Tarik Skubal fights tears in emotional farewell to Tigers - ESPN

WEST SACRAMENTO — The quirky geography of Sutter Health Park provided the best clue that Tarik Skubal's career with the Detroit Tigers was coming to an end Saturday night.

After the second inning, Skubal and fellow starting pitchers Casey Mize, Justin Verlander and Jack Flaherty made the walk from the first-base dugout to the clubhouse beyond center field. Later in the game, Mize, Verlander and Flaherty returned. Skubal did not.

«The walk to the clubhouse was very normal,» Skubal said after the game, following reports he had been traded to the Dodgers for three prospects. «I normally go in and do some stuff, move around a little bit, get some treatment.»

But while in the clubhouse, Skubal received a phone call that upended any concept of normalcy.

«I was like, 'I know what this is,'» he said. «And it didn't feel like it was the right time to go back out there.»

By the seventh inning, when ESPN's Jeff Passan reported that Skubal was being traded for prospects Zyhir Hope, River Ryan and Brady Smith, Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said fans behind the Tigers' dugout could be heard talking about the trade.

«It started to gain its own little momentum,» Hinch said. «Obviously, I think we've been bracing for things like this to happen, or something like this to happen, and then when it does, Tarik is not in the dugout, so there was a lot of unknown at that time and we were in the middle of a game. It wasn't really talked about a ton, but Jack and Casey and Justin had come back from the clubhouse, and everybody was asking a bunch of questions.»

Skubal, the back-to-back American League Cy Young winner and most celebrated trade-deadline prize in years, fought back tears as he recounted his nine seasons in the Tigers organization, a