Garrett Crochet brings questions, but also brings something the Red Sox have lacked for years
Does the Garrett Crochet move make the Red Sox serious contenders? It will if Boston combines it with another deal or two.
COMMENTARY
The Red Sox did something on Wednesday night. Capital-S Something, even. That’s not seen every offseason, especially around here anymore.
The formula to determine that threshhold is anecdotal, where I’m most comfortable given I’m 30 years removed from math class. It is also clear: A move that may actually save the post-Mookie face of the franchise, CEO Sam Kennedy, a couple of boos at Not Winter Weekend a month from now.
Aroldis Chapman, for a shade under $11 million? Eh. Even without the ugly parts of his past, and talented as he remains as a setup man, he’s 36 and would have been a lot more exciting baseball add five years ago. (Another hallmark of the Interest Kings era.) The Chris Martin-Kenley Jansen of 2024 will now be Chapman and Liam Hendriks.
Who was Boston’s Garrett Crochet of 2024? What starter matched his 12.9 strikeouts per nine innings, 7.6 hits allowed per nine, and a FIP (an ERA-like measure that seeks to exclude the effect of his teammates, key on a 121-loss disaster) of no higher than 2.69?
The Red Sox didn’t have one. They haven’t had one since 2018.
When Chris Sale did it for the second year in a row.
The parallels were already obvious, the Red Sox getting another South Side southpaw to be the keystone starter they’ve still not produced since the Lester/Buchholz era. Then, in late 2016, it was Dave Dombrowski — who already had David Price, Rick Porcello, All-Star Stephen Wright, and an on-the-rise Eduardo Rodriguez in the rotation — leaving no doubt who the favorite was in the American League.
“When he targets a guy, he gets him,” manager John Farrell told reporters. “There’s a lot to be said for his boldness.”
You said it, we note eight years into the future, but we digress.
It was a win-now move — to the point when they didn’t in 2017, Dombrowski fired Farrell — with the cost to match. Yoan Moncada, the record international signing of a year before. Michael Kopech, the best pitching prospect they had in the system. Then, as Wednesday, no major leaguers, but two of the biggest names the Sox had beyond Boston.
You’ve never missed them. And if Sale merely pitched out the three years of control the Sox acquired that December day, Dombrowski might still be here.
Alas, that 2019 extension, the ripples of which led us to Chaim Bloom, to Full Throttle, to Wednesday morning, and to Craig Breslow’s sudden pivot.
Max Fried was Plan A, we can safely assume, given the quickness with which the Sox acted after he opted for the Yankees and a $218 million contract that broke the record for a lefthander held by . . . David Price.
If John Henry’s relative stinginess has a baseball-related cause, Sale and Price are at its heart. Juan Soto’s blank check from the Mets forced the Yankees to react. When they gave the soon-31 Fried — he of 10 injured-list stints since 2018 — eight years, it drove up the market on Corbin Burnes, who’d have been a perfectly cromulent Red Sox alternative.
Burnes will sign a deal the Red Sox wouldn’t have dreamed offer him. And thus, Plan C. The lefty that Breslow tried to land at the trade deadline, now here for the next two years at the cost of Boston’s last two first-round draft picks.
“It was very clear,” White Sox GM Chris Getz told reporters on Wednesday about the speed with which the Crochet deal solidified, “that they were ready to get something done.”
The cost is high, but pointedly not astronomical. Kyle Teel, the fourth of the Big Four, a catcher who does everything. Braden Montgomery, the No. 12 pick in July. Chase Meidroth and Wikelman Gonzalez, talented pieces likely lacking that extra something.
It’s uncomfortable (unless you’re Connor Wong, I suppose). But I dare say the return is the more uncomfortable part.
Crochet’s 2024 was, as previously noted, ridiculous. Ninety-eighth percentile among pitchers last year in strikeout rate. Low 90s in chase rate, whiff rate, and fastball velocity (97.2 mph). Hitters missed his sweeper on 43 percent of their swings, and everything else about a third of the time.
It is, however, all we have to go on. He was a reliever in 2020-21, missed 2022 after Tommy John surgery, battled shoulder soreness in ’23 and threw 146 of his 219 major-league innings last season.
And about those . . . that’s over 32 starts. Crochet didn’t throw more than four innings a night the final three months of the season, Chicago capping his workload to protect both him and, clearly, his value to them as trade bait.
I’ll chalk up his poor finish to the year — the Red Sox mashed him in September, among others — and those reports he wanted a contract extension before he’d commit to pitching the playoffs with a new team to the crapulence of the 2024 White Sox.
Durability, though? That feels like it will never not be a concern.
“I didn’t like Crochet’s delivery just off the video I saw before the 2020 draft, and I have to admit that I still don’t,” The Athletic’s Keith Law wrote in September. “He may get hurt again — not a bold prediction since he’s been hurt several times before. But he’s going to get Cy Young Award votes, deservedly so . . . he’s been one of the very best starters in baseball this year.”
Breslow, as is his custom, is saying the right things. This clearly is not an end to his work, and with some $50 million left under a first luxury tax line that isn’t as penal for them as in prior years, he has some resources to do it.
“This is the type of move — and Garrett obviously comes with two years of control — that I think screams we need to compete in 2025 and that we need to put a better team on the field,” Breslow told reporters Wednesday.
It’s been years since the Red Sox deserved any offseason benefit of the doubt, and it’ll be years more before they’ve earned any back. They could pay Burnes’s asking price, but they won’t. They might convince Roki Sasaki to sign here, but I doubt it.
There’s still Jack Flaherty, who just had whiff, strikeout, and walk rates right in Crochet’s neighborhood during his age-28 season. Sean Manaea impresses me less and is 32, but for the right price? He did hold hitters to a .181 average as the Mets went 15-3 in his last 18 regular-season starts.
Luis Castillo and George Kirby in Seattle. Alex Bregman. Pete Alonso. Nolan Arenado. Teoscar Hernandez. Anthony Santander.
In varying degrees, they’d all be something. Some might even get the capital.
Combined with Garrett Crochet? Why, we might have to pull another ‘S’ out of the Boston baseball mothballs.
Serious. As in, serious contenders.
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