Rangers missed out on Sale in July, but didn’t take a swing Tuesday

The Chris Sale sale ended Tuesday afternoon on the second day of the annual winter meetings, where the Boston Red Sox put together a package of prospects that no other club could rival.

Or was willing to rival.

So, now the Red Sox have the American League’s best rotation, possibly the game’s best, with Sale acquired from the Chicago White Sox to join fellow left-hander David Price and the reigning AL Cy Young winner, Rick Porcello.

Red Sox head honcho Dave Dombrowski has never been shy about dealing away his team’s best prospects to win now, and Yoan Moncada, the game’s top prospect, and right-hander Michael Kopech, who legend says hit 105 mph with his fastball, were part of the four-prospect package.

While general manager of the Detroit Tigers, Dombrowski traded six prospects for Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. Since being named the Red Sox’s president of baseball operations late in the 2015 season, Dombrowski has traded four top prospects.

He puts his foot on the gas and doesn’t look back. Oftentimes, he lands the megastar with the megatrade. Occasionally, like when he traded a prospect named Randy Johnson from Montreal to Seattle for Mark Langston, he swings and misses.

But it’s all about the right time, place and circumstances of each trade. That’s Jon Daniels’ mantra each time he has mortgaged some of the future to win, and those times have been frequent in Daniels’ 11 years as the Texas Rangers’ GM.

Top prospects Justin Smoak and Blake Beavan for Cliff Lee. Youngsters Chris Davis and Tommy Hunter for Koji Uehara. Prospect Kyle Hendricks for Ryan Dempster in 2012.

Daniels has traded 17 prospects since January 2015 for Yovani Gallardo, Cole Hamels, Jake Diekman, Sam Dyson, Jonathan Lucroy, Jeremy Jeffress, Carlos Beltran, Lucas Harrell and Dario Alvarez. Consecutive AL West titles have been won.

A trade for Sale, though, never developed. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, at least in July with names exchanged before Daniels cut bait and loaded up with Lucroy, Jeffress and Beltran at the Aug. 1 trade deadline.

Within those two trades and the Harrell-Alvarez deal, the Rangers sent four former first-round picks packing, one of whom was one of the top 20 prospects in the game and another was the No. 4 overall pick only a year earlier.

The Rangers also had Joey Gallo, their top prospect and a top-10 prospect in the game, and one-time No. 1 MLB prospect Jurickson Profar, on the rebound from two missed seasons and, according to Daniels, still a coveted commodity.

Right fielder Nomar Mazara and second baseman Rougned Odor were reportedly sought by the White Sox. The Rangers had Mazara, Odor, Gallo and Profar to offer this off-season.

And they couldn’t pull off a trade. Or weren’t willing to pull off a trade.

It wasn’t the time, place and circumstances, apparently.

Not getting Sale will feel to some like a missed opportunity. But if Daniels truly had the chance and didn’t take it, it was in July.

He came to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center this week with a not-as-deep farm system following his trade deadline Plan B and his Hamels Plan A in 2015.

“Nobody can sustain that,” a source said.

But the ability to have three front-line starters, as the Red Sox do now, doesn’t come along often.

At the very least, a rotation of Sale, Hamels and Yu Darvish would have given the Rangers a better chance of not getting swept in the division series, and it would have made the Rangers the prohibitive favorites in the West again in 2017 no matter what the Houston Astros have done.

Were Darvish to flee via free agency after next season, the Rangers would have had Hamels and Sale, who goes to Boston with three years of relatively cheap club control at $38 million.

There were plenty of reasons to make the trade in July, but for whatever reason it didn’t happen. Daniels confirmed that he hadn’t been in contact with the White Sox for weeks since an initial conversation early this off-season that went nowhere.

In fairness to Daniels, maybe the White Sox passed in July. Maybe they aren’t one of the teams who still finds Profar attractive. Maybe Gallo’s frequent swings and misses scared them off, though they put up with a lot of that from Adam Dunn.

Daniels can’t be accused of being afraid to pull a trade trigger. He’s just never been on the big stage at the winter meetings to announce a blockbuster, as Dombrowski was to announce the acquisition of Sale.

To some, it will feel like a missed opportunity. If it was missed, it happened in July, not on Tuesday.

This story was originally published December 6, 2016 at 6:44 PM with the headline "Rangers missed out on Sale in July, but didn’t take a swing Tuesday."