MILWAUKEE — The National League Championship Series begins tonight at 8 p.m., and the most interesting thing about it is a contract. Tarik Skubal, the two-time reigning American League Cy Young winner, was traded to the Dodgers last August in a deadline deal so lopsided that Detroit accepted two prospects and a prayer. The deal was always temporary. Skubal is a rental. He leaves after the World Series, one way or another, and the Dodgers know it, the Brewers know it, and the man tonight standing across the diamond from him, 16-win rookie Jacob Misiorowski, has known it since July, when Milwaukee tried to win the same trade and lost.
So here is what Game 1 actually is: a job interview. Skubal, 29, the best pitcher in baseball on a one-month visa, will spend the next two weeks pitching for a team that has already decided it cannot keep him, against a team that wanted him badly enough to build a roster around the possibility, in a series whose winner gets to face whoever survives the other side of the bracket. Every pitch he throws in Milwaukee is being watched by three parties: the Dodgers, for the win; the Brewers, for the revenge; and every other organization in baseball, for the tape he takes to free agency in November.
The Dodgers, for their part, have spent the last two years winning the World Series and the last six weeks insisting the rental plan is normal. It is not normal. It is the most expensive impulse purchase in the history of sports, executed by a front office that looked at a one-month window and said yes to everything. Skubal, after two grueling Game 5 losses in past Octobers, finally conquered the Division Series last week, which the organization described as a breakthrough and which the rest of baseball described as the rental working exactly as advertised.
Milwaukee’s counter is Misiorowski, whose fastball sat 100 to 102 mph against Los Angeles in last year’s NLCS before the sixth inning arrived and the wheels came off, on the 73rd pitch, against Tommy Edman. The Brewers have spent the intervening year building a team whose entire purpose, from the first day of spring training, has been this series. They hit 154 home runs, few in the league, and scored 832 runs, second in it, which is the baseball equivalent of winning an argument by being in the room more often.
“I’ve been coming to these games eleven years,” said Dale Prucek, a season ticket holder who has watched the Brewers lose the 2024 pennant, the 2025 pennant, and one trade negotiation, and who describes himself as cautiously optimistic in the way of a man who has read the contract. “They rented the best pitcher in the world for thirty days. That’s not a strategy. That’s a heist. I respect it. I’m still booing him.”
The Dodgers have won two straight championships and are trying to become the first three-peat since the 1998-2000 Yankees, with a pitcher who will not be on the roster in December. The Brewers have won nothing for decades and are trying to become the first team to beat a rental. First pitch at 8. The lease ends whenever the lease ends.