Looking back at replays, it seems even more forgivable than it already did at the time.
During his June 18 outing, Garrett Crochet was ahead 0-1 on Astros slugger Yordan Álvarez. While his slider drifted over the middle, it also dipped well below the knees before the 2019 AL Rookie of the Year reached out and flipped it perfectly into the right-field corner, plating Yuli Gurriel from first and ending a tightly played, well-pitched, 2-1 loss to possibly the best team in the league. Unfortunate, but hard to assign blame, unless you’re in the practice of taking the blame for everything.
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“I definitely respect the opponent at all times,” Crochet told The Athletic. “But I typically don’t give them any credit. I typically reflect the blame on myself.”
That outing in Houston, in front of much of Crochet’s family, was his first game since the Rays’ Randy Arozarena hit a pitch a foot wide of the strike zone for the first and only home run Crochet has allowed as a professional. That kicked off four straight appearances where Crochet was scored upon. After not giving up a run in six innings pitched in 2020, his ERA this season crested over 3.00 but it’s now down to 2.92 with a 27.4 percent strikeout rate.
“It was a slump on the field and a slump inside my head,” Crochet said. “Team chemistry is everything to me. And that’s why after that Astros game — and I keep bringing it up because I was beating myself up for so long, just because I wanted my teammates to trust me and I felt like they did in that situation and I let them down.”
Crochet, who turned 22 on June 21, is learning a lot about himself this year and what makes him tick as a pitcher. The word he keeps coming back to is “tempo.” That big leg kick has a purpose, and it’s to hold his front side from leaking out toward the mound too early. When it fails to do its job and he rushes his delivery, his arm is late, his command fails and his sliders start hanging, losing depth and he starts falling behind in counts. His teammates reiterate that this is the only thing that can hold Crochet back.
“Garrett is going to dominate every time he goes out there if he throws strikes,” catcher Zack Collins said. “That’s the only thing that gets to him, is getting behind in counts. I mean, you saw today, he threw a middle-middle slider to (Miguel) Sanó and it’s still tough to hit.”
As useful as it is to know what timing checkpoints Crochet needs to hit to be consistent, and as much as he feels a mid-at-bat adjustment he made against the Twins’ Alex Kirilloff on Wednesday night set him back on course, he knows things are best when he’s solely focused on executing. Crochet spent the past week doing dry work, miming out his delivery in the bullpen and on the mound, feeling through every point of his motion, just so he can put it away when the time comes.
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“I feel like sometimes I get the paralysis by analysis, so the less I know, the better,” Crochet said. “Last year, I was a lot less conscious of it just because I knew I was throwing the shit out of the ball, and I really wasn’t too worried about my tempo. I was just worried about throwing strikes. But it’s at this point, as I’m continuing to grow and mature, that I’m realizing that the two are very correlated, and I’m just kind of trying to hone in on both.”
For most observers, Crochet “throwing the shit out of the ball” is not merely about results, slider shape, commanding his changeup or any of the things he largely focuses on, but it would mean hitting triple-digits consistently like he did in September rather than averaging 97 mph. The perfect inning Crochet threw Wednesday night, which he believes restored his confidence from a low point he had never experienced before as a professional, also happened to correlate with one of his liveliest fastballs of the season. But Crochet knows that when he steps on the mound and finds 95-97 mph when he reaches back, that he still has to get outs and has learned to deal with the fluctuations that seem to be coming for a lot of relievers dealing with their first full season in the role.
“I think it’s just something to adjust to,” said Michael Kopech, who is in a similar spot. “It’s a role I’m not typically familiar with. I’m not uncomfortable with it. Just having to kind of learn as I go. Once my body adjusts to that, there probably won’t be so many peaks and valleys. The valleys aren’t so low and the peaks are where they should be.”
The highlights of Crochet back at the University of Tennessee show a fiery competitor, someone who wouldn’t surprise anyone by staring down an opposing hitter after a strikeout or pounding his chest. That largely doesn’t match with the reserved and polite rookie quietly trying to make his way through the major league crucible.
“I definitely visualize it,” Crochet of showing more emotion. “Maybe over time, it’ll come back. But right now I’m trying to cement myself or feel myself out and make sure that I handle my business on the field before I do any celebrating.”
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But the primary message Crochet’s teammates are trying to communicate is to pump him up and get him to think of himself as basically the best pitcher in the world, and that his stuff will play in the zone if he challenges hitters with it early in the count before they start keyholing him. Crochet is starting to feel it, trusting that his changeup will help him command his heater and get bad swings even if it seems way too firm in the low-90s. He’s realizing that if he matches the tempo of his slider with his heater and doesn’t telegraph it, “it’s pretty unhittable.”
When he put the concept to the test Thursday, flipping a 2-2 slider to Sanó while protecting a two-run lead with the bases jammed in the seventh, splitting the plate but bringing the high-80s snap that he and pitching coach Ethan Katz spent all spring trying to establish, Crochet got the swing-and-miss in the big spot his teammates and coaches still trusted him to deliver in.
And then he roared.
Ryan Burr followed Crochet on Thursday by pitching a scoreless eighth, which seems like an increasingly regular assignment.
“A month ago, would we have thought in a close game that Burr would be the guy that we would look for to bring in there?” manager Tony La Russa asked himself aloud while weighing the impact of bullpen injuries.
After a year and a half off the White Sox 40-man roster, which included not getting selected from the alternate site last season, not making the team out of spring training in March, and not even putting up great numbers at Triple A, Burr has allowed three of the 42 hitters he’s faced to reach base and none of those three have scored in 13 innings. Clearly at some point during this climb, he mastered relief pitching for good, right?
“I’m not stupid, you know,” Burr said. “I know that there’s been a lot of luck in my corner these past few weeks, but sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”
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A standout element of Burr’s performance so far is the rate of outs on the ground; a 60 percent ground-ball rate would put him in the realm of effective sinkerballers, and mitigate the relative lack of strikeouts (19 percent) in the early going. He’s not issuing free passes (three walks), but hitters are frequently chasing Burr’s four-seam fastball out of the zone and beating it into the ground (-4 degree launch angle).
“It comes from still kind of cutting the ball a little bit right now,” Burr said. “I’m missing barrels, but still getting contact. Guys are swinging down on pitches, which is in turn getting groundballs. Groundballs are great. But obviously the whiff is more sexy and gets you out of trouble more times than not.”
Long term, Burr views himself as a strikeout pitcher when he’s in his finalized version. He’s developed a cutter to complement his slider, with hard, downward movement that should play against hitters of either hand. But even as he sees the league’s efforts force more contact into the game, he’s not preparing to pitch to it purposefully even as he happily accepts bad swings and quick, crucial outs in crucial innings. The cut is something that naturally comes from his throwing motion, but also works to control in favor of vertical ride.
Catching him on his way out to the field finds Burr toying with a Clean Fuego ball, which he says he works with every day. He notes that it’s shaped like a hockey puck, but a better way to explain it is that it’s the middle portion of a baseball with the sides removed. It trains Burr to keep his hand straight over the baseball to increase carry because it wobbles if he doesn’t and spins with clear, riding backspin when he does. It also keeps him from getting on the side of the baseball because the sides are missing. Burr not only thinks he can get more ride, but also thinks there should be more velocity than the 94.3 mph he’s averaged, and has some quibbles with his slider he could offer if you have the time. When he’s on the mound, he does not have the time.
“It just comes down to competing with your pitches and what you’ve got,” he said.
In February, that was harder to accept. La Russa explained Burr’s rough spring training as the right-hander trying too hard, and Burr, 27, nodded vigorously in agreement, asserting he thought there was a roster spot he could push himself into with a strong showing, and promptly overdid it. Now, Burr’s most nervous moments are when he has to watch from the sideline, with no ability to impact the game.
Burr’s mental skills work has focused on enjoying what he’s doing, and focusing less on the potential downside lurking behind every outing. If the 10th-inning appearance against the Rays last month took him by surprise, locking down eighth innings in close games is becoming old hat. And the fact that Burr is suddenly riding a scoreless streak for a major league team in a division race, a year and a half after he spent a couple of weeks as a minor league free agent, rehabbing from Tommy John surgery and wondering if the White Sox would bring him back at all, is something that only flashed across his mind for a moment or two over the past month.
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“It did,” Burr said. “But I’m really happy that I’m back here. This is where I wanted to be. These are the guys I wanted to do it with. There’s so many people that work really really hard in this organization that I don’t think get enough respect around the league, and to see us finally kind of rise on that ladder of teams that are in it to win it, it’s really cool.”
(Photo of Garrett Crochet: Ron Vesely / Getty Images)