Fantasy baseball fallout from Tarik Skubal's trade to the Dodgers - ESPN

What does a two-time defending World Series champion — one with a record-setting, roughly half a billion dollar payroll — do for an encore?

It trades for the two-time defending Cy Young Award winner from the opposite league, of course.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, perennially committed to investing whatever is necessary to win championships — and who can blame them for doing so? — acquired Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers late Saturday night, adding the lefty to their already sound stable of starters that includes No. 6 scoring pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, All-Star Justin Wrobleski and some guy named Shohei Ohtani. They'll also soon get Blake Snell, a two-time Cy Young Award winner himself, and Tyler Glasnow back from the injured list, giving themselves the game's soundest rotation for postseason play.

It's a deal that makes sense for the Dodgers, being that, despite the team's pitching depth on paper, they haven't always extracted the peak results predicted from said arms. Snell has thrown 77 major league pitches and made 12 regular-season starts for the Dodgers between this and last season. Glasnow has made 25 total starts in that time. Roki Sasaki has a 4.59 ERA in two seasons. Ohtani's knee and biceps issues have limited him to designated hitter duty only recently. The Dodgers had a need here, and operating under baseball's current rules construct, they filled it.

Nothing changes for Skubal's fantasy managers, other than those in old-school AL-only leagues that force abandonment of a cross-league traded player. He'll remain one of the three best pitchers in fantasy — he has been my No. 1 (putting Ohtani's dual eligibility aside for the moment) and will stay so — dependent upon your opinion of Jacob Misiorowski's