Eaton was exactly who the Nationals needed him to be

We don't know at this point if Adam Eaton has played his last game for the Nationals, and we won't know for a while longer. The club will decide after the season whether to pick up the outfielder's $10.5 million option for 2021 or take a $1.5 million buyout instead, making him a free agent.

But there's certainly a decent chance Eaton's time with the Nats is done after the club placed him on the 10-day injured list with a fractured left index finger Thursday evening. He won't have time to return this season, and given the combination of his declining performance and price tag, team officials may decide it's time to move on and find a new right fielder.

Eaton has been a polarizing player to many fans, and a lot of it has to do with the circumstances of his acquisition. There were a whole lot of dropped jaws at the 2016 Winter Meetings at National Harbor when Mike Rizzo traded away three pitching prospects (Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López and Dane Dunning) to the White Sox for Eaton.

Not that people didn't like Eaton as a player. He was a good, solid outfielder and pretty much exactly what the Nationals needed at the time. But was he really worth three top pitching prospects?

It's funny how our perception of trades changes over time. That December day, it felt like a hugely lopsided deal for the White Sox. Two years later, as Eaton played well for the Nats and the three pitchers were either busts or injured, it felt like another classic Rizzo steal.

Today? Well, it depends who you ask. Some have seen Giolito finally blossom into an ace, capped by his no-hitter earlier this summer, and determined Rizzo was a fool for ever letting him go. López, who for a brief while looked like the best pitcher of the group, hasn't panned out yet. Dunning, after missing a year with Tommy John surgery, finally made his major-league debut this summer at 25 and has pitched well so far.

Given the current long-term state of the Nationals rotation, it's easy to complain about how much they could've used Giolito. And that's not wrong. Of course, they could really have used him in 2020 and for several more years to come.

But it's not really fair to analyze a trade that way. It's not just about who you'd rather have now and in the future, but who you'd rather have had since the deal went down. Who would you rather have had from 2017-19: Eaton, or Giolito, López and Dunning?

The answer, obviously, is Eaton.

He gets criticized for his admittedly subpar play this season, especially in the field, but let's not forget just how good he was his first three seasons in D.C. when healthy.

From 2017-19, Eaton hit .288 with a .377 on-base percentage, .425 slugging percentage and .802 OPS. The previous three years in Chicago, he hit .290 with a .362 on-base percentage, .422 slugging percentage and .783 OPS.

Basically, he was exactly the player the Nationals thought they were getting.

The only downside were the games Eaton missed due to injury, most of those coming in 2017 after he tore his ACL and messed up his ankle on a freak play running down the line to try to beat out a ground ball. It took until late in the 2018 season for him to feel 100 percent again. And really, he never did return to full pre-injury form in the field. He's still really tentative going after fly balls near the wall, and that has cost the Nats on a few occasions.

Who knows what Eaton might have been if not for the injury. But even with it, he was a darn good player for the Nationals, never more so than during the World Series, when he directly contributed to victories in multiple ways: bunts, two-out RBI singles and home runs.

Eaton was never going to be a star. That's not the kind of player he is. He's a complementary piece. But an important one. Back in December 2016, the Nats sorely needed a guy like Eaton. They had star power in Bryce Harper, Anthony Rendon, Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Ryan Zimmerman and Daniel Murphy. They didn't have many grinders, and Rizzo knew they needed to add that element to the field and to the clubhouse.

How badly did Rizzo believe he needed it? Bad enough to trade away three top pitching prospects, a price he knew was high.

"You've got to give to get," he said that 2016 evening at National Harbor. "We certainly got what we wanted in Adam Eaton. The White Sox should and do feel good about what they acquired in this."

The Nationals did get what they wanted, including a Commissioner's Trophy and a pennant high above the scoreboard on South Capitol Street. And the White Sox got what they wanted, an ace on a team that hopes to hoist its own trophy and pennant in the next few years.

What's wrong with both teams coming away satisfied from a trade that shocked so many others the day it was made?