The Apparent Price for Chris Sale

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.

The Miller trade was, of course, a disaster, so no one is looking to make that kind of deal again. But the negative reception to that trade was mostly based around the idea that the Diamondbacks paid a price for an ace but got a mid-rotation starter. The headline on Jeff Sullivan’s post after the deal was reported was “Diamondbacks Pay For An Ace, Get Shelby Miller“. If they had paid that price for an actual ace, the reaction wouldn’t have been as extreme; it would have been an interesting discussion of whether elite starting pitchers are worth that level of long-term value.

But Chris Sale is an actual ace. He’s legitimately one of the best pitchers on the planet, and he has the same number of years of control as Miller did, at salaries not all that different from what Miller would have gotten in arbitration had he pitched as well as Arizona hoped. Sale is one of the most valuable players in the game, combining elite performance with a well-below market contract.

As I argued last week, the White Sox were probably going to have to accept a deal of not-quite-ready big league pieces, as one of the big problems in the Miller deal was that losing Inciarte meant that the Diamondbacks didn’t really even improve in the short-term. But in writing that piece, I thought the White Sox would be able to command a monstrous return of further away guys, essentially just picking from whatever they wanted that wasn’t Turner, Bregman, or Swanson.

Giolito and Robles are quite valuable, of course. By Baseball America’s midseason ratings, they were the #4 and #13 prospects in baseball, with Giolito ranking ahead of Turner, Bregman, and Swanson. If you still see Giolito as that kind of player, then he’s the big get in this deal, and Robles is a great second piece, and by prospect valuations, those guys would be worth something like $130 million between them, about what we eyeballed Sale’s value at back in July.

But I’m with Jeff Sullivan in being somewhat skeptical of whether Giolito’s name value is matched by his actual expected future value. From Jeff’s piece this morning, which you really need to read.

The prized curveball still has plenty of depth, but Giolito wasn’t spotting it well with the Nationals. The changeup is a distant third pitch, and while Giolito used to get his fastball close to triple digits, it just spent the bulk of its time around 93-94. For a four-seamer, it was flat, and Statcast didn’t yield an encouraging spin rate. There is no two-seamer complement. The four-seamer is the fastball, and it wasn’t a good primary pitch. It has to be better, and it could get better, but this was supposed to be the carrying tool.

Giolito is currently a stuff-over-results prospect, except the stuff didn’t actually seem exceptional in the second half of the year. Yeah, it’s easy to point to Gerrit Cole and Aaron Sanchez as reminders that talent can trump underwhelming minor league performance, but there’s a non-zero chance that Giolito could be more on the Archie Bradley path instead. Command hasn’t been Giolito’s thing, and if the stuff is just good and not great, well, that’s not really the guy I want as the centerpiece of my Chris Sale trade.

Of course, the White Sox might be really high on Robles; he’s a 19-year-old who already held his own in high-A and apparently has superstar upside. Perhaps Robles is the #1 piece from Chicago’s perspective, and they see Giolito as an upside play that could help them win the deal in a big way if he pans out alongside Robles. If you’re looking long-term, Robles is a great target, since the eventual upside could justify the wait. But with waiting comes risk, and lots of guys who looked great at 19 never get better enough to live up to the potential.

In both Giolito and Robles, the White Sox would be getting significant high-risk prospects. Perhaps the other stuff in the deal will also be of significant value, and perhaps be a little more certain in terms of expected production, even if it doesn’t come with the same upside. I’m not trying to pass judgment on a trade that hasn’t even been agreed to, when the rest of the stuff in the deal could easily explain why the White Sox might see this as the best deal on the table.

But this summer, when speculating about possible deals for Sale, I was suggesting packages like Julio Urias and Cody Bellinger, Andrew Benintendi and Rafael Devers, or Joey Gallo, Lewis Brinson, and Luis Ortiz. Sale is worth less now than he was over the summer — the White Sox bet on him increasing in value this winter with more bidders in play was always a weird one, since the acquiring time is now getting one fewer pennant race to utilize Sale in — but I personally don’t see Giolito and Robles as being the equivalent of any of those packages.

So, in this reported deal, the other stuff might really matter. It seems like the frontline names might not be quite what we thought they might be, so the White Sox are going to have to get significant quantity to make this type of deal worth doing. If the other stuff that might end up in the deal ends up being more Aaron Blair than Ender Inciarte, well, then the White Sox will be betting big on Giolito living up to the potential people have been praising him for. I don’t know how comfortable I’d be making that kind of bet, especially if it was the bet that made me give up Chris Sale.

But as I’ve written before, the trend in reactions to star player trades has been to think the team giving up the best player didn’t get enough, and it’s happened often enough that the issue may be our expectations, not a failure of the seller to correctly exchange their player in exchange for proper value. While it remains easy to believe that star players are worth emptying the farm for, teams continue to place higher and higher value on young talent, and Miller deal aside, we just don’t see teams giving up the kinds of dramatic returns that get speculated about.

The White Sox have been listening to offers on Sale for so long that I’m sure they know what the market for him actually looks like. If it’s Giolito, Robles, and some other stuff, that’s less than I expected it would be, but maybe the other stuff is going to be really valuable. Or maybe, once again, it could be a reminder that teams put more similar valuations on stars and prospects than we often are willing to believe.