Adam Eaton dealt to Nats for a haul

[UOK]

@RyanBakerMedia
Rick Hahn ain't playing. Adam Eaton deal 2 Nats is done #WhiteSox get #1 pitching prospect Lucas Giolito, RHPs Reynaldo Lopez & Dane Dunning

White Sox in 24 hours went from one of baseball's worst farm system to having a top 5 system. Rick Hahn laying pipe, and there's still Quintana to deal.

[Boris13c]

ok, I now see what the White Sox are doing and am not as upset as I was


How the White Sox won the Winter Meetings

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – This is what a rebuild is supposed to look like. The Chicago White Sox hemmed and hawed, lived in that dangerous ZIP code where they weren’t awful but weren’t any good, either, and found themselves once again staring at a question no team ever wants to ask itself: Are we good enough? The answer, as is almost always the case when such an examination begins, was no. The ability for enough self-reflection to do something about it is always the hard part.

Honesty amid introspection can be hard to come by in a business judged solely upon wins and losses, which makes what the White Sox did over the final two days of the Winter Meetings all the more impressive. In trading Chris Sale and Adam Eaton – one a superstar and the other quite underrated, both on the sorts of team-friendly deals the White Sox have excelled at negotiating – Chicago managed to kick off its demolition in the best fashion possible.

Wednesday’s deal that sent Eaton to the Washington Nationals for pitching prospects Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez and Dane Dunning was, in the words of one executive, “Shelby Miller 2.0.” And while that may be an exaggeration – the Miller-for-Dansby Swanson/Ender Inciarte/Aaron Blair swap brought two everyday players, while the Eaton trade trafficked in the uncertain quantity known as pitching prospects – the implication was obvious: Chicago extracted immense value out of Eaton and the five years and $38.4 million that remain on his contract, should the Nationals exercise the two club options at the end of it.

“We are ecstatic about the return we were able to secure,” said White Sox general manager Rick Hahn, the architect of the Eaton deal as well as the Sale trade that secured them star-in-the-making Yoan Moncada, 100-mph-flamethrower Michael Kopech, outfield prospect Luis Basabe and power arm Victor Diaz. In Giolito, the White Sox bought low on a 21-year-old right-hander who, before six ugly outings in Washington, was thought to be the best pitching prospect in baseball. In Lopez, they got an ultra-quick right-hander who, if he can start, is a potential No. 2 and, worst-case scenario, ends up an eighth- or ninth-inning arm. And in Dunning, they secured the Nationals’ most recent first-round pick, a righty with the potential to move fast. Or, as Hahn put it, “High-impact, potential front-of-the-rotation pieces.”