The Dodgers Landed Skubal, and Wrigley Field Immediately Objected

L.A. added a back-to-back Cy Young winner at the deadline, promptly got swept in Chicago — and still leads the NL West by eight games.

The rich got richer, then face-planted, in that order — a very Dodgers week. On the night of August 1, a day and a half before the deadline, L.A. pried Tarik Skubal, the reigning back-to-back AL Cy Young winner, from Detroit for prospects Zyhir Hope, River Ryan and Brady Smith, per ESPN, dropping a 2.79 ERA and a 116-to-14 strikeout-to-walk ratio into a rotation that already had Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani. The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh did the math: that's five of baseball's top 25 projected starters by rest-of-season FIP on one staff, acquired for roughly $10 million in remaining salary, and his sharper point was that the other 29 teams could have stopped this and simply didn't.

Baseball's answer arrived within 72 hours. Skubal's Tuesday debut at Wrigley was perfectly fine — six innings, two runs, six strikeouts — and the Dodgers lost anyway, 5-1, managing little beyond a Kyle Tucker homer off Javier Assad, per ESPN; OutKick counted it as a fifth straight defeat. The Cubs finished the sweep Wednesday, 7-6, wasting two Ohtani home runs, per The Sporting Tribune — a game that also produced the week's genuine scare, Freddie Freeman fouling a Shota Imanaga fastball off his own right hand. X-rays came back negative and Freeman is expected back Friday in Arizona, per MLB.com.

Zoom out and the anxiety is mostly theoretical. The Dodgers sit at 69-46, first in the NL West by eight games over Arizona with a +140 run differential, per CBS Sports' standings, and the stated project remains becoming the first NL team ever to win three consecutive World Series, per ESPN. A cold week in Chicago is a footnote; the deadline was the story, and the deadline went one way.