With Kyle Teel, Braden Montgomery, Chase Meidroth and Wikelman González turning in decent-to-good seasons in their first year with the White Sox, Chris Getz can say he got a lot for Garrett Crochet.
Which is good, because with the regular season Crochet just completed in Boston, Getz might've given up more than he would've guessed.
Making his final start before Boston's presumptive postseason run on Wednesday, Crochet shut out the Blue Jays for eight innings in Boston's 7-1 victory over Toronto. He improved to 18-5, lowered his ERA to 2.59, added six strikeouts to his league-leading total of 255, and, most impressively, blasted through the 200-inning tape with room to spare. His 205⅓ innings currently leads the league, and while Logan Webb could pass him -- he's thrown 201⅔ innings and is on track to pitch Sunday -- Crochet amassed his total in only 32 games, while Webb would be making his 34th start.
His outing on Wednesday is a good example of the energy-saver mode Crochet developed over the course of the season. Facing a Toronto team that doesn't strike out much, Crochet didn't chase K's. Instead, he used a four-pitch arsenal -- five, if you include a handful of changeups -- to manage contact. He ended up throwing just 100 pitches over eight innings, and even though he only generated 10 swinging strikes, the counts were in his favor enough to still result in six strikeouts.
Crochet introduced the sinker at the end of last season with the White Sox, and he told the Boston Globe's Alex Speier it's one of the biggest reasons why he's been able to get through lineups with fewer pitches.
“It’s nice having a couple different pairings of pitches that I can exclusively throw to each hitter, depending on what time it is through the lineup,” said Crochet. “That’s what we work on in the offseason, everybody does. How can I best protect my arsenal? And that’s why I ultimately added the sinker last year, because the cutter was kind of falling into similar tendencies as it is right now, and I just kind of had to have guys honoring both sides of the plate.”
Despite all of this progress Crochet still seems likely to finish a comfortable second behind Tarik Skubal in the AL Cy Young race, but Crochet might be able to claim the more satisfying finish to his season. If the Tigers aren't able to stop their free-fall between now and Sunday, Skubal's long-snapping throwing error could be the enduring image of his season.
Assuming Crochet maintains this level beyond this season, it ups the ante on what the White Sox need to get back from the swap, as they theoretically could have extended him for a price that now looks to be considerably below his market value. A Cy Young-caliber season would have been more or less wasted on this White Sox team, so turning him into help at multiple positions always made sense. They just need that vision to turn into reality, lest the deal be reduced to trading one great player for one good one and some bench help.
For now, everybody involved is holding serve, which is why Jeff Passan called it the transaction of the year.
Trades don't work out more often than they do. (Just ask the Mets.) But on the day this deal was consummated, the industry response liked it for each side. The White Sox weren't willing to commit to a Crochet extension and wanted to avoid injury or ineffectiveness cratering his value, and in Boston, they found a team desperate enough to offload an immense amount of talent. Year 1 of a deal that included a combined 30 years of club control is too early to name definitive winners and losers. So for now, it's an easy call: the rare win-win.
Spare Parts
The Tigers couldn't quite say they were in first place entering Wednesday, because even though they were even with the Guardians in the standings, Cleveland owned the tiebreaker, so being tied for first wouldn't be good enough to win the division. After a 5-1 loss at Progressive Field on Tuesday, it's no longer a matter of semantics.
With the Mariners winning their sixth straight game to clinch their first division title in 24 years, T-Mobile Park was already going to host a party on Tuesday. With his 11th multi-homer game of the season on Wednesday, Cal Raleigh became the fourth American League player to reach 60 homers in the season, it's a scene I want to keep seeing deep into October.
Were it not for Crochet, Lucas Giolito would be the preeminent former White Sox on the Red Sox staff. He's only thrown 145 innings this season thanks to a season-opening injury and a sluggish return, but he's turning in a superficially stellar season (10-4, 3.41 ERA) despite peripherals that don't support it. At the time Giolito departed the White Sox in 2023, he was honest with James that the peak of his stuff was 2019-21.
After firing Mike Rizzo a week before the draft in early July, the Nationals finally found his successor in Red Sox assistant general manager Paul Toboni, who is all of 35 years old. This paragraph is a pretty good elevator pitch:
Outfielder Roman Anthony, shortstop Marcelo Mayer and infielder/outfielder Kristian Campbell are among the players the Red Sox drafted during Toboni’s time running the amateur scouting department. His drafts also included right-hander Hunter Dobbins and left-hander Connelly Early, as well as two of the four players the Red Sox traded for left-hander Garrett Crochet (infielder Chase Meidroth and catcher Kyle Teel), and the one they traded for catcher Carlos Narváez (pitcher Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz).
- MLB labor: How fight over salary cap will shape negotiations -- ESPN
- Rob Manfred's two jobs -- Baseball Prospectus
The CBA negotiations after the 2026 season figure to be brutal, especially since Rob Manfred stated rather casually how a lockout is a useful negotiating tool. But while owners are motivated to push for a salary cap, there's a chance that topic could be superseded by an unprecedented broadcast rights deal Major League Baseball has to craft. In most other winters, the threat of missed games wouldn't loom so large, but if the league needs to put its best foot forward with regards to ratings, this might not be the right time for mutually assured destruction.
