Inside Tarik Skubal's last two days as a Tiger - ESPN

TARIK SKUBAL SPENT much of his final day as a Detroit Tiger expertly deploying a relatively new skill: pretending everything is perfectly normal when nothing is.

Being the lead actor in the MLB trade deadline can feel like an out-of-body experience. The hours tick down, the world contracts, the periphery ceases to exist. Everyone seems to have an opinion or a source or a prediction, and none of it makes sense to you. It's both flattering and maddening, and sometimes detachment is the only path to inner peace.

And so, in his unflinching pursuit of sanity amid chaos, Skubal sat at his locker late Saturday afternoon in the communal cell that is the visiting clubhouse in West Sacramento's Sutter Health Park and spoke to a small group of reporters about something of utmost importance in his life right now: true-crime documentaries.

In a few hours, his life would be upended. He would walk across the field after the second inning, from first-base dugout to center-field clubhouse, and receive a phone call informing him he'd been traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the most predictable result of an unpredictable trade-deadline weekend. He would remove his Tigers uniform, remain in the clubhouse — «it didn't feel like it was the right time to go back there,» he said — and call it a night after nearly nine years in the Tigers' organization.

But for now, with all of that both unknown and unknowable, he wanted to talk docs: Ted Bundy; Bryan Kohberger and the University of Idaho killings; South Carolina's Murdaugh murders. He watched a documentary just that morning. You ever wonder about the mild-mannered, innocuous neighbors who harbor horrible secrets and hidden bodies? Skubal does, too.

The more he talked, the wider his eyes grew,