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A 2-0 shutout loss to the lowly White Sox a little more than three weeks ago seemed, at the time, to announce the death of the Houston Astros’ 2024 MLB season. They had fallen 10 games behind the Mariners and were 33-40, with a starting rotation obliterated by injuries and little hope in sight. The trade deadline appeared a moot point.
Ah, but in the flimsy AL West, all it took was a seven-game winning streak to vault the Astros back into divisional contention, and a run of 13 wins in 17 games since has brought Houston to within 2.0 games of the division-leading Mariners with the Rangers scuffling as the A’s and Angels have long been left for dead.
Astros GM Dana Brown raised eyebrows when he declared, even amidst the Astros’ woes this spring, that his team would be MLB trade deadline buyers by July. It appears he is right. And CBS Sports foresees Brown landing the biggest prize on the pitching market: White Sox lefty ace Garrett Crochet.
Astros Trade Deadline: Pitching Help Badly Needed
In a roundtable answering the question, “Where will White Sox ace Garrett Crochet land at the 2024 MLB trade deadline?” CBS writer Mike Axisa predicted he will land in Houston.
“I’m going to say the Astros,” Axisa wrote. “They’ve climbed back into the AL West race and need another starter. It’s tough to count on Crochet to start the rest of the season is given his workload but not impossible, and there is the fallback plan of putting him in the bullpen later this year (a role he is familiar with). And you get him the next two seasons as well.
“Houston’s farm system isn’t great, though they can start a package with 2023 first-round pick Brice Matthews, who’s in Double-A and has performed well this season.”
Garrett Crochet Has Been a Surprise Cy Young Candidate
Crochet is one of the most remarkable stories of the 2024 season, an ace starter and Cy Young candidate whom no one could have seen coming. He was the No. 11 overall pick in the 2020 MLB draft by the White Sox out of Tennessee, picked based largely on his electric stuff—he showed a triple-digit fastball in college—but was a bit of a risk.
Crochet suffered a broken jaw and soreness in his shoulder in his three seasons in Knoxville, limiting him to 36 games, only 13 of which were starts, and 132 innings. He posted just a 10-9 record and an ERA of 4.64 in his entire collegiate career.
Still, Crochet impressed the White Sox so thoroughly while working out at the team training facility that he made his debut at the end of the 2020 season, just months after he was drafted, at the big-league level, becoming the first player in a decade to bypass the minors and debut with a big-league club.
Injury concerns about Crochet caught up with the team, when, after a successful debut first full season working out of the bullpen in 2021, Crochet missed all of 2022 recovering from Tommy John surgery. He made only 25 appearances, all in relief, in 2023 as he was further dealing with recovery.
Crochet came into 2024 with 73 total big-league innings to his credit, and zero starts. Including college, he had thrown just 217 innings in a six-year span.
In a little more than three months, Crochet has thrown nearly half that number. And he’s been one of the best in the league in doing so. The Astros and Brown have shown a willingness to gamble on trades now, and this time around, Crochet is a worthwhile gamble.
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