White Sox plan for prized trade chip gives interested teams cause to pause

The Chicago White Sox are a brutal baseball team without many players that drive fans to their televisions to watch. Garrett Crochet is one rare exception. Every time he takes the ball, he's must-see TV.

After holding the high-powered Los Angeles Dodgers scoreless through 5.2 frames on Tuesday, Crochet now has a 3.05 ERA in 17 appearances and 94.1 innings of work. It's not often that you see a deserving All-Star on a team as bad as this one, but Crochet would be deserving assuming he is selected.

The southpaw is one of many players who is expected to be available at this year's trade deadline. The White Sox don't have to trade him, but they can get an enormous haul for a 25-year-old budding star.

Crochet is an extremely valuable trade asset, but what the White Sox are planning on doing with him as the season progresses might give interested teams cause to pause just a bit.

Teams interested in Garrett Crochet might think twice after White Sox plan for ace is revealed

White Sox manager Pedro Grifol had this to say about Crochet and the remainder of his season after his most recent dominant outing:

"We're going to start dwindling his workload down a little bit, and we'll manage that correctly," White Sox manager Pedro Grifol said Tuesday. "But it's not something we're going to put out and say, 'Here's what we're doing,' because nothing in this game is black and white."

The White Sox have been letting Crochet pitch deep into games and he has even topped the 100-pitch mark twice this season, but they're going to start to limit his workload. Grifol didn't specify exactly how he was going to manage it, but Chicago's goal is to get him through the season fully healthy.

"He's slowly detraining through the course of the year so he can finish the season," Grifol said. "We're not going to detrain him and build him back to the capacity where he was at the start of the season. This is going downhill now. We have to really monitor his workload."

From the sound of this quote, Crochet is going to be scaled back slowly as the season progresses. It might not be recognizable right away, but as we reach the end of the season (if he isn't traded) the White Sox will have limited his workload down the stretch.

The reason why they're doing this is quite simple. Crochet has already set a career-high by a substantial margin with 94.1 innings of work this season. His previous high was 54.1 innings pitched back in 2021 when he worked exclusively in relief for the White Sox.

Rather than risk injury for Crochet, a pitcher who has dealt with them in the past, the White Sox are being conservative in a lost season for them. That makes a ton of sense, obviously, but what will interested teams think?

The White Sox are going to be asking for an enormous haul (and rightfully so) if they trade Crochet. Will any team be willing to meet Chicago's asking price if they know Crochet won't be available for a full starter workload after they get him? Yes, he'd come with several years of control, but part of the reason why they'd want to do it at the trade deadline would be to have him down the stretch for this year's postseason.

Perhaps interested teams will overlook it and be comfortable with Crochet even at a lesser workload, but this decision could impact what the White Sox receive in return if they do the deal now.