Cubs Trade Jeff Samardzija And Jason Hammel To Athletics

All right, now it's time for a front-page post:

DEAL IS DONE: #Cubs send Samardzija and Hammel to #Athletics for Addison Russell, per sources. May be other players and team(s) involved.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 5, 2014

Addison Russell is a fine prospect, for sure, but that's way too small of a payoff, in my view, for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel, two major-league starting pitchers. Ken Rosenthal is usually on top of things and I would be nearly certain that he's right about at least the beginnings of this deal. I'd bet there's a lot more involved.

Obviously, we're going to get more news coming up soon -- and one thing this affects immediately is the starting pitcher for Saturday afternoon's game in Washington, because Samardzija was scheduled to start the game against the Nationals' Gio Gonzalez.

This will likely be the biggest single deal that Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer will pull off as Cubs baseball operations executives. Let's hope they're right in dealing 40 percent of the rotation to one team.

More to come, obviously, but you can start here.

Update: here's the whole deal.

Cubs/A's deal official. Samardzija and Hammel for Russell, McKinney, Straily, PTBNL. Analysis to follow on ESPN Insider.

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) July 5, 2014