Garrett Crochet’s Success Shows The Path For Reggie Crawford
Image credit: Reggie Crawford (Bill Mitchell)
On April 16, Giants lefthander Reggie Crawford made his official 2024 debut with Double-A Richmond. Facing Harrisburg, he went one shutout inning, walked one and struck out another.
Believe it or not, that one inning, those three outs, represent 5% of his career innings total since being drafted by San Francisco in the first round back in 2022. Counting college, it’s roughly 2.7% of all the innings he’s thrown between the University of Connecticut, two summer college leagues and the minor leagues.
Point is, he’s long on talent but short on experience.
He’s also got a bit of an unusual background and an unfortunate set of circumstances to blame. The lefthander pitched just 0.1 inning with Connecticut in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, then added another 6.1 innings that summer in the Futures League.
In 2021, he pitched 9.2 innings between his sophomore season at UConn and a brief stint in the Cape Cod League. His amateur career closed when he had Tommy John surgery in October 2021 and missed what would have been his draft season.
Beyond his electric fastball-slider combination, Crawford also showcased thunderous power from the left side during his college days. No matter whether he had a bat or a ball in his left hand, he had the kind of tools evaluators covet.
It was no surprise, then, that the Giants selected him as a two-way player and that his first pro experience came in the batter’s box in the 2022 Arizona Complex League before he was ready to get on the mound for the first time in orange and black.
Even after his elbow had completely healed, Crawford’s time as a pro has been limited. He’s dealt with mononucleosis as well as injuries to his oblique and lat muscles, which in turn have kept him off the field more than the Giants would like.
His longest stretch of uninterrupted play came in the 2023 Arizona Fall League, where he worked as a hitter only and finished with 71 plate appearances in 17 games. By comparison, he has just 40 plate appearances in regular minor league games.
Crawford finished his AFL stint with a .138/.282/.276 stint and this year has transitioned into a pitching-only role. The lat injury sidelined him this spring, and he worked in one-inning stints in spring training before his opening outing with Richmond.
When a team takes a pitcher in the first round, it obviously would like him to become a big league starter. There is little doubt that Crawford has the kind of stuff that would fit in a rotation—he works with an upper-90s fastball, a filthy slider and a changeup with plenty of upside—but all of the roadblocks over the last few years will make it difficult to ramp himself up to the workload required of a big league starter.
Difficult, but not impossible.
For a blueprint, one can turn to Chicago and see how the White Sox have gotten their own first-round fireballing lefty—Garrett Crochet—through injuries and an unusual development track and into the rotation.
Though he was used mostly as a reliever in college, Crochet had way more innings on his ledger when the White Sox popped him with their first pick in the pandemic-shortened 2020 draft. He was slated to transition into the rotation that season but pitched just 3.1 innings before the sport shut down for the year.
With the minor league season cancelled and the big league seasons reduced to just 60 games, the White Sox included Crochet as part of their alternate training site before deciding his triple-digit fastballs and devastating sliders were too good to waste in that setting and called him to the big leagues to help them in their run toward the playoffs.
He spent all of 2021 in Chicago’s bullpen but required Tommy John surgery in 2022 and missed the whole season. He pitched just 25 innings in 2023, split almost evenly between the minor and major leagues.
Now, he’s at the front of the White Sox’s rotation and his 31 strikeouts lead the American League. Crochet’s innings will certainly have to be monitored closely this season, but there he is, in the big leagues, working as a starter for the first time since his last appearance at Tennessee.
Crawford and Crochet share plenty of similarities. They’re both lefthanders equipped with major league-caliber arsenals and have gone through career arcs that stray far from the norm. Both were drafted in the hopes that they’d one day become members of their teams’ starting rotations.
In his fifth pro season, Crochet has achieved that goal. It might take a while longer, but his success shows that there is a path for Crawford to one day do the same.
