All-Star starting pitcher open to extension with White Sox

White Sox left-hander Garrett Crochet spoke to media members Thursday, including Bruce Levine of 670 The Score, indicating that he would be open to having contract extension talks this winter. 

“I would be receptive to conversations,” Crochet said. “Those conversations are not reliant on only myself and what I might want. I know that (GM Chris) Getz does everything with the team’s future in mind. So I think we can trust that to be true.”

Notably, Crochet isn’t immediately dismissing the idea of a long-term deal. Still, a willingness to have conversations doesn’t necessarily indicate that a deal is likely or plausible.

Until this point in his career, Crochet’s earning power has been fairly modest by MLB standards, but it is about to shoot up. In 2023, he surpassed three years of service time and qualified for arbitration. However, since he missed significant time while recovering from Tommy John surgery, he could only secure a slight pay bump. He is making $800K here in 2024, barely above the $740K league minimum.

But this year, he moved from the bullpen to the rotation with outstanding results. To this point, he has tossed 142 innings over 31 starts. That has come despite the club scaling back his workload in the second half, as he hasn’t thrown more than four innings in an outing since June. He has a 3.68 earned run average on the year and perhaps deserves better. His 35.1% strikeout rate, 5.5% walk rate and 45.1% ground ball rate are all strong numbers. His 18 home runs allowed are the biggest weak point, which is why an ERA estimator like SIERA that normalizes home run rate has him down at 2.54.

The excellent results turned Crochet into a much-discussed trade chip this summer, though his circumstances seemingly prevented a deal from being consummated. The White Sox were well out of contention and Crochet was plenty available, but there were questions about his second half. After being drafted, he was quickly shot up to the majors during the 2020 season and subsequently missed time due to his surgery above. As such, he had been able to throw just 85 1/3 professional innings over the 2020-23 period.

Though he had flourished as a starter in the first half of 2024, teams would naturally wonder how he would hold up if kept in that role during a pennant race and into the postseason. Crochet and his reps reportedly wanted him to continue starting and securing a contract extension before pitching in October.

Perhaps due to those complications, no trade occurred before the deadline, but it’s generally expected that those talks will be revisited this winter. The workload concerns should be less of an issue with the base he established this year. Crochet has two arbitration seasons remaining, and it will be difficult for this historically bad White Sox club to return to contention in that timeframe. His salary will leap from $800K but will still be relatively low compared to free agent rates, giving him plenty of surplus trade value. Rather than continuing to run out Crochet to be the best player on a bad team, there’s logic to flipping him for players that can help the club down the line, which Crochet seemingly alluded to in his comments Thursday.

An extension with the White Sox could change that calculus by keeping him around longer, but there are reasons not to expect that to happen. Crochet is only 25 years old, meaning he is slated to hit free agency just after his 27th birthday.

Pitchers rarely reach the open market that young, apart from guys coming from international leagues. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was coming over from Japan this past offseason at 25 and had widespread interest, eventually securing a $325M guarantee from the Dodgers. That spending on a player with no major league experience, plus the $51M posting fee the Dodgers had to cough up, suggests that the league values that youth highly.

Crochet will be two years older as a free agent than Yamamoto was, but he could have a decent track record in the big leagues by then. There is risk in going year to year, as Crochet could always suffer another injury between now and then, but it would likely take a fairly notable investment to get him to give up that kind of opportunity. In August, MLBTR’s Anthony Franco wrote a piece for Front Office subscribers that looked at some recent pitcher extensions and compared them to Crochet, suggesting that the lefty could get something close to a nine-figure deal.

The White Sox have never given out a guarantee larger than the $75M they gave Andrew Benintendi. Given that they are currently at the nadir of a rebuild, it’s probably not the time they want to set new franchise records in that department.

Considering all these factors, it still seems fair to expect a trade. If the club is interested in a public relations win after so many losses this year, they could consider breaking the bank on Crochet. If they have such thoughts, he is at least willing to answer the phone and talk, but other clubs will also be calling and trying to pry him loose this winter. In comments made a few weeks ago, Getz suggested the club would likely have trade talks involving Crochet this winter.