Everybody has gone home from the fictional city of National Harbor, Maryland, after a week of making high-stakes trades and signings of a decidedly nonfictional nature. With the free-agent market being one of the weakest markets -- if not the weakest market -- ever, a lot of the focus of baseball's largest conclave was on a few giant trades. And one Giant trade.
Because trades are all about the future, given that nobody's actually playing games at this moment and trading/signing the past exists only in science fiction and in the minds of executives who acquire Matt Kemp, we've run the ZiPS projection for each player who shuffled around this week.
The teams are ranked by surplus value (expressed in wins), the projected difference between the total number of projected wins they picked up and the projected salary they expect to pay for the wins. However, don't assume this is a list of best-to-worst because it's not. Surplus value is a tool, a basic number to look at, but teams rightly don't value all wins the same. Time is a very big deal in baseball, and if you have good reasons to believe that wins right now can get you to the playoffs or even to a champagne drenching in late October, giving up more wins much later to get wins now is not only justifiable but downright smart. After all, a Ferrari is a lot more valuable than a bucket of water, but if you're dying of thirst in a desert, you'd much rather use $50,000 and overpay for the water than underpay for the Ferrari. OK, that's an extreme situation -- you won't typically find merchants in the Sahara Desert offering great deals on sports cars -- but you get the idea.
Chicago White Sox: plus-31.8 wins. Yup, the Sox did darn well trading two of their core players in Chris Sale and Adam Eaton. No single player is a guarantee for stardom, although ZiPS does see Yoan Moncada peaking at four wins a season as the average result. But the amount of talent for the future they picked up was tremendous. This was the winter for the White Sox to start a rebuild. Although there were possible scenarios the past two years in which the team was playoff-relevant, the fact remains that they didn't work out, and the team's window of opportunity was nearly shut. In a market in which money can't buy great players because they're simply not out there, what better time to shop players who would each be the most sought-after free agent if he had in fact been a free agent?