Dodgers Casually Deploy Tarik Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for Games 1 and 2
Bob Nightengale reported the starters are Skubal and Yamamoto 'as expected.'
The Los Angeles Dodgers are rolling out Tarik Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for Games 1 and 2 of their upcoming playoff series, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes the rest of the league want to forfeit. Bob Nightengale confirmed the rotation plans, making it official that Los Angeles is bringing a bazooka to a knife fight.
Setting up a postseason rotation is usually a stressful puzzle of rest days and bullpen management. For the Dodgers, it is just a matter of deciding which elite, franchise-altering ace gets to ruin the opponent's night first.
Los Angeles just finished dispatching the Atlanta Braves in four games, closing out the series with a 4-1 win on October 7. That early gentleman's sweep gave their pitching staff plenty of time to kick their feet up before heading to Milwaukee to face the Brewers.
Having Skubal and Yamamoto pitch back-to-back is objectively hilarious. It is the baseball equivalent of a billionaire buying two mega-yachts just in case the first one gets a scratch. Most franchises spend decades trying to draft and develop one guy with this kind of stuff, and the Dodgers just casually stack them at the top of a playoff rotation.
From a betting perspective, seeing these two names on the bump makes the moneyline math incredibly steep. Oddsmakers already treat the Dodgers like an inevitable force of nature, and throwing two Cy Young-caliber arms in the first 48 hours of a series only inflates that premium.
The Brewers get the first crack at this two-headed monster on October 12. Milwaukee better hope their bats are fully awake, because falling behind 0-2 against a rotation built like an All-Star team is a math problem nobody wants to solve.