CHICAGO — He doesn’t have to say it.
“I’m not going to sit here and say I’m the big piece,” Tarik Skubal said of fitting into the Dodgers’ championship puzzle. “They’ve been a pretty good baseball team without me. So I’m going to show up and kind of be a chameleon in a sense and fit right in with these guys and just gel with them.
“They’ve got the winning recipe. They know what it takes to win. I don’t.”
Skubal is a new ingredient in that mix as the Dodgers go for a three-peat – and undoubtedly an important one however he tries to blend in. He is also a hired gun, rolling into town with an expiring contract and heralded by Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman as the only player they felt could be a difference-maker. There is pressure to live up to that label.
“I think pressure in this game is a privilege. Not a lot of guys in the game get to wear that,” Skubal said. “So it’s an honor to have expectations around you. I’ve always thought that. It’s an honor to have a fan base that expects me to go out there and perform. It’s an honor to have teammates that expect me to go out and put us in a position to win. So that pressure has always been a privilege to me.
“I’m excited. It’s what fuels me. It’s what motivates me to be great. I think all the really good players in this game all kind of wear that and they all go out there and perform and I’m sure they use it as fuel too. … I don’t want to shy away from it. I want to embrace it.”
It will embrace him. Before his Dodgers debut at Wrigley Field on Tuesday night, he was booed when he went out to jog in the outfield, booed when he finished his warmups in the bullpen, booed when his name was announced in the starting lineup and booed when he took the mound in the bottom of the first inning. All before he threw his first pitch as a Dodger.
“I plan on pitching in front of those atmospheres for the rest of the season, and then obviously, when it comes postseason time, I’ll be ready to go,” Skubal said.
“Going in and competing, I don’t expect anything else. … I haven’t actually made a home start in the postseason. They’ve all been on the road.”
The eight or nine starts Skubal will make over the rest of the regular season will not be true tests of whether he can be the difference-maker the Dodgers hope he is. That will come in the postseason when he, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell and Shohei Ohtani would give the Dodgers the most accomplished pitching rotation in generations – four Cy Young awards (two each for Skubal and Snell), a World Series MVP (Yamamoto in 2025) and a unicorn (Ohtani).
“It’s No. 1s every day,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said, smiling in anticipation and holding down a pang of sympathy for opposing hitters.
“This game is so mental and when you see those horses coming at you every single day it’s going to be draining.”
At 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, Skubal is “a big man coming at you with a lot of things going on,” Freeman said.
“All of his pitches are plus,” said Freeman, who is 1 for 6 with a home run in his two games facing Skubal. “It’s the changeup off the heater that is devastating. He throws it to right- and left-handed hitters. It’s hard to cover both of those, because it looks like a fastball out of his hand and then it’s 88 (mph). All of his pitches are competitive. That’s also what makes him good. That’s what separates the best pitchers from the other pitchers. If you throw 100 pitches in a game, 98 of them make us want to go after it instead of 84 and the rest of them you can just let them go. He doesn’t do that.
“He has plus-command, plus-stuff and all of his stuff makes you attempt at the swing. So it’s an exhausting at-bat. It’s an exhausting day. Those are the days I always talk about when you face the deGroms, the Kershaws – the days when you wake up and you get your coffee and you think, ‘This is going to be a grind.’”
The Dodgers have done this before, obtaining an elite starting pitcher with an expiring contract at midseason – in 2017 it was Yu Darvish, in 2021 Max Scherzer.
Darvish went 4-3 with a 3.44 ERA in nine regular-season starts for the Dodgers. Scherzer was 7-0 with a 1.98 ERA for the only Dodgers team not to win the NL West in the past 13 seasons. Neither could deliver a World Series title.
And neither re-signed with the Dodgers.
Labor negotiations and the almost certain lockout will complicate Skubal’s free agency next winter. But the next three months could be an extended first date for him and the Dodgers, a chance for the two sides to get to know each other and see if a long-term relationship is something they want to pursue – making Skubal a big piece of the Dodgers’ future as well as their present.
“I’m really not going to talk about the business side of what’s happening with me,” Skubal said when asked about that element of his move to Los Angeles. “Obviously, I understand free agency. I’d really like the message to be just, I’m excited to be here and learn everything about the Dodgers and all these guys here, develop relationships and win as many baseball games as I can.”
UP NEXT
Dodgers (RHP Roki Sasaki, 5-5, 4.64 ERA) at Diamondbacks (TBA), Friday, 6:40 p.m., SportsNet LA, 570 AM