Red Sox agree to terms on contracts for three pitchers
Thursday saw chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and the Red Sox officially avoid arbitration with three members of their projected 2025 starting rotation, with Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, and Garrett Crochet all signed to new, one-year deals according to multiple reports.
Of the three, Houck will check in as the most expensive, at $3.95 million.
An All Star in 2024, Houck is coming off a season that featured career-best marks in wins (nine), ERA (3.12), innings (178.2), and strikeouts (154) in 30 starts for Boston.
Crawford, meanwhile, will make $2.75 million on his new deal with the Red Sox. While Crawford could be the odd man out in the Boston rotation depending on the health of Lucas Giolito and the club’s overall willingness to go with a potential six-man rotation, the 28-year-old is coming off a 2024 season that featured a team-high 175 strikeouts for the Red Sox.
And then there’s Crochet.
Boston’s big offseason addition to date, Crochet’s first year in Boston will come with a $3.8 million salary.
Considered one of the top pitchers available on the trade block prior to the Red Sox swinging the trade to bring him to Boston from Chicago, the 25-year-old Crochet is coming off a 2024 campaign that included a 6-12 record (means very little on a team as bad as the White Sox) and 3.58 ERA, and was Chicago’s lone rep at the 2024 MLB All-Star Game. The big thing with the 6-foot-6 Crochet was his ability to fan batters, with 209 strikeouts in just 146 innings in 2024. Crochet’s 12.9 strikeouts per nine innings would’ve been tops in all of baseball had he pitched enough innings to qualify among starters, but was tops among all starters if you dropped the qualifier down to a minimum of 140 innings.
With the pitchers locked up, the focus will now shift to Jarren Duran, who is in need of a new contract and is an arbitration-eligible talent for Breslow’s squad.
