After Garrett Crochet made his Fenway Park debut during the season’s first homestand amid frigid conditions, he was frustrated. He owned a 1.45 ERA at the time through three starts, but he felt the precision that had made him one of baseball’s best starters last season was missing.
“There really hasn’t been a start this year where I feel like I’ve had my best stuff,” he said on April 8 after he’d allowed four runs to the Toronto Blue Jays, though just one earned, with four walks over 5 2/3 innings.
In his subsequent outing this past Sunday against the Chicago White Sox — a game the Red Sox desperately needed to win after two awful games to start the series — Crochet made the best start of his career.
The 25-year-old lefty held his old team hitless through one out in the eighth inning before a single from Chase Meidroth (one of the players he was traded for in December) snapped his no-hit bid. Crochet struck out 11 — which was tied for the second-most in his career — and exited having thrown 96 pitches (65 strikes). It marked the longest no-hit bid of his career and the longest by a single pitcher for the Red Sox since Eduardo Rodríguez went 7 2/3 innings without allowing a hit on Sept. 4, 2016.
11 nasty Ks.
— Red Sox (@redsox.com) April 13, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Crochet is set to take the Fenway Park mound again on Saturday with hopes this start resembles something closer to what he did on Sunday.
Relying solely on his pure talent, Crochet could simply be a very good pitcher, but his pursuit of perfection is what makes him great, and why, entering Sunday, he’d been aggravated with his start to the year for the Red Sox. After a dominant spring training, in which he’d struck out 30 of 66 batters faced, Crochet had been good, but not great (in his estimation), even after his career-high eight scoreless innings in Baltimore.
Crochet did some research with the Red Sox pitching department in search of answers as to why he hadn’t been pitching as well as he would have liked.
“We were kind of looking at biomechanical stuff after (the last Fenway) start, looking at heat maps for individual pitch types by month last season and comparing them to where I’m at right now,” Crochet said. “Then asking, regardless of what that pitch was then or where it is right now, where do I want it to be?”
Crochet was most concerned with his lack of swing-and-miss. He led all of baseball last season with a 35.1 percent strikeout rate among pitchers with a minimum of 100 innings. Entering Sunday’s start, he’d posted a 22.6 percent strikeout rate.
After looking at the heat maps comparing last year and this year, Crochet and the pitching department decided nothing was drastically off. He was still getting whiffs at the top of the zone with his four-seamer, with cutters on the inside edge and changeups on the outside edge to right-handers.
“It just kind of validated that I’m on the right path, even though I’m not getting as much swing-and-miss and saying, you know what, maybe the three teams we played just don’t swing and miss as much,” he said.
Indeed, the first three teams he faced — the Texas Rangers, Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays — rank in the top third in the league in terms of fewest strikeouts at the time he faced them. It had only been three starts, likely too early to glean any real data, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try to figure out why those starts hadn’t matched his expectations.
“Maybe it’s not me,” Crochet said. “Maybe it’s that they just did a really good job. While also maintaining the idea that, you know what, I did it all year last year pretty much with two pitches (four-seamer and cutter). And it’s like maybe people are just able to adapt to that. And, I think that’s why I’ve seen the success with the changeup up to this point.”
Though the White Sox have been struggling, Crochet was further validated on Sunday by his brilliant outing. He still deemed that his cutter needs work, but his 17 swings-and-misses were a season high, and the most he’d had since Aug. 16, when he also registered 17 whiffs. He managed a career-high 24 whiffs twice last June. Sunday’s start bumped Crochet’s strikeout rate up to 28.6 percent, still below where he wants but ranking within the 76th percentile in the league.
Crochet said he hadn’t changed up anything in his bullpen sessions entering Sunday’s start, aside from looking at the backend data to pick up on any trends with where his pitches were landing that he might have missed otherwise. He also recognized how early in the season it is, noting the small sample of starts.
“I’m not really giving up runs and I’m not really giving up damage outside of the one home run that I gave up (at Fenway),” he said. “So it’s just sticking with the process.”
Crochet’s perfectionism offers a peek inside how competitive he is with himself, but he also allows for the possibility of needing a few starts to find his rhythm.
“I don’t feel like I am myself right now,” he said a week ago. “But it’s also April and 30 degrees, right? They call it midseason form for a reason. And it’s not midseason yet.”
If Sunday’s start wasn’t midseason from, imagine what he’ll display once the season heats up.
(Photo: Matt Marton / Imagn Images)
