The Milwaukee Brewers surprised many in baseball by recording the best record of the regular season this year despite playing with a relatively modest payroll and relatively few marquee players.
Compared to a juggernaut franchise like the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Brewers found success with a ragtag group of lesser known players and surged all the way to the National League Championship Series as a result.
But with so much success, it’s easy to speculate about how good the Brewers might be with a superstar injection or two. And when asked about whether the team might pursue a trade for Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, Brewers manager Pat Murphy acknowledged the temptation.
“I mean, those questions are the questions being talked about right now,” Murphy said during an appearance on “The Show” podcast with the New York Post’s Jon Heyman and Joel Sherman. “The Skubal thing, believe me, there’s a lot of teams in baseball that would give up a lot right now for that.”
However, Murphy also noted that the Brewers don’t have much history of leveraging their prospect talent for veteran stars and that even the chance to add a player like Skubal seems unlikely to change that.
“But when you think of our organization, giving up prospects for one year of control of somebody is probably now what we do best,” Murphy added on the podcast appearance. “It probably doesn’t make sense, does it?”
The Brewers have some open questions in the rotation headed into next season, particularly with staff ace Freddy Peralta going into his final year under contract. But given how the Brewers typically operate and the success they’ve had recently, the team seems more likely to offload Peralta than to acquire Skubal.
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