Wednesday, August 5, 2026 — two days after the Trade Deadline.
Saturday night, the Los Angeles Dodgers acquired the best pitcher in baseball and the industry more or less conceded the National League. Since then they have lost five consecutive games, been swept by the Red Sox, and watched Tarik Skubal get outpitched by Javier Assad at Wrigley Field.
Buster Olney summed up the mood on Tuesday night: the Dodgers, he said, are vulnerable.
The Debut That Deserved Better
Skubal was good. He was not the problem.
The two-time AL Cy Young winner threw six innings against the Cubs, allowing four hits and two earned runs with six strikeouts and two walks across 86 pitches. He cruised through the first two frames without a baserunner. Chicago won 5-1, and Skubal took the loss.
The underlying data was better than the box score. His four-seamer and sinker both averaged 97.3 mph — roughly seven-tenths of a tick above his season marks — and he topped out at 99.3. He generated 13 whiffs on 43 swings, a 30 percent rate, with the changeup his sharpest weapon at 44 percent. The 16 balls put in play against him averaged just 78.8 mph off the bat, with only two classified as hard-hit.
The two runs came on a Dansby Swanson home run in the third and, in the sixth, a sequence involving a ball Kyle Tucker couldn’t reach in right and a Nico Hoerner swinging bunt that bounced too high for anyone to field. That’s not an ace unraveling. That’s baseball.
The Actual Problem Is the Offense
One run. Against Javier Assad, a 29-year-old who had struck out 51 batters in 75 1/3 innings this season and who held the vaunted Los Angeles lineup to four hits over 5 2/3 innings.
That is the story of this slide. The Dodgers are 3-7 in their last ten. They lost 10-5 to the Cubs on Monday, meaning the pitching has had its own struggles — but a team built on the deepest offensive roster in baseball has stopped scoring at the worst possible moment.
It doesn’t help that the injured list still reads like an All-Star roster. Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow are both working back. Shohei Ohtani remains away from the mound with a left knee issue. Will Smith hasn’t been behind the plate since the neck injury that had Los Angeles briefly shopping for catching help in July.
Why This Matters More Than a Bad Week
Every 162-game season contains a five-game losing streak. The Dodgers are still favored to win the World Series, and a rotation featuring Skubal, Snell, Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in October remains a nightmare for anyone.
But there’s a reason the “vulnerable” framing has traction. Los Angeles gave up three prospects for Skubal specifically because Andrew Friedman said there simply aren’t many star-level players available and the Dodgers intend to be in the room whenever one is. That’s a philosophy built for the postseason, where one arm can decide a series.
What it doesn’t fix is a lineup that goes cold, a bullpen that has to cover innings while starters rebuild arm strength, and a division race that isn’t over.
The Cubs Are Making Their Own Point
Chicago deserves credit here rather than sympathy for the visitors. Jed Hoyer spent deadline weekend adding Kevin Gausman from Toronto and Clay Holmes from the Mets after being outbid for Skubal, and the Cubs entered Wednesday at 65-49 — second-best in the NL Central behind a Milwaukee club that has been the best team in baseball all year.
Beating the Dodgers twice in three days, with Skubal on the mound for one of them, is exactly the kind of series that convinces a clubhouse it belongs.
What Comes Next
Los Angeles sends Eric Lauer against Shota Imanaga on Wednesday afternoon, trying to avoid a second consecutive series sweep. That is a sentence nobody expected to write about this team in August.
Skubal’s next turn should tell more. His velocity is up, his stuff played, and he pitched six innings against a good lineup in a hostile park four days after being traded across the country.
The Dodgers didn’t buy him for August. But August is where confidence gets built, and right now there isn’t much of it going around.
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