local-sports · August 5, 2026

Skubal Was Fine. The Offense Wasn't.

Six innings, two runs, six strikeouts — and a fifth straight Dodgers loss. What Tarik Skubal's debut at Wrigley actually told us, and what it didn't.

by Support LoCal Staff

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They booed him before he threw a pitch.

Wrigley Field let Tarik Skubal know exactly how it felt about the trade.

Booed during introductions.

Booed again walking to the mound.

Four days earlier he had been a Tiger, and now he was the most expensive symbol of a franchise that a lot of baseball has decided to resent.

Then he retired the first six hitters he faced, struck out three of them, and for two innings looked exactly like the reason Los Angeles gave up two top-100 prospects.

The Dodgers lost 5-1. It was their fifth straight loss.

The line, and what's inside it.

Six innings. Four hits. Two earned runs. Six strikeouts, two walks. Eighty-five pitches, fifty-one of them strikes.

That is a good major league start, and it is a better one than the box score suggests.

Only two balls all night were hit genuinely hard — a Dansby Swanson home run leading off the third on a fastball that drifted over too much plate, and an Alex Bregman double.

The other two hits were a single to right and, in the sixth, a Nico Hoerner chopper that bounced so high over Skubal's head that nobody on the field had any chance at it.

That is the ball that scored the go-ahead run.

There is no version of pitching that prevents it.

He generated 13 whiffs on 43 swings.

Cubs manager Craig Counsell, watching from the other dugout, described a fastball hitters have to cheat to catch up to, cutting one direction to righties and running the other way, with a changeup underneath it.

Dave Roberts, seeing him live for the first time, put it plainly: even when it's not perfect, it's still pretty dang good.

The part that should actually worry Los Angeles.

Kyle Tucker homered in the second.

That was the entire Dodgers offense while Skubal was in the game, and very nearly the entire offense of the night.

Chicago's Javier Assad kept them quiet, the Cubs bullpen kept them quieter, and a lineup that has been among the most feared in baseball for three years has now dropped five in a row and gone 3-7 across its last ten.

The defense, for what it's worth, was excellent.

Andy Pages took two hits away from Cubs batters in center.

Tucker made a lunging grab in right.

The team behind Skubal played well.

The team ahead of him did not.

Which is exactly the thing a trade cannot fix.

When we wrote about this trade on Saturday, the argument was that Los Angeles bought insurance on three injured starters — Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani — rather than a luxury they didn't need. That still looks right.

But it's worth saying what the trade never addressed.

Skubal makes roughly one start in five.

He cannot hit.

On the four days between his starts he is a spectator like everyone else, and if the lineup produces one run, the best pitcher in the American League last year loses 5-1 at Wrigley.

One start is not a sample.

A five-game losing streak in August is not a crisis for a team with a ten-game divisional lead and a 69-45 record.

Both of those things are true, and neither changes the fact that the offense is the actual problem right now and nobody was traded to solve it.

What it looked like from out here.

Tuesday night, five o'clock our time, and the sports bars across Los Angeles were full of people who had specifically arranged to be there.

That's what an acquisition like this does before it does anything else. It makes an ordinary Tuesday in August into a reason to meet someone. People took the early shift, ordered a second round, stayed for the sixth.

Then he came out, the bullpen gave up two more, Hoerner homered in the ninth, and everyone went home slightly disappointed — which is, if we're honest, most of what watching baseball actually is.

The rooms were still full. The kitchens still had their best Tuesday in weeks. That part happened regardless of the score, and it's the part we'll keep paying attention to.

The reasonable read.

He was good. He wasn't dominant, he didn't have his best breaking stuff early, and he still gave his team six innings and a chance.

Roberts had said he vetted him thoroughly before the deal. Counsell, who had to watch it from ninety feet away, said that's simply how he is every night.

October is the point of all this, and October is still two months out. There will be time to worry about the rotation later, and considerably more reason to worry about the lineup now.

You can trade for an ace. Nobody has figured out how to trade for run support.

Game details via ESPN, CBS Sports, ABC7, and MLB.com; accurate as of August 5, 2026. Read what a deep October means for local businesses, or find somewhere to watch the next one. Own a local business in Southern California? Tell us about it. Or recommend a business you love.