Garrett Crochet rises to role of White Sox stopper as franchise-record losing streak ends

Garrett Crochet wanted to be a starter.

So he did it.

Friday night, he wanted to end the Chicago White Sox’ miserable losing streak.

So he did it.

“I already have so many expectations of myself,” Crochet said. “In a moment like this, I like to think that I thrive in it.”

If there’s a big game to be had for a team sitting at 16-48, this was it. And they had the right guy on the mound.

Crochet is now more than just a curiosity, the novelty of a reliever trying to turn himself into a major league starter. Sure, it’s only been a little more than two months, but Crochet is among the better starting pitchers in baseball right now, the AL strikeout leader after punching out 10 hitters in the White Sox’ skid-halting win over the Red Sox on Friday night.

He’s gone from an enormous preseason question mark to the guy to shoulder the burden of bringing an end to two weeks of losing.

And through it all, he’s had no doubt in his mind that it would happen.

“When you have that type of talent and those types of weapons and you’ve got that will and that drive to really execute and do something, you do it,” Pedro Grifol said. “He’s got that type of makeup. He’s got that type of mindset. Nobody’s going to stop him. He’s going to continue to work to do something that probably 90 percent of the people in this game thought he couldn’t.”

“I’ve always had a lot of self belief,” Crochet said. “It was waiting for that opportunity and then taking advantage of it.”

Indeed, Crochet has proven every doubter and every questioner wrong to this point. And as folks still wonder if someone who never threw more than 54.1 innings in a major league season can keep it up, he turns in one impressive performance after another.

Friday, he only gave up three hits to a Red Sox team that pummeled White Sox pitching for 24 hits a night earlier. The two runs he gave up stemmed from his third-inning throwing error more than anything he did as a pitcher. His 10 strikeouts made it four double-digit strikeout outings on the year.

And now the White Sox can thank him for one more important stat: Zero consecutive losses.

“Happy day. I won’t have to hear about that streak anymore,” Grifol said. “Crochet is developing into a big-time pitcher. These are the guys that stop streaks like this.”

But of course, the workload questions aren’t going to go away, and Grifol spent an awful lot of time before Friday night’s game talking about the “uncharted waters” the White Sox find themselves in and the things they might have to do to keep Crochet as effective as possible moving forward. The list of options includes skipping a start here and there, giving him extra days of rest between starts and potentially limiting him in his starts, keeping him to a smaller pitch count than usual.

Crochet, though, is showing no signs of being negatively affected by a workload unlike anything he’s experienced before, and as he answers questions about how he’s feeling, overall, after each start, his answer remains the same: “I feel good.”

And much like James Brown, it seems he knew that he would.

This goes back to spring training, when Crochet bristled at the idea of an innings limit and a late-season shutdown, saying those kinds of things aren’t really en vogue these days. The White Sox have said they hope to avoid getting to a place where they’ll have to shut Crochet down, hence the sampler of methods they could employ over the next few months.

“It’s something we think about every five days when he takes the ball,” Grifol said before the game. “We’re at a point now where he’s reaching numbers that really nobody knows. The only thing we can go on is our communication with him, our sports-performance people, the way his body is reacting, the testing that he’s doing in the weight room, the testing that he’s doing with his shoulder. … There’s no decrease in strength anywhere, there’s no decrease in velocity, there’s no warning signs. Right now, we’re OK.

“There’s going to be a time where we’re going to probably have to slow it down a little bit. That time is not right now.

“You’re going to have to buy innings here and there, buy days here and there, buy pitches here and there. And if you do that, if you do that consistently throughout the season, you’re going to end up minimizing some of the workload.”

Perhaps aware of the focus on that workload, Crochet went to his manager to fight for another inning Friday after throwing just north of 80 pitches through five. Grifol had no intention on this night of pulling the ripcord that early.

“In the fifth inning, he came to me and said, ‘Let me go,’” Grifol said. “I was going to let him go for the sixth, for sure.”

As Crochet flexes the kinds of muscles flexed by baseball’s most reliable starting pitchers, guys who have been stoppers and aces for far longer than he has, a bigger question becomes how much longer this whole workload thing might even be the White Sox’ problem to deal with.

Chris Getz’s front office seems, unsurprisingly, open to anything ahead of this summer’s trade deadline. While Crochet could certainly be of value to the future Getz has planned, with two years of club control after this one, he could also represent one of a small number of opportunities for the first-year general manager to bring some significant talent into an organization at the very outset of a long-term rebuilding project.

Crochet rightfully strikes plenty as a potential ace to build around. But will he be that guy for the White Sox or for a team that is in enough of a win-now mode to blow Getz away at the deadline?

And so as Crochet continues to dominate opposing lineups, it could be viewed as an audition as much as the development of a pitcher into one of baseball’s most impressive arms.

While the White Sox might see the opportunity to make a deal, Crochet is seeing the opportunity to be everything he always thought he could be.

“He might not wane at all,” Grifol said. “This guy’s 6-6, 200-whatever pounds. He might be able to go 185 innings this year. Who’s to say he can’t?

“He could stay strong all year.”

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