Inside Garrett Crochet’s Rapid Reliever-to-Ace Transformation
NEW YORK — Garrett Crochet recoils at the premise. At 26, after 205 ⅓ innings (most in the American League), 255 strikeouts (most in the majors) and a 2.59 ERA (third in the AL) for the 89-win Red Sox, on the cusp of starting Game 1 of the American League wild-card series against the Yankees, he’s finally the guy he always knew he could be, right?
“Um,” he says quickly. “Becoming it.”
For starters, he didn’t always know he could be this kind of starter. Not until he began throwing 91 mph as a left-handed high school senior did any Division I programs show interest, and even at Tennessee, he spent half his time pitching in relief. When the White Sox drafted him No. 11 in June 2020 and promoted him to the big-league bullpen three months later, he was just thrilled to be in the majors. So he was not exactly clawing at the walls of the bullpen asking to be unleashed on the rotation.
“I thought that I could do it,” he says slowly. “I wasn’t sure.”
Even that degree of faith began to feel misplaced. In 2021, he threw 54 ⅓ innings in relief and felt gassed. “And I’m, like, last on my team!” he recalls. He set for himself the goal of hitting 80 or 90 innings in ’22, then putting himself in position for a few spot starts in ’23. “And then I blew out [my elbow],” he says. “It was like, ”
The Chicago brass knew he had the talent to be a frontline starter—a four-seamer that touches 100 mph plus perhaps the best slider in the game will usually play—but they wanted to see if he could develop the stamina. So after he finished rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, they let him spend the winter before the 2024 season stretching out. He was so dominant in spring training that they made him the Opening Day starter—his first major league start.
“I was just like, ” he recalls. “”
Last June, he threw seven innings of one-run, 13-strikeout ball against the Mariners. “And I was like, ” he recalls. That made the subsequent three months even more frustrating. At the All-Star break, his 107 ⅓ innings easily surpassed his career high—in the previous three seasons combined, he’d logged 73—and he and the team decided to limit him to four innings or 65 pitches per start. He felt like every five days, he’d get through the first three cleanly, then give up two in the fourth, then head for the bench. “That’s a four-and-a-half ERA,” he says. “So I’m like, ” He always wondered what he could have done with another two or three innings.
But then he started thinking about it differently: He finished with 146 innings. Another frame and change per start in the second half and he would have qualified for the ERA title. Two per start and he would have been closing in on 180 innings. “I was like, ” he says. “”
He entered the offseason sure of two things: He would be traded, and he wanted to throw 200 innings for his new team. The White Sox had tried to trade him during the season, but he had made clear to contenders that he wanted a contract extension before he agreed to blow through his innings limit and pitch into October. In the end, he stayed in Chicago.
But entering 2025, he felt healthy. So as soon as he was traded to the Red Sox in December—and especially after he signed a six-year, $170 million extension in April—he started doing some campaigning. “Every time that we talked about preparing for the season, I always made sure to throw in there,” he says. “Like, ‘Yeah, whatever I’ve got to do to throw 200 [innings]!’ Just kind of slipped that in there.” The Red Sox were happy to accommodate him: He averaged 6.4 innings and 98.5 pitches per start, and he even threw a complete-game shutout against the Rays in July.
“I don’t want to say I can’t believe I actually did it,” he says. “I can believe it, but it is still like, ”
He became not just the workhorse he had envisioned but the ace he wondered if he could be. He liked being the pitcher his team could rely on instead of one whose innings it monitored.
“It’s not something that I want to admit, because I don't want to be, like, arrogant or cocky or anything, but I feel like I was—see, I’m still trying to figure out how to say it without saying it!—I feel like that’s what I was this year, and I was very pleased with how I was responding to my own expectations,” he says.
This is something of an unusual way for an elite athlete to talk about his performance. More often they discuss the haters and the doubters. But for Crochet, this journey has not been about proving anyone wrong. It hasn’t even really been about proving himself right.
“I just want to see,” he says. “I just want to know." He answered some of his own questions this year. But he can only answer the last one in the postseason. “That’s kind of the fun part,” he says. “There’s only one way to find out.”