Astros' Tarik Skubal trade rumors only work if Dana Brown uses last 'get out of jail free' card

If only we could all love something as much as Bob Nightengale loves connecting the Houston Astros to the top trade target out there, Tarik Skubal. He wrote about it in early July, and he’s been beating the drum ever since. What nobody can quite explain is how a team with two top-100 prospects and a lame-duck general manager can convince Scott Harris and the Detroit Tigers to send Skubal to Houston.

There is one way it can work. It requires Dana Brown to do the thing he has so adamantly insisted he wouldn’t do. To get Skubal, he’d need to trade Jeremy Peña.

Jeremy Peña is the only currency Houston has that Detroit would actually notice

The truth is that Boston tried. They approached Brown about Peña and got shot down almost before they finished asking, according to a league source. Brown has told other clubs, reporters, hotel front desk workers, and Amazon delivery drivers flatly that his shortstop isn’t going anywhere before Monday. It doesn’t feel like posturing at this point, and the Astros are right in the thick of the race, so there is some logic behind it. 

But in this wacky season of trades, a no is only a no until it’s a yes. Peña is a Scott Boras client entering his final year of control next year, and the Astros have already gone through this with Kyle Tucker. If Boston, or really anyone else, puts a real offer on the table, the return could give Brown something he can’t ignore. And this is where Skubal comes in.

The only road to him that is more than wishful thinking is to flip a controllable, star-level shortstop to get back prospects in a system that ranks near the bottom of baseball. Then they funnel some of those prospects to the Tigers to get Skubal in the navy and orange. It seems crazy, but it’s the sort of swing a general manager makes when he knows he’s fighting for his job if October comes and his team isn’t playing for the chance to host a parade.

Short of that, the Red Sox trying to leverage a couple of division rivals is far more Nightengale being Nightengale than anything else. He connects a big name to a contender without a whole lot of concern for how the deal would actually get done. But if it were to happen, Brown basically just has this one card to play. He just hasn’t, at any point, made it appear that he’s ready to play it or will ever be ready to play it.

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