The White Sox are baseball’s worst team by a long shot and seemed to acknowledge that likelihood even before the season began when they traded Dylan Cease to the Padres in spring training. San Diego is already reportedly interested in yet another Sox pitcher, lefty Garrett Crochet, and ESPN’s Jeff Passan reports that the Sox are open to offers not only on Crochet but on center fielder Luis Robert Jr. Passan categorizes the ChiSox as “open for business” and lists Robert, Crochet, Erick Fedde and virtually all of the team’s short-term veterans as players who could be moved between now and the trade deadline.
Fedde, Tommy Pham, Paul DeJong, Mike Clevinger, John Brebbia, Tim Hill and other players who aren’t signed long-term — Fedde is signed through next season, the others are all free agents this winter — all stood as obvious trade candidates to begin with. I wrote about Fedde’s trade candidacy for MLBTR Front Office subscribers a couple weeks back. DeJong recently said on 670 The Score in Chicago that he and Pham both fully expect to be traded. That anyone from that group is viewed as likely to change hands is only logical.
Names like Robert and Crochet being available is far less certain, even for a rebuilding club like the Sox, given the amount of club control each has remaining. In Robert’s case, he’s signed through the 2027 season in the form of a $12.5MM salary this season, a $15MM salary in 2025 and a pair of club options valued at $20MM apiece (both with a $2MM buyout). Crochet entered the 2024 campaign with three years of big league service, meaning he’s in his first arbitration season and has another pair of seasons of club control beyond 2024.
It bears emphasizing that the Sox being “open” to offers or “willing to trade” either player is far different from the team actively shopping said players. That open-minded approach is also far from a guarantee that either will be moved. The substantial control remaining beyond the current season means Chicago GM Chris Getz will set an enormous asking price on both players, and both will still retain tremendous trade value into the offseason and even into next year’s deadline if a deal doesn’t come together this summer.
Robert, still just 26 years old, returned from the injured list yesterday after an absence of nearly two months. He suffered a Grade 2 strain of his hip flexor early in the season and was sidelined for the bulk of April and the entirety of May. He…
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