2020’s weirdness makes 2021 White Sox prospect rankings, roles hard to grasp

I learned a fact this weekend that surprised the hell out of me: Christmas is less than a week away. That’s crazy.

It’s hard to use the scientific method to determine why this caught me off guard, because moving south generates an extra variable outside the pandemic. If I were still in New York’s Capital Region like I had been the previous 15 winters, I’d have dug out from under two feet of snow this week. Instead, this month marked the first time I listened to holiday music while mowing the lawn. I keep waiting for the cold, and 40s might be it.

That’s probably a part of it, but I’m guessing the pandemic’s flattening of time takes care of the lion’s share of my confusion. Two purchases took care my shopping. There were no vacations to arrange. In terms of the head count in the house, Dec. 24 and Dec. 25 will look like June 17 and Aug. 4 and Nov. 23 in my house. What was I doing on those days? I didn’t look it up, but whatever it was, guests weren’t involved.

We’re in the throes of prospect season, and what’s normally a most wonderful time of the year suffers from that same context loss. Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America posted their top-10 prospect lists over the past few weeks, and FanGraphs joined them a couple days ago with Eric Longenhagen’s top 32 prospects, which pushes us to the halfway point of the season. There’s a general agreement over the top five spots — especially after the Lance Lynn trade brought about Dane Dunning’s departure — and then chaos reigns.

Longenhagen’s list looks loose by comparison. Burdi shot up from 13th to sixth year over year, while Stiever slid from sixth to 12th. On one hand, Burdi’s stuff regained more of its former potency, while Stiever’s fastball lacked pop. On the other, both were worked over by Central division hitters. At least they both pitched in real competition. We didn’t see four of the other top 11 pitchers in any traditional professional environment this year.

What do you do with all that? I’m still working on that part, mostly because beyond the 2020-specific vagaries, it’s unclear what kind of start awaits most of these players in 2021. Minor League Baseball’s new order hasn’t yet been established, and even when the affiliates are finalized, there’s the matter of spring training being potentially impossible in its traditional form, and minor league baseball being nonviable without fans in attendance under the standard business model.

I have the same ambivalence to discussions about Garrett Crochet’s future. On the White Sox Talk podcast, Ethan Katz gave his impressions of Crochet, as well as an injury update (he’s healthy and throwing). What he didn’t reveal was a role:

“He’s dedicated himself. He’s in Arizona, full time. He’s preparing, getting ready for the season. He’s throwing right now, everything’s feeling good. He’s going to be a big part of what we do next year. It’s exciting. What he did from (being) drafted to showing up in the big leagues and complete dominance, not normal. Not normal. And the stuff’s not normal, either. The mentality behind the stuff is definitely off the charts.”

In Longenhagen’s write-up of Crochet, he said that teams focusing on Crochet’s college data thought he was “one of the few pitchers available who might pitch at the top of a rotation or the back of a bullpen.” After watching his brief time in Chicago, Longenhagen leans more toward the latter:

He pitched six innings in five relief appearances, walked no one (though he was pretty wild if you put on the tape), allowed just three hits and no runs, and struck out eight big leaguers. He made the White Sox playoff roster but left his first career postseason outing with a flexor strain, which ended his season. He’s healthy now, training and throwing at the team’s complex in Arizona. Because he barely threw in 2020, he’s likely to be on a strict innings limit in 2021. The club is going to try to thread the needle here and use Crochet in a relief role while still trying to develop him as a long-term starter. Players in this situation tend to wind up in the bullpen, and that’s where I have Crochet projected based on his strike-throwing limitations, independent of his shortened developmental timeline.

For an extra point of data, Keith Law was asked about Crochet in his Friday afternoon chat:

ffballmaster: Do you think Gerrit Crochet has top of the rotation potential or ends up as a high end bullpen arm?  Impressive debut but not sure how you’d rank him among some of the other draftees like Meyer and Lacy.

Keith Law: Bullpen guy. Basically a one-pitch guy in college, with control issues and trouble staying healthy. That’s a lot to fix to make him a starter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Law revises Crochet to a two-pitch guy after reviewing Crochet’s full body of work in 2020. If he doesn’t, I’m tempted to liken the improvement in Crochet’s slider to the way Chris Sale quickly rendered Law’s draft day scouting report outdated. But after Carlos Rodón fizzled and Carson Fulmer flopped, I’m less inclined to draw direct comparisons to Sale, because that was 10 years ago, and the White Sox haven’t made a habit out of beating the reports since.

It feels rash to rule out starting for Crochet, especially if we could say something like, “He’ll be the Opening Day starter in Winston-Salem.” For a different reason, it feels rash to pencil him into the White Sox bullpen because of something he told Scott Merkin in November.

In his first comments since that playoff loss, Crochet spoke to MLB.com about feeling soreness even before the left forearm tightness arose in Game 3. He still wanted to push through, including that final appearance of 2020.

“I was kind of sore just like leading up to the game,” Crochet said. “I felt like I just hadn’t been recovering well because I felt like I was thrown into the mix pretty quick and tried not to really speak out of turn. I didn’t want to feel like they were going to have somebody else do my job. So that was a little selfish on my part, not really speaking up a little bit more.

“It was kind of a quick trigger. As soon as they got out there, it was already known I was coming out of the game. There really wasn’t anything I could have said to stay in. I like to think I could have but after the diagnosis, I’m glad that I didn’t. They definitely made the right call doing what they did.”

This is immaturity of the physical and emotional kind, although not in a way that reflected poorly on him. He pitched six times as many games in the majors than he did in college this past summer, with no minor league experience in between. The last of those games was the franchise’s tensest situation in more than a decade. He blew away all reasonable expectations, and I can’t blame him if his body and mind didn’t react to the sudden burden in the most polished way.

It brought to mind the rise and fall of Rodón, who managed to survive his rookie season without a firm idea of a five-day routine, but struggled to sustain availability after his sophomore year. Fulmer suffered from a more exaggerated form of this phenomenon, as the White Sox rushed him to the majors before all parties involved had settled on how, what and when they wanted him to throw.

Whatever role the White Sox choose for Crochet, I just want them to prepare him physically for it, with the brain in tow. I can see the club’s best-laid plans thrown awry by incomplete camps and delayed starts, so if they think full-time MLB bullpen work is the stablest way to ready him for a career-high workload, I’ll have a hard time finding fault. If the minors start on time, the Sox have bullpen arms to spare and the White Sox have the luxury of letting him resume a five-day schedule, that’s terrific too. Whatever happens, I just want the Sox to have safeguards in place where previous attempts at fast-tracking were derailed.

(Photo by Nick Wosika/Icon Sportswire)

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