseball
