The Red Sox gave up at least four very good prospects in two deals on Tuesday at the winter meetings. The big deal involved four prospects to the White Sox for pitching ace Chris Sale.
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.
The Red Sox also picked up a reliever from the Brewers:
The Red Sox have landed right-handed reliever Tyler Thornburg in exchange for a trio of players: big-league corner infielder Travis Shaw and prospects Mauricio Dubon and Josh Pennington.
There are very good scouting reports on the young players at the links. Four of them, Moncada, Kopech, Basabe, and Dubon all have high upsides.
Thornburg is a high strikeout pitcher who also produced consistently low BABIPs, so he not only misses bats up appears to produce poor contact. He’s a reliever, however, so everything with him is small sample sizes.
Sale on the other hand, consistently produces WARs around five per season. That worth about $40 million a year, but the Red Sox will pay about $39 million for three years of Sale if they exercise the club options. That’s a lot of potential residual value. That’s probably worth three great prospects, especially because Boston is already an excellent team. This should push them to the top of the AL, not just the AL East.
Of course, this is somewhat short term thinking. When Theo Epstein was with the Red Sox, there was always tension with the higher ups due to Theo wanting to build a team that could win consistently, and the owners wanting to always win now. With the Cubs, Epstein was allowed to build up the farm system that should make the Cubs the team to beat for a while. Boston just traded away pieces that would allow them to get younger and improve over time for a huge improvement right now. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s the move of a team that hasn’t won in a long time, while the Red Sox are one of the most successful teams of the 21st Century.
The White Sox are in a position to grow into a power house, especially if they draft well. Maybe in ten years we’ll be arguing about which Chicago team assembled the better dynasty.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2gPu69l
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