When the Red Sox placed Garrett Crochet on the injured list at the end of April, it was not supposed to be a long stay.
Yet with the calendar now closer to August than June, Crochet’s still nowhere near a return to the mound. And when asked Tuesday (prior to the game being postponed) if it’s possible that he might not pitch at all for the rest of the season, Crochet could not give a definitive answer.
“I mean, it’s tough to say. I mean, I’m not gonna make a claim like that,” Crochet said when asked if missing the rest of the season is a possibility.
Considering the diagnosis in April, Crochet lamented the current reality of his situation.
“It sucks,” he said. “Like, I understand why you asked the question. It sucks, though, because I remember when I went on the IL originally, I was like, maybe I’ll just miss one start. And then the way that the injury just kind of matured, especially with the setback following the first ramp, it just, it matured to a place where, like I said, it’s just completely different from the original diagnosis, which sucks. But the shoulder is complex like that.”
Crochet has recently ramped down his activity, with the lefty no longer throwing plyo balls as part of his recovery efforts. The 27-year-old said that he was “not making the progress that we were hoping to see” and had plateaued in the rehab, leading to the decision to remove throwing from his program.
Crochet was the runner-up for the American League Cy Young Award last season, his first in Boston, when he went 18-5 with a 2.59 ERA in 32 starts. He led the AL in innings pitched (205 1/3, which was only 13 2/3 fewer than the number of innings he pitched combined in the five previous seasons) and led the majors in strikeouts (255).
This year, Crochet posted a 7.36 ERA across four spring training starts before pitching a gem (six shutout innings, eight strikeouts, two walks, three hits) in an Opening Day victory in Cincinnati. Crochet then went 2-3 in his next five starts, posting a 7.88 ERA and 1.625 WHIP. That stretch included a stunning start in Minnesota, when Crochet allowed 11 runs (10 earned) in just 1 2/3 innings against the Twins. Crochet allowed five runs (all earned) in five innings his next time out, but he did pitch six scoreless innings in late April in Baltimore (which happened to have been Alex Cora’s final game as Boston’s manager).
After being placed on the IL, Crochet said he needed to build up strength in his shoulder. On Tuesday, he said the diagnosis remains the same.
Yet when it comes to when the training staff might feel comfortable with letting him throw again, Crochet couldn’t venture a guess.
“To be honest, I don’t really have an idea,” he said. “Just with the setbacks that I had in the past, we’ve been rightfully cautious. For me, I’m just kind of doing what I’m asked.”
And while Crochet was a fixture in the Red Sox’ dugout throughout the month of May and the early part of June, he’s been absent during this current run of success (14-game winning streak, wins in 19 of the last 21 games). Crochet said that his absence was initially due to some of his rehab work taking place during games, so that he could stay out of the way of the players who were actually active.
“And then it was like, man, we kind of got a good thing going here,” Crochet said. “And then I finished my work the other day in like the seventh inning and I was like, let me finish this inning in here and maybe I’ll go out. And then Wilyer [Abreu] hit the homer and I was like, ooh, I gotta stay inside.”
While superstition will always be present in baseball, Crochet admitted that he’s just doing what he can to help the streak while he remains on the IL.
“I think that there’s enough confidence amongst the group where they don’t really feel the need to press like that,” Crochet said. “But, you know, I’m gonna do my part.”
