Dave Dombrowski Explains Why He Passed On The Chance To Trade For Garrett Crochet

Dave Dombrowski Explains Why He Passed On The Chance To Trade For Garret Crochet

Dave Dombrowski is the man responsible for landing Chris Sale during his time with the Red Sox at the 2016 Winter Meetings. When another dominant lefty starter became available in Chicago, it sure felt like Dombrowski would be big name hunting again.

Except that didn’t happen. The Red Sox won the Garrett Crochet sweepstakes and Trader Dave sat on the sidelines. That usually isn’t in his nature.

It turns out, Dombrowski had a chance to trade for Crochet but passed on the opportunity. In a recent interview, Dombrowski pulls back the curtain on what went down behind the scenes on Crochet.

VIA NBC Sports Philadelphia:

“Well, you always weigh those things. I’ve been there before, done it before,” Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said Wednesday afternoon of the Crochet trade.

“Not sure it was the right time for us to do that right now and I think there’s a few reasons behind that. One is that (the White Sox) got a nice group of players, from what I read. We have four quality starting pitchers and a young pitcher coming right behind him that we really like a whole bundle.

“To give up that type of talent … we really rode out the development of our farm system over the last few years and we’re just getting to the point of having the impact of those guys. It’s not quite here but we’re on the verge of having some really good young, homegrown players.

“And there’s two years of service. You could sign the player long-term but there’s only two years. I’ve done that before so I’m not knocking it, I just don’t think it’s the right time for us to do that.”

“Our number one priority is always to win but I can’t tell you that it’s always to win at any cost because you’ve got other guys you really do like,” Dombrowski said. “For example, Andrew Painter’s pretty good. We could get a lot of players for Andrew Painter but I think I’ll wait it out the next few months to get him with us. It’s something you weigh every single time something comes up.”

“I wish we would’ve maybe done a little more but it’s not done either,” Dombrowski said. “One of the things that you have to be careful of, we talked about it yesterday — we had a couple of different conversations going that were quite heavy that didn’t happen and then all of the sudden it’s what about this, what about this? And it’s like hold on, let’s take a step back, we don’t have to force anything, let’s just wait and see what happens. Some of them are free agents and you can see if you’re swimming in the free-agent waters right now, you’re swimming in deep waters. With what we’ve been looking at, we haven’t wanted to do what’s out there.

“I don’t want to force it. I don’t think that’s smart, we have too good a team and too many good players.”

Let’s close things out with a little GM translation…

You don’t even need to read between the lines on this one. You know exactly what Dombrowski is saying and this is coming from a man who is notoriously ruthless when it comes to trading prospects.

He clearly thinks Boston overpaid. If you read my trade grades post, it would appear Trader Dave agrees with me. For Philadelphia to match what Boston gave up, they likely would have had to part with Aidan Miller, Andrew Painter, and possibly more. It’s an outrageous price to give up for a pitcher who has one year of evidence that he’s a quality starting pitcher.

Again, this is coming from a man who notorious is unafraid to deal prospects. If he thinks Boston overpaid, then that should tell you everything you need to know.

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