The recently-converted starting pitcher is still drawing interest in the offseason.

The Orioles have an obvious need to fill in their rotation with Corbin Burnes off to free agency after his one year here. The White Sox, who were terrible for the last two seasons and figure to repeat at the bottom next year, need to get talent to help them rebuild. It’s not hard to imagine these two teams coming together for a deal involving Garrett Crochet. According to Jon Heyman in the New York Post, the Orioles are among teams showing “big interest” in Crochet so far this offseason.

Along with the Orioles, Heyman’s report lists the Red Sox, Dodgers, and Phillies with specific interest in acquiring Crochet, and hints that’s not the full list.

For any trade or free agency rumor, I always start with the simplest question: Does this make sense? In this case, that’s an obvious yes. Someone enamored with the Orioles prospect depth might get in and nitpick whether Crochet is truly worth whatever it would cost to get him, but that doesn’t change that the O’s need a starting pitcher, the White Sox have one, and the White Sox have a further interest in getting prospects or young players.

Heyman’s note indicates that both the Orioles and Red Sox are “well-stocked with the position player talent Chicago seeks.” That’s another point towards this making sense. It seems plausible that the starting point of a trade would be either Coby Mayo or Heston Kjerstad as a headline player.

The Orioles have shown that they’ll deal from near to the top of their position player prospect stash to get the right pitcher, as in trading Joey Ortiz to get Burnes. They’ve also shown they’ll deal from the lower parts of the prospect list if it will get them a pitcher they like, with midseason 2024 trades for Zach Eflin, Trevor Rogers, and Gregory Soto. Burnes and Eflin worked out pretty well. Rogers and Soto had bumpier beginnings.

The second question is: If this is true, does it mean anything? In this case, that’s less certain. The phrase “big interest” could mean any number of things and without knowing what constitutes big, it’s not a rumor worth freaking out about. The Orioles under Mike Elias have run an extremely tight ship and it’s not likely that the source for this information is in the O’s front office. Chicago looking to nudge someone to up their bid is a plausible motive for this rumor.

Crochet is a 6’6” lefty who will be in his age 26 season next year. He has two more seasons of team control remaining before becoming a free agent, with a projected salary of about $3 million for 2025. Drafted at #11 overall by the White Sox in 2020, Crochet jumped straight to the majors that season and every pro pitch he’d thrown before the 2024 season was as a reliever.

The conversion into a starter for Crochet was watched with curiosity and interest. Would he be effective? Would he manage to avoid getting hurt as he went for a full season’s workload? Both of these aspects were a success. Crochet made 32 starts, which is a whole season workload, though the innings were limited: He averaged fewer than five innings per game started.

Even with only 146 innings pitched, Crochet struck out 209 batters. He did this while keeping the walk rate down – just a 2.0 BB/9, lower than any of the 2024 Orioles starting pitchers except for Eflin. Over the whole season, batters hit just .222/.271/.371 off of Crochet and he finished with a 3.58 ERA (115 ERA+). Those are pretty good results, if maybe not #1 pitcher caliber. The amount of red (good) on his Statcast page suggests the ace-caliber gear may be in there, especially if he can find success with more pitches than just his fastball.

One season worth of success does not fully answer the two big questions about him. He’s still got an April 2022 Tommy John surgery in his medical history, which meant that he threw zero innings in 2022 and 12.1 innings in 2023. A past elbow injury is one of the biggest risk factors towards a future elbow injury. A team trading for Crochet is going to want to get twelve, or counting the playoffs fourteen, months of pitching out of him. Bad luck with the repaired ulnar collateral ligament and they might get just three or four.

There’s risk to the Orioles in doing something and there’s risk in doing nothing too. The starting rotation as currently constituted might not be good enough. It might not have enough depth in case of an injury to one of its more experienced pitchers. Whether they risk prospect depth or free agent dollars, there’s a need to do something about this over the course of this offseason. Crochet could be the player they decide to target.