The long-pondered White Sox rebuild rumors have more meat to them because the franchise-altering move to trade Chris Sale is being put at the forefront of reports, and the long-pondered Sale trade has more meat to it because it’s staked into these rebuild talks rather than some ill-conceived shifting of resources for a would-be contender. They can’t trade Sale and not rebuild, to a degree, and they can’t rebuild effectively while keeping Sale, so pushing both at the same time adds a level of seriousness.

The Dodgers, Nationals and Braves have all drawn direct mention as competitors for Sale in the past few days, with almost certainly more interested, but perhaps not as stocked for a competitive bid, though the Red Sox are certainly capable of delivering the top bid if they wanted to.

Normally, a typical Sox trade discussion revolves around a need for offense, a need for major league-ready talent to avoid the weeds of their position player development system, and then some rumor of Rick Hahn holding out for a Godfather offer. It sounds like we’re only getting that final bit, for normalcy’s sake.

Ken Rosenthal:

“As for Sale, the biggest question is whether the White Sox will actually move him.

‘They’re willing but only if they totally win the deal, which won’t happen,’ a rival executive said.

Call it the Curse of Shelby Miller: Every team with a high-end starter wants to match or exceed the Braves’ return for Miller and reliever Gabe Speier — infielder Dansby Swanson, outfielder Ender Inciarte and right-hander Aaron Blair.”

More like ‘a salty rival executive,” perhaps.

As much as the Sox are perpetually in need of offensive help, a Sale departure decimates a rotation that is both already probably giving playing time to James Shields next season, and doesn’t know where their next stud is coming from, confidence in Carson Fulmer, Alec Hansen, or even Jordan Stephens and Spencer Adams, aside. If this is truly a full-scale teardown, where everyone older or further along in their service time than Carlos Rodon could be on the outs, the Sox will need more of everything, and can focus on getting the most value rather than specific help at certain positions.

The Braves are the odd team to see here, because rather than a contender looking for a super weapon, they seem to be trying to slap together a competitive team for their new ballpark, even at the possibility of shipping out pieces that were thought to be their new core going forward. Dansby Swanson is both seemingly the new face of the franchise for the Braves, and their best chip for building a package to match Sale’s value, rather than a group that has not made their major league debut.

As much as fencing a crop of guys under control for three years or more just to get a new crop of players under control for six years seems slightly pointless, the Sox both need to take some big league guys because building a package of guys at Double-A or below would take too much volume to counteract the level of uncertainty, and if the Sox can’t take their payroll above $120 million to compete, they are going to need to be in the game of aggressive pre-arbitration extensions to their youngsters anyway.

The Nationals are considered strongly in the mix, but if they insist on withholding Trea Turner, as Rosenthal is reporting, their top prospect is Victor Robles, who is very good, but also 19 until May and has not reached Double-A yet. How much risk are the Sox willing to assume in the return for the biggest trade chip in the league? Typically not very much, but this rebuild is supposed to a new paradigm for White Sox thinking.

While Sale and Jose Quintana seem to be the most sought after trade pieces, they are probably the only pieces in the core group of Adam Eaton, Jose Abreu, or even Nate Jones, that would be worth holding onto through the rebuild. Even though they are pitchers, if the Sox are going to be in the tank for two-to-four years, Sale and Quintana are better bets to be excellent on the other side of that gulf than soon-to-be 28-year-old Eaton, whose game is heavy on speed and depends on corner outfield defense for value, or Abreu, who will turn 30 in January and has seen his production decline every season. Jones is the oldest of the group, has the longest injury history and is an extreme hard-thrower with unusual mechanics.

All the fire sale trades get a lot easier to conceive of and make fair value for if they are simply moving everything, because it will shed all restrictions both for position and for future timeline. But this whole article was just stalling to avoid admitting I have no idea what is coming from the Sox.

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1. The scoring was done quick and early Sunday afternoon. Solo home runs from Jeff Francoeur and Jace Pederson in the second and third innings would provide the only runs. The Braves threatened again in both the fifth and sixth, but a timely double play and a big strikeout of Freddie Freeman helped the Sox escape unscathed. Meanwhile, the South Siders saw only one runner advance past first base the entire game. This is not typically a recipe for success.

2. James Shields had a surprisingly strong outing. Despite taking the loss, he posted perhaps his strongest outing in a Sox uniform. He threw 93 efficient pitches (61 strikes) going 7.2 innings while allowing two runs on six hits and two walks. Locating around the edges of the zone proved effective as Shields was without a walk until the sixth inning. Unfortunately he was without a strikeout until the sixth as well. Sox fans may be permanently scarred, but Shields has now put together three-straight quality starts and allowed only six runs over his last 20.1 innings. This is a welcome improvement that is only slightly dampened by the realization that those last three starts have come against the Twins, Yankees, and Braves.

3. The story of this game was Mike Foltynewicz displaying how big of an arm he has, and how small the back of a uniform looks with a Polish name. He lit up the radar with a fastball between 97 and 99 mph and displayed a tight slider and slow curve that kept Sox hitters off balance all day. The major knock in his development has been control, but he had it in spades Sunday. He finished with a seven-inning, ten-strikeout, zero-walk win. As that line indicates, there won’t be many hitting accolades for the Sox in this recap.

4. After a promising first three years in the bigs, Jeff Francoeur has spent the past nine years accumulating $26 million, 1.6 WARP, and one debatably insensitive nickname. Naturally he would provide the thunder this series. His solo home run kicked off the scoring in the second and he finished the series with six RBI. There’s mild consolation knowing that he’s surely aware that everyone’s still disappointed in him.

5. Tim Anderson is good. Potentially very good. Watching him at bat and in the field is downright exciting. With a 2-for-4 day, he closed out the first half with an .304 average and .798 OPS. He also notched himself an unassisted double play with a leaping catch that impressed anyone familiar with gravity. The consensus among Sox brass was that he needed a season in the minors to play everyday. He keeps defying those expectations. However, a visit from the Braves is a solemn reminder that rookie years can be deceiving. We wish you the best of luck, or something, Gordon.

Team Record: 45-43

Next game is Friday at 8:05pm CT vs. the Los Angeles Angels

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So naturally they were both pretty bad on Saturday against mediocre and awful offenses, respectively.

1. Todd Frazier began his bid to take over the game early, lacing a deep drive to center in the second that flopped out of the top of Braves centerfielder Ender Inciarte‘s glove and over the wall to stake Quintana to an early 2-1 lead. In the third, he capped off a run of three-straight RBI hits by the Sox by smacking a double to left to stretch the lead to 5-1, and he capped off his heroics in the fifth by shuffling to right to field an A.J. Pierzynski grounder before firing a throw to third while falling away from first.

2. One day after Chris Sale inexplicably couldn’t keep the dinger-starved Braves in the yard, Quintana matched the feat by hanging a curveball for a Gordon Beckham solo shot in the first, hanging another curveball for a Jeff Francouer two-run shot in the fourth, and continued efforts to pitch Freddie Freeman outside resulted in a liner to left that seemed to kick off the heel of Melky Cabrera‘s glove and go over the wall to make things white knuckle from the sixth inning on.

Six innings, four earned and three home runs to the Braves is no way to build an All-Star case.

3. With David Robertson mysteriously unavailable, Nate Jones nailed down four extremely nerve-wracking outs to hold down a one-run win. After Matt Albers was used to try to deal with right-handers in the eighth and promptly allowed a double to Chase d’Arnaud, Jones struck out Nick Markakis with a dipping center-cut slider to strand him.

A would-be easy ninth inning (he started off by striking out Francouer, got a comebacker to the mound from Adonis Garcia, a seeing-eye chopper from Pierzynski, and struck out Erick Aybar) for Jones got complicated by some fluke occurrences. He couldn’t find the Garcia comebacker after it struck him in the butt, and Garcia managed to screen the Sox defense from the Pierzynski chopper while narrowly avoiding it himself. Jones let runners advance when he dumped a slider against Aybar into the dirt, but recovered for the strikeout and got an easy grounder to third from d’Arnaud to end it.

4. Tyler Flowers left the game in the second inning with a curious left hand strain injury, setting up a peculiar moment where fans cheered as Pierzynski came out to warm up, and Flowers trudged off the field in pain. Even more curiously, Teheran completely fell apart after Flowers left.

Seriously, how are these two in a catching rotation with one another again?

5. This game was close despite Tim Anderson, Frazier, Cabrera, Brett Lawrie and J.B. Shuck all enjoying multi-hit afternoons.

Team Record: 45-42

Next game is Sunday at 1:10pm CT vs. Atlanta on CSN

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The White Sox had a matchup between Chris Sale (An AL Cy Young favorite before tonight) against…some guy who pitches for the Braves, and mostly got annihilated.

1. In the first inning, Sale threw a low 93 mph fastball on the outer half to Freddie Freeman and got taken out. In the second inning, he split the plate with a 92 mph fastball to Tyler Flowers and got taken out. In the fourth inning, he floated some 90 mph mess in the lefty hitter kill zone to Nick Markakis, and got taken out.

The Atlanta Braves, who came into night with 47 home runs on the season, 25 fewer home runs than the next-to-last team in baseball, blasted Sale and his take-a-penny, leave-a-penny velocity games all over the yard.

Despite all this, he was still working a tie game in the fifth inning, against the Braves, when he let a two out, two on situation devolve into disaster with three-straight doubles to the likes of Jeff Francouer, Flowers and Adonis Garcia to break the game open to 8-4, and gave the Braves a lead they would not yield. It was Sale’s shortest start of the season, and capped off a month and half stretch where he’s not been All-Star worthy, let alone a Cy Young frontrunner.

Since a May 24 loss to Cleveland, this is Sale: 56.2 IP, 65 H, 35 ER, 12 HR, 61K

— Scott Merkin (@scottmerkin) July 9, 2016

2. The Braves and starter Matt Wisler hardly excelled at run prevention. An RBI single by Melky Cabrera knotted the game back at 1-1 in the first, and a rally started with back-to-back doubles by lineup fillers Carlos Sanchez and J.B. Shuck begat a three-run second. After Tim Anderson singled, Wisler egregiously mishandling an Adam Eaton bunt followed by each of them stealing a base, making it seem like the floodgates were about to burst to a wave of Braves incompetence.

Even Sale coughing up the four-run fifth seemed like it could be undone when Eaton and Todd Frazier both lifted solo home runs in the bottom half of the inning. It could not.

3. He wouldn’t be a fair person to square blame on given how Sale faltered, but the scoring difference on the night wound up being the immediate effort to move on from the ace’s disasterpiece with Chris Beck. The right-hander came on for the sixth inning and gave up hard contact and hits to all three batters he faced, and watched Dan Jennings allow both of the runners he inherited from him to score.

Beck aside, the bullpen, sans Nate Jones and David Robertson, delivered four innings of scoreless two-hit ball on a night where the Braves seemed like they couldn’t miss. It’s not like there’s a teeming mass of qualified candidates, but Beck has allowed 12 hits and seven walks over five strikeouts in 6.2 innings after being far from overpowering in Triple-A. Something that shouldn’t work doesn’t appear to be working.

4. The Sox scored eight runs, so they hardly merit a long look at their offensive execution failures, but an Eaton strikeout to end the sixth and strand runners at second and third, and Dioner Navarro whiffing with one out and runners at the corners in the seventh followed by a deep Sanchez flyout loomed large.

Jose Abreu and Cabrera led off the ninth with back-to-back singles to give some excitement that was quickly snuffed out by Frazier bouncing into a double play.

5. Anderson nearly single-handedly turned the White Sox third triple play of the season in the third inning. He snared a Freeman liner on a short hop that tricked Chase d’Arnaud into running back to second and toward Anderson’s tag. Anderson then stomped on second base and threw out Freeman at first to complete the trickery.

Anderson’s quick thinking and footwork provided Sale his only scoreless inning of the night.

Team Record: 44-42

Next game is Saturday at 1:10pm CT vs. Atlanta on WGN

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