CHICAGO (WGN) — For Garrett Crochet, Sunday’s return to Rate Field was all business, no emotion. But even if it was easy for him to turn the page, it wouldn’t stop him from looking back fondly on the memories he made on Chicago’s South Side.
“For me, it wasn’t that hard to move on. Especially going to the Red Sox, going to such a storied franchise, I was excited, quite frankly,” Crochet said. “I still am for what this team can accomplish this season.”
Crochet traded his white socks for red ones in a deal that went down last December. The White Sox shipped Crochet to Beantown in exchange for a quartet of Boston prospects—catcher Kyle Teel, outfielder Braden Montgomery, shortstop Chase Meidroth and pitcher Wikelman Gonzalez.
The deal had been months in the making, dating back to before the 2024 trade deadline. Hindsight being 20/20, the time it took for the move to materialize felt like a roller coaster’s steady climb to the mountaintop before a high-speed plunge into the depths below.
“There’s all this build-up … You can really go back to the [trade] deadline and then in the offseason. Winter meetings were what I was targeting in my mind like, hopefully, it’ll be done by then,” Crochet said Friday of trade rumors last year. “But then, once it actually went through, it was like dunking your head in a bowl of ice water.
“It just happened so quickly. I think it went really smoothly, just by the conversations I had with the front office over in Boston.”
All four players acquired for Crochet were ranked among the Red Sox’s top 15 prospects at the time of the trade, according to mlb.com. Teel (No. 29) and Montgomery (No. 51) appear in this year’s rendition of the Top 100, while Meidroth was called up Friday and played a role in Sunday’s reacquaintance (more on that later).
It was a notable haul for a former first-rounder who joined a Red Sox team that MLB experts predicted would take the American League East before the season began—a drastic change in expectation for the hard-throwing lefty.
Crochet is going from half-empty stadiums with crowds of 18,000 people, to 36,000-plus fans packed into Fenway Park. Every single one of them fully expects Boston to be in the postseason come October, and it’s something he acknowledged last Friday.
“Opening Day, nothing against Chicago, but that home opener was electric,” Crochet said. “It was one of the coolest games I’ve been a part of.”
Crochet didn’t get the nod for the Red Sox home opener, but Boston did win a 13-9 ballgame in front of 36,462 fans at Fenway.
In 2024, Fenway Park averaged 32,839 fans per game. Chicago exceeded the Red Sox’s average attendance only three times last year. They had 36,225 fans attend their series finale against the Los Angeles Dodgers on June 26, then had 38,127 and 38,341 fans in back-to-back games during their yearly home tilt in the Crosstown Classic against the Cubs on Aug. 9 and 10.
All three games were defeats on a long road toward the most single-season losses in MLB history.
As the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. Crochet made his Major League debut in 2020 and pitched out of the bullpen in 2021—the last year the South Siders made the playoffs.
That experience is a distant memory and a far cry from the experiences that have led Crochet to where he is today.
While Tommy John surgery wiped out his 2022 season and left shoulder inflammation cost him a large chunk of 2023, the White Sox went on a downward slide. Chicago finished 81-81 in 2022 before digressing another 20 games in 2023—finishing 61-101 in the basement of the American League Central.
Ahead of spring training in 2024, Crochet expressed a desire to start. Despite his limited MLB experience and injury-riddled past, General Manager Chris Getz supported the decision, and the organization worked to help him develop into a starter, all the while acting in his best interest long-term.
“I had a lot of belief in my ability and had the right guidance along the way,” Crochet said. “I had a team in the White Sox that was willing to protect me down the stretch last year. It was really just a group effort all the way around. They were willing to let me start and Chris [Getz] and I have talked about the conversation we had two Octobers ago.
“He had a lot of confidence in me and allowed me to get prepared for the season [and] take the toll of a full season as a starter.”
That combination of confidence and guidance led Crochet to be the White Sox’s lone All-Star representative last season. By year’s end, he put together a 6-12 record with a 3.58 ERA and 209 strikeouts across 146 innings pitched.
If Crochet maintained his strikeouts-per-9 ratio (12.9) and surpassed the 162 IP threshold to qualify for league leadership, he would have led baseball in strikeouts-per-9 ratio in 2024.
It was an all-around performance that, after Crochet was traded to Boston, led him to earn a six-year, $170 million contract extension with his new club.
“I still go back to Garrett and I’m happy for him. I really am. I’m happy for the White Sox too. We look at what he was able to accomplish, it was a team effort last year,” Getz said Friday. “We made the hard decision to make a trade and brought back some players that we’re really excited about.
“I don’t necessarily look forward to facing him on Sunday, but I’m happy for Garrett. [He’s] very deserving, but I think our organizations feel good about that deal.”
In the opposite dugout minutes apart, Crochet echoed a similar sentiment to Getz’s—both sides feel good about the deal and will look back on his development into a frontline starter in a positive light.
“It was great. I loved it. The organization that drafts you, people say typically treats you the best,” Crochet said Friday. “It was all I knew, but being over here in Boston, the love has been the exact same. [Chicago] was a good organization as far as I was concerned.
“Unless you’re [Paul] Konerko or [Jason] Varitek, you don’t really wear one color your entire career so, I’m just happy to be a Red Sock.”
What’s changed since Crochet has joined the Red Sox?
A more diversified arsenal of fastballs, according to the man himself.
Crochet has always been perfectionistic. He called it “the blessing and the curse” Sunday, a constant mechanism in his mind where he’s always trying to find where he can take the next step in his game.
“I felt like sequencing has really taken a step forward for me, incorporating the changeup today,” Crochet said after shutting down Chicago’s bats. “It helps that the wind was right in my face so, maybe I got a little extra horizontal on it. But the sinker as well, just being a guy that’s throwing three fastballs, I think that is what I kind of harped on at the end of last year and it’s working out so far for me.”
Those three fastballs are the high-90s four-seamer White Sox fans were accustomed to last year, along with the sinker he mentioned, and a cutter to mix and match with the occasional changeup or sweeper.
According to Baseball Savant, 91% of Crochet’s pitches Sunday were either the four-seam (52%), cutter (22%) or the sinker (17%). In total, he threw only six changeups and three sweepers, but the results were as dominant as Crochet was at the beginning of last year.
Brooks Baldwin, who faced Crochet in 2023 while he was on a minor league rehab assignment, said the big lefty’s stuff Sunday was what he remembered, but had a “little extra giddy-up on it” compared to the version of Crochet that was working back from shoulder inflammation two years ago.
“He’s a great pitcher, a great arm. We put up some good at-bats against him. He just made some better pitches,” Baldwin said. “That’s just him. He’s going to come right after you and show you what he’s got. If you can hit it, good. If you can’t, he’s going to beat you with it all day.”
Crochet threw 7.1 innings and notched 11 strikeouts while giving up only one run, one walk and one hit, which came courtesy of the last batter he faced—Meidroth—with one out in the eighth inning to break up his no-hit bid.
“I’m chasing greatness every time I touch the mound. Everybody is,” Crochet said two days prior. “I want to throw a complete game no-hitter and as soon as the first hit’s given up, I’m like ‘F***, alright. Let’s move on.’ But it’s just seeing how many zeroes I can put up every time I go out there.”
Meidroth’s single came on a 1-2 cutter, a pitch Crochet said he wanted to throw in that situation and even though the result wasn’t what he wanted, he’s fine with the outcome.
“Yeah and that’s actually the spot where I want to throw the cutter, so I’m okay with it,” Crochet said. “Looking back at the swing, I think that I did fool him a little bit, but he’s a good bat-to-ball guy. You know, doesn’t swing and miss a ton. I got him with the sweeper in his second at-bat, so I didn’t really love the idea of going back to the sweeper.
“Just playing the sinker game all day with him, I felt like the cutter was the pitch to go to. He put a good swing on it though.”
Crochet did find it a bit ironic that one of the players he was traded for broke up the no-hitter, although Meidroth just chalked it up to being baseball at the end of the day.
“Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny too,” Crochet said. “I don’t really have anything to say about it, but he put a good swing on the ball, that’s about it.”
What’s next for Crochet?
Through four starts, Crochet looks everything like the Red Sox’s No. 1 starter—he’s 2-1 with a 1.38 ERA, 28 strikeouts and eight walks across 26 IP.
Boston manager Alex Cora said the performance like Crochet’s latest on Sunday is “what he’s here for” and it’s already not the first time he’s been the Red Sox’s stopper.
“It happened earlier in the season [on April 2],” Cora said. “We had a long losing streak and he pitched a great game and we played better after that. Today was a big day for us to get a W and move on. He was really good. [His] stuff halfway through the game kind of took off. That’s what we expected.”
What Cora didn’t expect was for Crochet to be so good, that he carried a no-hitter into the game’s second-to-last inning.
“He kept saying he was feeling good, but still, you got to put everything in perspective, you know?” Cora said. “That’s the hard part of this job because [he had] 90-95 pitches. But I kept looking at the scoreboard like, oh shoot, it’s going to be tough. But, honestly, I’ve never been so happy for the opponent to get a hit.
“Chase [Meidroth] got a hit, I’m like, okay, now we can move on.”