Before we get into this, let’s address the elephant in the room. With all due respect to the accomplished USA Today MLB columnist Bob Nightengale, we all know to take this type of stuff with a huge grain of salt. With that being said, this is a link that’s been made by multiple MLB reporters now so it’s also easy to imagine that there could be some real smoke surrounding a potential fire here.
Anyways, Nightengale in his latest piece for USA Today has predicted that not only will the Detroit Tigers
end up trading Skubal — he’ll end up going to the Atlanta Braves as well.
Nightengale is using “rival executives” as his source here and to be honest, it makes a lot of sense. While the Braves are currently in desperate need of any help at any position across the board at this particular moment, we can at least hope that Atlanta’s entire core of star players will stop slumping as a unit at some point in the future. It’s more difficult to imagine taking the Braves seriously as a threat in the Postseason with Chris Sale, Martín Pérez and a dream as their playoff rotation, so it makes all the sense in the world that the Braves would decide to not only bolster their rotation but swing big as well.
Now, just because this is a prediction in a column doesn’t mean that the Braves are a lock at this point. A lot can change between now and the Trade Deadline on August 3 (as Alex Anthopoulos mentioned in a pre-game interview over this past weekend) but as long as there are no more catastrophic injuries, starting pitching seems like it would be the priority for the Braves. It also helps that Atlanta has built up its farm system to the point where they have what it takes in prospects (and also in cash) to make any potential big deal that they want.
Alex Anthopoulos also has a reputation for doing smaller deals since becoming the General Manager of the Atlanta Braves — if you can remember, none of the deals that he made that helped propel the Braves to the World Series title in 2021 were earth-shattering deals but they were mostly under-the-radar trades where he hit on nearly all of them. With that being said, AA has also been known to make a splashy trade in his time and this would be a very splashy one indeed if he was to pull it off.
Anyways, my opinion on whether or not the Braves should get Skubal if they have the chance has already been written so I’ll just direct you to my piece on the subject. With that being said, it sure feels like this could start going from “speculation” to “actual negotiations” if this type of talk continues to keep up among MLB insiders and reporters. We’ll see what happens.
