With the Chicago White Sox’ decision to trade Chris Sale to the Red Sox for an impressive array of prospects, the club has made clear their intentions to begin selling. They are rebuilding, and are going to get younger with an eye on the long-term future. Yoan Moncada — maybe the best prospect in baseball — and Michael Kopech are a very good start. If we start to go down the list of players the White Sox have who might fetch a good deal on the trade market, we begin with Chris Sale. With Sale crossed off the list, the obvious next name belongs to the White Sox other ace, Jose Quintana.

To be clear, Jose Quintana is not Chris Sale. His stuff is not quite as electric, he doesn’t strike as many batters out, and he doesn’t dominate a game in the way that Sale does. But not being as good as Chris Sale isn’t much of an insult. One can be less good than Chris Sale and still really freaking good, and that basically describes Jose Quintana.

Here is a list of the top-10 pitchers in baseball over the last three years, by our version of pitcher WAR.

That’s eight guys generally agreed to be legitimate No. 1 starters, plus Quintana and Cueto, who have performed like aces despite not having classic ace stuff or ace strikeout rates. But by limiting walks and home runs, Quintana has been one of the best pitchers in baseball, in a league with guys who are unquestionably elite arms.

So that’s what he’s done. You can’t buy the past, but the past does help us predict the future to some degree. So, looking forward, we have the Steamer projections. What does Steamer think about Quintana for 2017?

Well, it thinks he’ll be a little worse, because pitchers generally do get worse as they get older. But by “worse,” that means he projects as a +4 WAR pitcher instead of a +5 WAR one, and that forecast calls for him to be as valuable as Cueto, Chris Archer, Jake Arrieta, and Dallas Keuchel. Again, these are great names with which to be associated. Steamer thinks Quintana is a top-15 or -20 starting pitcher in major-league baseball next year. And oh yeah: he’s signed for less money over the next four years than Sale is due over the next three. And that means there’s an argument that the package the White Sox receive for Quintana shouldn’t be wildly different than the one they got for Sale.

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The Red Sox acquired a second pitcher on Tuesday following their trade for reliever Tyler Thornburg — in this case, receiving talented left-handed starter Chris Sale from the White Sox in exchange for an impressive return (roughly in order of consensus future value): Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Luis Alexander Basabe and Victor Diaz.

Here’s how the minor leaguers headed to Chicago grade out by my KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar a methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

*****

Yoan Moncada, 2B (Profile)

KATOH: 6.2 WAR (36th overall)
KATOH+: 14.0 WAR (4th overall)

There’s no denying that Yoan Moncada was one of the most productive hitters in the minors this year. In 61 High-A games, he hit .307/.427/.496. In 44 Double-A games, he slashed .285/.388/.547. He 45 stolen bases across both levels. Moncada excels in multiple areas: he hits for power, runs like crazy, and plays a semi-premium position. His tools are top-notch, which is why he was the consensus No. 1 prospect last summer.

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At least as far as recent history goes, Chris Sale might’ve been unprecedentedly valuable as a trade asset. We just haven’t seen trades with pitchers so good, signed for so long, to such affordable salaries. It’s fitting, then, that the White Sox convinced the Red Sox to make the recently unprecedented decision to move baseball’s top prospect. There’s nothing fun or painless about initiating a rebuild. It can get fun pretty quick, though, when you land a player like Yoan Moncada.

In all honesty, it’s not entirely clear the White Sox got more for Sale than the Braves got a year ago for Shelby Miller. There are two ways you could interpret that. One, you could choose to believe the White Sox didn’t get enough. But, two, no, that’s not right. This is the price of an ace-level starter, and this just further goes to show how badly the Diamondbacks screwed up. I guess that’s not what’s important now. What’s important now is the White Sox have officially decided to pivot, and this is a hell of a first step.

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In what will probably be the blockbuster deal of the entire offseason, the White Sox sent LHP Chris Sale to Boston this afternoon in exchange for two of the highest-upside prospects in baseball, Yoan Moncada and Michael Kopech, as well as tools-goof outfielder Luis Alexander Basabe and arm-strength lottery ticket Victor Diaz. Below are my scouting reports on the prospects involved. I’ll update the White Sox prospect list with these reports later this evening. Moncada will be No. 1 and Kopech No. 2, with Basabe slotting in toward the back of the org’s top 10 and Diaz falling toward the bottom of the 40 FV section.

It’s strange that one of the hardest-throwing pitchers in the minor leagues is involved in this deal and yet somehow not its headliner. Such is the prodigious talent of Cuban infielder Yoan Moncada, who I believe to be the best prospect in all of baseball despite his swing-and-miss issues. A generational talent who possesses one of the most robust collections of tools I’ve seen, Moncada has an SEC running back’s body at an athletic and strong 6-foot-2, 205 pounds. There are very few, if any, comparable physiques across baseball.

He’s also a plus-plus runner, both from home to first and on the bases, scattering large swaths of dirt behind him as he traverses the bases. I think Moncada is going to retain that speed for quite a while despite already appearing to have maxed out physically. Even if he does lose a step with age (and it will probably happen at some point), I expect Moncada to retain impact plus speed into his late 20s or early 30s, even if he’s no longer an elite runner at peak.

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Mauricio Dubon is one of three players — Travis Shaw and Josh Pennington are the others —going from Boston to Milwaukee in exchange for Tyler Thornburg. He’s a promising prospect with a unique background. A shortstop with a good glove, the 22-year-old Dubon grew up in Honduras, and moved to California as a teenager to chase his baseball dreams. Drafted by the Red Sox out of a Sacramento high school in 2013, Dubon slashed .323/.379/.461 between high-A Salem and Double-A Portland this season.

Dubon has twice been featured in my Sunday Notes column. In 2014, I wrote about his journey from Honduras to professional baseball. Three months ago, I touched on his breakthrough season, which was impacted by advice he’s received from Xander Bogaerts.

Here is an edited version of my full conversation with Dubon from this past August. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros have had an interesting offseason thus far. They’ve signed Josh Reddick to play the outfield, claimed Nori Aoki off waivers, rolled the dice on Charlie Morton to beef up their rotation, and doled out perhaps a bit too much to acquire Brian McCann. They just signed Carlos Beltran to be their DH, too.  If nothing else, we may very well figure out if there’s a critical mass for dingers, given that Houston also employs George Springer, Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, and Evan Gattis (and not for nothing, but Alex Bregman is projected to hit 20 bombs too). Our projections love the Astros. We have them winning 91 games, the most in the AL, and tied for second most in the bigs (with the Dodgers), behind only the Cubs. That’s not bad!

However, there’s a reasonable chance that they could come up short of that projection. Of course, there’s a reasonable chance that any team could come up short of (or exceed or exactly meet) their projections, but the Astros are the franchise du jour right now, so let’s focus on them. We know Houston will probably hit the ball pretty well. They might catch the ball pretty well, too. Their position players are good, and they’ve got a fair amount of depth. It’s their starting pitching that interests me.

Pitching was a strength of the 2015 Astros. Scott Feldman, Lance McCullers, and Collin McHugh backed a Cy Young-winning breakout effort from Dallas Keuchel. The Houston rotation threw the third-most innings in the big leagues that year. They produced the ninth-highest WAR by the FIP version of that metric placed fifth by the sort calculated with runs allowed. They were pretty good. Not world-beating, Verlander-Scherzer-Sanchez-Porcello good — or Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz good, for that matter — but good enough.

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After years of rumors and speculation, Chris Sale has finally been traded.

BREAKING: Sale to #RedSox. Moncada, Kopech and two other prospects to #WhiteSox.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 6, 2016

Even with David Price and Rick Porcello, the Red Sox always seemed like a potential fit. Dave Dombrowski was brought in to win in the short-term, and he’s always done that by turning prospects into star players; this is exactly the kind of deal that he’s made his name on. He loves frontline starting pitchers. He had a loaded farm system; at least, he did a year ago before he started trading it for veterans.

So, yeah, we shouldn’t be too surprised that Dombrowski was the guy who eventually agreed to pay the price that got Sale out of Chicago. And the price was definitely steep. As of right now, we only know the Yoan Moncada and Michael Kopech names, but there will be a couple other guys in the deal as well. When discussing potential packages for Sale this summer, I wrote the following.

Boston Red SoxThis one’s pretty easy; the team could start the bidding with either Yoan Moncada (#1 BA/#2 MLB) or Andrew Benintendi (#9 BA/#7 MLB) and go from there. Top 10 hitting prospects are highly valuable assets because they usually combine upside and proximity to the big leagues, and thus are worth something like $75 million; Moncada may be worth closer to $100 million, since he’s the guy who might be the top overall prospect in the game right now.

So the White Sox would be right to demand either in a deal, but even Sale isn’t worth both, so the Red Sox would have to pick which of the two they wanted to keep around, and then add some additional value beyond giving up a terrific young hitter. If Benintendi was the main piece, Rafael Devers (#41 BA/#25 MLB) would be a reasonable piece to add, putting the Red Sox package on part with a Urias/Bellinger or Urias/Verdugo offer from Los Angeles.

If Moncada is the guy they’re sending to Chicago, though, Devers’ value probably pushes the deal past what Sale is worth; his value gets you most of the way to Sale, so the second piece could be a higher risk guy like hard-throwing righty Michael Kopech (#93 BA/#83 MLB), since back-end Top 100 pitching prospects are worth about $15 million. Toss in some sweeteners on top of that, and the White Sox would at least have to think about it, as Moncada and Kopech could give them a pretty great return.

Hey, look, Moncada and Kopech, plus some “sweeteners”. Sometimes, the things we write don’t end up being too crazy.

But yeah, this is more what we thought Sale would command. He’s worth so much. We’re talking about a guy who would probably get something between $35-$40 million a year on a six or seven year deal as a free agent this winter; instead, he’s going to make $38 million over the next three years combined. If Sale hit the open market right now and said he’d only sign a three year deal to mitigate a team’s long-term risk, the bidding would probably start at $125 million, and I wouldn’t be shocked if someone ended up at $140 or $150 million. Sale has something like $100 million in surplus value, and if you weight present value over long-term value, it’s easy to argue that he’s worth more than any prospect in baseball.

And realistically, Moncada is exactly the kind of prospect that made sense as the headliner in a Sale deal. Quoting myself again, from my piece on trading a stud for Chris Sale last week.

That’s why a Red Sox deal makes more sense centered around Yoan Moncada, who probably isn’t quite ready to help the Red Sox win in 2017. You swap out Moncada for Sale, and all of the sudden, the Red Sox are probably three or four wins better than they are right now. That’s a huge change in expected outcomes, and starts to be worth the long-term value being surrendered.

Moncada is a terrific prospect, but he was probably not ready to help the Red Sox win in 2017. Maybe he could have helped down the stretch, maybe, but it wasn’t anything the team could really count on, so by building a deal around a guy who is entirely future value, the Red Sox maximize their upgrade for 2017. And it’s a big upgrade.

At the back of their rotation, they have Drew Pomeranz and Clay Buchholz, both who project as something like league average starters next year. Both have been better than that recently, but both have also had injury problems and have pitched more effectively in relief, so the team certainly has options. Pomeranz could move to the bullpen and give them a high quality lefty, in which case they’d get roughly a three win upgrade in the rotation, plus whatever value Pomeranz adds in relief over the team’s other lefty relief options. Or they could keep Pomeranz in the rotation and trade Buchholz, freeing up $13 million in salary to spend elsewhere, maybe on an upgrade at 3B or DH.

The Red Sox roster isn’t done yet, but it’s already quite good. With this trade accounted for, here are our current projected standings for 2017.

We have the Red Sox as almost the equal of the Cubs, and that’s without a DH, and with maybe an upgradeable hole at third base. Sure, they’ll lose some value if they dump Buccholz in order to free up money to add one of those guys, but the point is clear; the Red Sox have made themselves the class of the American League, at this point.

The door isn’t closed on the rest of the league. The Indians could get a real boost if they signed Edwin Encarnacion or some other quality 1B/DH. The Astros could still get a rotation upgrade that pushes them up another few more wins. Nothing is set in stone in December.

But the Red Sox just got a lot better in a hurry. They paid a very high price to do so, and if Moncada turns into what people think he might turn into, there could be some long-term pains watching him play for the White Sox. And Michael Kopech has the kind of velocity that makes it easy to dream on his upside. Long-term, the Red Sox may now be on the Tigers path.

But the Red Sox already had the best young core of position players in the American League. They have a star young right fielder, a star young shortstop, and really good pieces around those guys. And now they have maybe the two best left-handed pitchers in the American League. This roster is beastly.

By getting Sale without moving anything off their big league roster, the Red Sox have made themselves the team to beat in the American League. They paid an elite price to get an elite player, and now, the 2016 AL Cy Young winner is their #3 starter. Good luck to the rest of the AL East; this is not going to be an easy team to take down for the next few years.

Last season, there were 129 relievers who threw at least 50 innings. Cody Allen ranked 12th in strikeout rate. Tyler Thornburg was one slot ahead of him. Craig Kimbrel ranked 15th in K-BB%. Tyler Thornburg was one slot ahead of him. Ken Giles ranked tied for 20th in adjusted FIP. Tyler Thornburg was one slot ahead of him.

Thornburg didn’t draw a lot of attention, having a breakout year in a crowded bullpen on a go-nowhere Brewers team. He’s now become professional property of the Red Sox, him and his three years of arbitration eligibility. While Thornburg might’ve been off the general radar, he’s a big addition as a controllable setup guy for a team that wanted to make its bullpen more dominant. In return for an underrated power righty, the Brewers are getting their own underrated package. Dave Dombrowski has dipped into his farm again, and other front offices like when he does just that.

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As I write this, Chris Sale is still a member of the White Sox organization. Based on the rumors from the last 24 hours, though, that might not be true much longer.

Sources: Legitimate chance of Sale trade to #Nationals. Robles, Giolito would go to #WhiteSox. Teams haggling over final pieces in deal.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 6, 2016

The #Whitesox did not come close to trading Chris Sale tonight but acknowledge the #Nats were very aggressive in proposals

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 6, 2016

At this point, signs seem to be pointing towards Sale ending up in Washington, joining Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg to form a remarkable group of starting pitchers. There doesn’t seem to be a deal in place, but the White Sox asking price seems to have scared off most other interested buyers, with the Astros choosing to hang on to Alex Bregman and the Braves declining to put Dansby Swanson in a deal. The Nationals aren’t willing to include Trea Turner, but they have enough other highly valued assets to get the White Sox interested, and right now, it seems like the smart money is on the two teams completing a deal for Sale that would net Chicago Lucas Giolito, Victor Robles, and some other stuff.

I have to say, though, from my perspective, this feels like a bit of an underwhelming return for Chicago. Depending on what the other stuff is, it seems possible that Sale is going to command not that much more now than Shelby Miller did a year ago.

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