The Major League Baseball trade deadline is July 30. For the second straight season, the White Sox will be active sellers. As many as seven or eight players could be somewhere other than Chicago by this time next week.
Of course, the two biggest potential trade chips are left-handed All-Star pitcher Garrett Crochet and center fielder Luis Robert Jr.
We don't have a crystal ball here at The Baseball Kid, so we won't pretend to know what comes next. Both Robert and Crochet could be dealt, or both of them could still be here for the final two months of the season.
But, as a hypothetical exercise, if you could only keep one of Robert and Crochet, and you had to trade the other, who would you keep?
Conventional wisdom would probably say keep the position player, not the starting pitcher. After all, your center fielder plays every day, and theoretically, he can lift you to victory at any given time. Your ace starter plays only once every five days. Therefore, there's only so much impact he can make.
So, keep Robert, right? After all, he's the only player on the Sox who is competent both offensively and defensively.
I understand that point, but I'm going to go against the grain here. I'd keep Crochet.
Power lefties such as Crochet are hard to come by. He just turned 25 years old. He's already gotten his inevitable Tommy John surgery out of the way, and he looks like a guy who is going to be in Cy Young contention over the next few years.
He's really surprised me in his first full year as a starting pitcher. Despite all the talk of innings limits, he hasn't shown any signs of slowing down, 21 outings into his season. He leads the American League in strikeouts with 157, and he's second in baseball behind some guy named Dylan Cease (159 Ks). Remember him?
But I digress. The other thing I like about Crochet is he has a WHIP of 0.970 in 111.1 innings. For a starting pitcher to have a WHIP under 1.00, that's really impressive. And he has only 25 walks against those 157 strikeouts. That's a 6.28 strikeout-to-walk ratio. I like pitchers who throw strikes, strike people out and don't put many people on base.
Pitchers like that are cornerstones, not trade chips.
I can hear you know, "Oh, but Jerry Reinsdorf will never sign him."
Let me say this as gently as possible: Screw Jerry. Too many fans are OK with the Sox making bad baseball decisions because Jerry is a cheap old miser who is too evil to die.
Crochet still has two more years of team control. You don't have to sign him or trade him now. So don't force the issue.
What about Robert, you say? Well, he's still a prodigious talent, but the combination of injuries and poor decision-making on the field -- especially his swing decisions at the plate -- has given me pause about whether he's really a player you build around.
Robert finally played a full season -- 145 games -- in 2023, and he had a breakout year, delivering 38 home runs. But that's the only season of his career in which he's topped 100 games.
A strained hip flexor caused him to miss two months here in 2024. He was playing in just his 49th game of the season Wednesday night against the Texas Rangers. In his first 48 games, he put up a pedestrian slash line of .227/.300/.464.
Sure, he's got 12 homers, and he'll wow you with that power. And when he's focused in the field, he's a Gold Glove center fielder. But with the team out of the pennant race, we've seen some terrible defensive lapses from him, and he's still swinging at a lot of pitches out of the zone. When is he going to fix that weakness? Maybe never.
Robert has struck out a remarkable 67 times through his first 48 games. When he's right at the plate, he's something to watch, but when he's off, he's prone to long slumps, and he's basically an automatic out.
On a good team, Robert is somebody who bats sixth and maybe finishes off a rally with an extra-base hit. He can certainly help a team, but for me, he's not THE GUY.
Crochet is trending toward being THE GUY in a starting rotation, and that's why I'd keep him over Robert if I had to choose one.
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