Top Padres pitching prospect’s struggles help explain pursuit of Garrett Crochet

The old saying goes that you can never have enough pitching. The San Diego Padres are walking, talking proof of that adage as they appeared to be in really good shape with their rotation, especially after they traded for Dylan Cease right before the start of the 2024 season.

However, injuries to Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove changed the calculus considerably.

Fortunately, the Padres have some internal depth at starter and they chose to utilize that depth when they called up Adam Mazur at the beginning of June. While Mazur's first start went well and he absolutely has the stuff to be a successful big league starter, Mazur's struggles in his second start highlighted exactly why San Diego is still expected to be busy at the trade deadline.

Even if Adam Mazur pitches well, the Padres need more pitching

This isn't a knock on Mazur whatsoever. In fact, the Padres are quite lucky to have a pitching prospect of his quality that was at least close to ready when they had Darvish and Musgrove go down. However, he is still a very green rookie who is bound to have some growing pains. Moreover, San Diego could still use some more rotation depth even if he handles his business with both Darvish and Musgrove's health a question mark going forward.

It is for that reason that the Padres expected pursuit of Garrett Crochet ahead of the trade deadline still makes a lot of sense. San Diego is hanging around in the wild card race and will get a boost once Darvish and Musgrove are (hopefully) healthy again. It will be costly to trade for Crochet to be sure, but adding another high-ceiling arm with multiple years of team control is exactly the sort of move that the Padres should be looking to make to help them in the short and long term.

Unfortunately, the competition is going to be stiff if the White Sox actually play ball and are willing to move Crochet this year. They don't have to move him this year and they could wait until next offseason to net a similar return (like how they handled Cease). That said, the Padres and Chicago have already reportedly talks and the two teams made a big deal recently, which gives hope if San Diego is still in the running by the deadline (hopefully with some help from Mazur), they could get yet another big deal done.

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