White Sox owner: 'It will be very hard to trade' Sale

Jerry Reinsdorf doesn't like thinking about a rebuild, but his Chicago White Sox appear to be inching closer to doing just that.

Amid reports suggesting that Chris Sale's days on the South Side are numbered - on Monday night it was reported the Washington Nationals were moving towards acquiring the southpaw for a package that would include top prospects Lucas Giolito and Victor Robles - Reinsdorf, the octogenarian White Sox owner, doesn't seem to want to think about life without Sale on his side.

"It will be very hard to trade him," Reinsdorf told CSN Chicago's Chuck Garfien in an interview at baseball's winter meetings in Maryland.

Getting a package including Giolito - arguably baseball's top pitching prospect - and Robles, Washington's No. 2 youngster (or their equivalents from another team) might constitute a good return for Sale, who's finished in the top five in AL Cy Young voting and struck out over 200 batters in four consecutive seasons. Still, Reinsdorf believes that hitching his team's wagon to prospects who may or may not pan out at the highest level can often end up going wrong. With a Sale trade potentially looming, the possibility of that happening again with a player acquired in that deal does scare him.

But as hard as it may be, Reinsdorf did admit that dealing Sale now could end up being to the benefit of the White Sox. Having been in sports ownership for nearly 37 years now, he knows that baseball is a business. That's why, with one notable exception, Reinsdorf refuses to pronounce anyone as untouchable.

"I've said it many, many times, I've only had one player that couldn't be traded (Michael Jordan), and the only reason he couldn't be traded was that I would have been shot dead the day after," Reinsdorf said. "We love our players, and we want our players when their careers are over to say that 'the best place I played was with the White Sox.'

"But again our obligation is to the fans to make our teams as good as we can make them, and we have to look at the players basically as assets and if we can make a team better by trading somebody no matter how much we love the guy, we have to go ahead and do it."