TOM VERDUCCI

Tom Verducci delivers a mix of expert commentary, inside angles and thoughtful perspectives on baseball’s biggest storylines every week.

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In what seemed an inevitability, the Dodgers added the best player available on the trade market, Tarik Skubal. Of course they did. In the past 32 months, they have added Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott, Edwin Diaz, Kyle Tucker and Skubal.

With that kind of spending power, it’s easy to conflate their largesse with the argument that the baseball economic system is broken. But this time the deal is more about the monster player development system the Dodgers have built than the payroll advantage they have.

The Tigers did well, not great, to get something out of the 10 starts left from Skubal before he signs a record-setting free agent deal (likely with the Dodgers on a short-term, high AAV contract). They shopped Skubal around the league and somehow decided the Dodgers had the best package—and a package that hardly dents the prospect capital Los Angeles has on hand. The Dodgers traded:

Somehow the Dodgers turned two former 11th-round picks acquired in low-level deals and the 95th pick of their 2023 draft into the two-time AL Cy Young Award winner. Nobody finds more talent late in the draft and in other organizations than the Dodgers. Under president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, they made early mistakes trading Oneil Cruz and Yordan Alvarez. But for years now the Dodgers have been as smart with prospect capital as they have been as ruthless with their money.

Outflanking the rest of baseball to get Skubal is a good time to recall the story of when Freidman recruited Ohtani, then a free agent. Ohtani wanted a consistent winner. Friedman began to explain to him how important the team’s farm system was in keeping the World Series within reach every year.

“The system is designed for us to be at the bottom in terms of farm system rankings,” Friedman told him. “Picking at the end of the draft ... Having less amount of international money ... Always being competitive and so therefore not really being able to trade off players as they’re nearing free agency ... And yet, we're in the top three, top five, every year.”

Ohtani suddenly stopped him.

“How?” Ohtani asked. 

Friedman answered Ohtani by talking about “cohesiveness and collaboration” and “the stability and the continuity of our group,” principles that apply more to the player development system than money.

The best team in baseball just got better. They can roll out Skubal, Ohtani, Snell and Yamamoto in a postseason rotation, with Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan and Justin Wrobleski as depth starters/bullpen pieces. 

If you want to nit-pick, the Tigers were 3–3 in the postseason when they gave the ball to Skubal, including 0–2 in elimination games. He has a 4.60 career ERA after the sixth inning. Since he reached the majors in 2020, he has thrown 100 pitches in a game only 14 times, less often in these seven seasons than the likes of Dean Kremer, Andrew Heaney, Chris Flexen and Taj Bradley. The Dodgers know this and will ask him to dominate for six innings, not eight.

The Skubal trade was more about prospect capital than money, although money is never far from the reasons the Dodgers are successful. Yes, they nearly were eliminated in the past two postseasons, with the Padres letting them off the hook in the 2024 NLDS and the Blue Jays doing so in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series. But let’s remember the pitchers the Dodgers used in Game 7. Ohtani, Glasnow, Snell and Yamamoto all pitched in that game. Four pitchers they signed to contracts worth $1.277 billion.

And now, because their farm system is loaded, they added Skubal. It’s a team with some age on it, but it’s the best team the Dodgers are taking into the playoffs in their modern dynasty.

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One of these years, if only because anomalies happen, a team with below average home run power is going to win the World Series. It’s just that there are no signs from how the game is played in this era that it is likely.

As teams jockey in the last hours before the trade deadline to fill needs, understand that nothing is more important to winning the World Series than hitting home runs. This trend is bad news for the five contenders who rank among the six worst home-run hitting teams in MLB: the Rays (25), Guardians (27), Red Sox (28), D-Backs (29) and Brewers (30).

All five teams rely more on hitting singles, running the bases and letting pitching and defense carry them more than slugging. It’s fun baseball to watch, but over the past decade it’s not the kind of baseball that carries a team through three or four rounds of the postseason.

Here are the currents the so-called “small ball” teams are swimming against:

Why would these trends be so strong? Afterall, the importance of home runs in postseason baseball games goes against our traditional ideas of what wins in October (moving runners, bunting, etc.). But as hits dry up in October against better pitching (especially bullpens), the rare swings that can change a game become more important.

First, let’s look at how hitting becomes more difficult:

Putting that postseason batting average in perspective, there has never been a regular season with a batting average as low as .232. In such a difficult hitting environment, one home run can swing a game. Two can win it. Now let’s see how important home runs become in that environment.

Winning a game without a home run is always hard. It becomes even harder in the postseason in today’s game. The 2014 Giants went 8–4 in the postseason without a homer, a record for most homerless wins in a postseason. The next year the Royals were 4–1 without a homer in October. The game has been played very differently since then.

The Brewers this year are the team most trying to zag against the zig of homers. Through July they played the most games without a homer (47), won the most games without going yard (24) and were the only team with a winning record when they didn't homer (24–23).

At the deadline, teams like Milwaukee that are best adept at playing “small ball” have a choice: find power or double down on pitching to win low-scoring games and defy a strong decade-long trend.

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Munetaka Murakami is a huge bargain for the White Sox. While most of baseball last winter scoffed at the swing-and-miss in his game in Japan and questioned how he would adjust to the greater velocity in MLB, the White Sox signed him to a two-year, $34 million deal. And now he is among the best hitters in the game crushing fastballs.

He ended July with the sixth best slugging against fastballs (not including cutters), only behind the likes of Ben Rice, Yordan Alvarez, James Wood, Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper. And no one has a higher slug against pitches 97 mph and faster than Murakami. How did the White Sox help Murakami adjust so quickly to MLB velocity? It began in spring training with hitting coaches Ryan Fuller and Derek Shomon and the rest of the Chicago staff.

“First of all, this guy is just a really good player,” says White Sox manager Will Venable. “He’s making adjustments and has so much aptitude to make adjustments that it’s been cool to see. As we talked about it and attacked the support for Mune’s development, it was about the way he trained. Getting on high-velo machines, upshoot machines, the Trajekt ... just challenging him in a different way in his preparation and his work. I think it really helped him create and find these solutions for more challenging shapes and velocity.”

For years the White Sox were known as a team with poor player development, both in tools and support. That is changing with some outside-the-box hires. Their pitching coach, Zach Bove, 37, was a college first baseman. Shomon, 36, started in pro ball as a bullpen catcher for the Schaumburg Boomers of the Frontier League. Fuller, 36, has a master’s education and once worked as a financial advisor and high school teacher. Bove came from the Royals, Shomon from the Marlins and Fuller from the Orioles. They may have just 41 games of combined pro playing experience, but they are making a quick impact on Venable’s revamped White Sox staff.

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Andy Pages, breakout star for the Dodgers, is the rare hitter who is better against non-fastballs (.287) than he is against fastballs (.254). That explains why he sees the most fastballs on the Dodgers (61.5%) and ranks in the top 20 of hitters who see the most fastballs.

Pages is especially adept at hitting right-on-right breaking pitches, like his fellow Cuban countryman Yandy Diaz, who also sees a ton of fastballs (62.7%). In fact, the three best hitters against non-fastballs were all born in Cuba:

Best Hitters vs. Non-Fastballs, 2026 (Min. 1,500 pitches)

What’s going on? When I asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, he said, “I think there are a lot of Latin hitters and hitters in general [that] don’t hit the fastball and they’re run producers. Yasiel Puig was that way. With Pages in particular, he’s got like a loopy swing. So, he’s worked real hard at battling the high fastball but his natural swing is like Shohei’s. Why does Shohei hit lefties with the sweeper? Because of his path. Why does [Kyle] Tucker hit lefties as well as righties? He’s got like an uppercut.

“And [pitchers] just can’t go fastball-fastball-fastball. They go fastball-fastball ... now I’ll throw this. And then he gets them. That’s where Andy’s swing path is.”

It’s been a lost year for Cal Raleigh. After posting a .948 OPS while hitting 60 home runs last year, the Mariners catcher ended July at .579 with 11 home runs. His decline is unprecedented. Of the 54 seasons in which a player hit 50 home runs, none fell the next year to an OPS lower than the .704 OPS of Chris Davis in 2014.

The most obvious decline in his game is how weak he has been against velocity. The Statcast numbers show that he is chronically late getting to fastballs. Pitchers know this and they are throwing him more velo.

In the video above, you can see for yourself why Raleigh has been chronically late on heaters this year.

Raleigh vs. 95+ MPH

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