New context from Brewers' Tarik Skubal pursuit proves Matt Arnold was serious about landing Tigers' ace

Since the Los Angeles Dodgers acquired Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers two days before Monday's MLB trade deadline, various reports have surfaced in regard to the Milwaukee Brewers' pursuit of the reigning back-to-back AL Cy Young Award winner. The Brewers' front office, largely considered the runner-up in the Skubal sweepstakes, certainly made an offer for the dominant southpaw, but just how serious that offer truly was has been disputed.

The common thread among the competing reports is that the Brewers were prepared to part ways with their second-ranked prospect, Luis Peña, in order to land Skubal. Peña, MLB Pipeline's No. 18-ranked prospect in baseball, should carry more or at least the same amount of value as Zyhir Hope, the outfield prospect who headlined the Dodgers' accepted trade offer.

Where reports differ is in regard to what the Brewers were willing to pair with Peña to get a deal across the finish line. Some have suggested that the Brewers made one offer to Detroit, which included Peña and two more position player prospects, one of whom was considered a Top 100 prospect.

However, this morning, MLB insider Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic challenged that notion, claiming that Matt Arnold and the Brewers' front office put forth several offers to the Tigers, some of which included pitching. Said Rosenthal on the deal, "Rather than one set proposal, the Brewers gave the Tigers multiple paths to consider. Some of those paths included pitching. Some included Peña and outfielder Alexander Frias...Some included infielder/outfielder Jett Williams, whose stock among some evaluators is not as high as it was last offseason."

Paired with a report from Jeff Passan of ESPN, who noted that Logan Henderson, alongside Jesús Made, Cooper Pratt, and Luis Lara, was treated as untouchable at this year's trade deadline, we can deduce that the "pitching" Rosenthal reports the Brewers were offering was either one of their two highly-ranked prospects, Bishop Letson and Josh Knoth, or one of their young starters other than Henderson, like Coleman Crow or Robert Gasser.

The fact that the Brewers' front office, who have built a perennial contender by relying on players at the beginning of their careers, were willing to include these names in a deal for a rental arm, albeit one of the best rental arms ever traded at the deadline, proves that Milwaukee was serious about landing Skubal, and didn't make an offer simply to say that they did.

However, Milwaukee's efforts to land Skubal, made more impressive by their inability to replace the future big leaguers they would have traded away with expensive free agents, still wasn't enough to satisfy many in the industry. Like a number of other experts in the field, Rosenthal wasn't satisfied with the Brewers' unwillingness to be even more aggressive than they reportedly were in their pursuit of Skubal.

MLB insider's call for Brewers to be more aggressive in Tarik Skubal chase is inherently contradictory

Shortly after reporting that the Brewers were willing to part ways with their No. 2-ranked prospect, their No. 4 prospect, and some type of controllable starter, Rosenthal suggested that the reason Milwaukee ultimately lost the Skubal sweepstakes to the Dodgers was because they weren't more aggressive. As Rosenthal wrote, "The lingering question, however, is whether the Brewers, in this particular case, could have been more aggressive. The way teams resist trading prospects, it’s almost as if they assume every one of them will become a star. The hit rate on such players isn’t nearly that good."

While claiming that the smallest market in baseball, who was ready to part with multiple Top 100 prospects for a rental arm needed to be more aggressive in their offer is likely to fall on deaf ears, it's Rosenthal's reasoning for why the Brewers could afford to be more aggressive that is especially problematic. From his perspective, the fact that prospects have a low hit rate is a reason to trade more of them away, but for a team that needs young talent to survive MLB's broken financial landscape, the exact opposite is true. If the hit rate is low on prospects, teams should be wanting to increase their chances of keeping one who "hits" by maintaining as much prospect talent as they can. In other words, if one out of ten top prospects is going to hit, a team decreasing their pool of top prospects from 10 to seven hurts their chances of keeping the one that is going to become a star.

As has frequently been the case amid the Dodgers' rise to dominance over the last few seasons, members of the national media continue to expect the Brewers to act in the same way as their blank-check-bearing competition on the West Coast. What often fails to be acknowledged is that the only reason the Brewers are competitive in a broken system actively working against them is because they've acknowledged that they can't operate like a big-market team and have stopped trying to. Milwaukee's pursuit of Skubal was the first instance of them breaking from this mold in quite a while, and even though they put multiple strong offers forward, their willingness to stray from what has led them to success over the last decade still didn't satisfy the demands of those wanting them to act like the big-market ballclub that they are not.

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