Garrett Crochet still can’t say whether he’ll pitch again for the Red Sox this season, and the uncertainty around his shoulder has only grown since his April trip to the injured list.
When asked Tuesday, before the game was postponed, whether missing the rest of the year is a possibility, Crochet didn’t offer a firm answer.
“I mean, it's tough to say. I mean, I'm not gonna make a claim like that,” Crochet said.
That kind of uncertainty is a far cry from where things stood when Boston first shut him down at the end of April. At the time, the expectation was that his stay on the IL would be brief. Instead, Crochet said the issue has evolved into something much bigger than the original diagnosis.
“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.”
The left-hander has recently backed off his rehab work, too. He’s no longer throwing plyo balls, and Crochet said that decision came after he was “not making the progress that we were hoping to see” and had plateaued in the recovery process.
For a pitcher who was the runner-up for the American League Cy Young Award last season, it’s been a jarring turn. In his first year in Boston, Crochet went 18-5 with a 2.59 ERA in 32 starts. He led the AL with 205 1/3 innings, a total that was only 13 2/3 shy of what he had thrown combined over the previous five seasons, and he paced the majors with 255 strikeouts.
This season has looked nothing like that. Crochet opened spring training with a 7.36 ERA across four starts, then delivered a brilliant Opening Day outing in Cincinnati, firing six shutout innings with eight strikeouts, two walks and three hits in a win.
But the momentum didn’t last. Over his next five starts, he went 2-3 with a 7.88 ERA and a 1.625 WHIP.
That rough stretch included one especially ugly afternoon in Minnesota, where he gave up 11 runs, 10 earned, in just 1 2/3 innings against the Twins. He allowed five earned runs in five innings in his next start, then bounced back with six scoreless innings in late April in Baltimore, a game that also happened to be Alex Cora’s final one as Boston’s manager.
Crochet said after landing on the IL that he needed to rebuild strength in his shoulder, and that remains the same now. What he can’t pin down is when the training staff might clear him to start throwing again.
“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.”
While he was around the Red Sox dugout through much of May and early June, Crochet has been absent during the club’s recent surge, a 14-game winning streak and 19 wins in its last 21 games. He said his initial in-game absence was tied to rehab work he was doing during games so he wouldn’t get in the way of active players.
Then the streak kept rolling, and superstition took over just enough to keep him out of sight.
“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.”
Crochet said he’s trying to help however he can while he’s on the IL, even if that means staying out of the way and not tempting fate.
“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.”
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