Each night before he starts, Garrett Crochet polishes his noggin.
Boston’s 26-year-old ace will flip on some Sheryl Crow, or maybe a bit of Carrie Underwood. Then he’ll wet his razor, lather up and go to work.
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“I’ll shave my head. I shower. I think about my start the next day. Then I go to bed, wake up, and I’m just locked in,” Crochet recently told Yahoo Sports when asked about his between-outings routine.
He insists the habit is not fundamental to his preparation, yet the ritual showcases something unique about the sturdy southpaw. Crochet has been bald, proudly so, since the 2021-22 offseason. He was 22 at the time but could feel the lettuce thinning, could see the hairline creeping away. It would be prudent, he realized then, to accept reality. And so, after getting married that winter, he embraced the inevitable.
“It’s not something that I wanted to grasp, but it’s something that I needed to,” he told The Athletic the following March.
It takes a certain type of character, someone supremely confident in himself, both personally and professionally, to pull the trigger and mow the lawn. Most men in their early 20s approach such a humbling experience with defiance and inaction. That’s particularly true for balding ballplayers, given their ability to shield time’s cruelties under a ballcap. But Crochet went a different route.
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Now, three-and-a-half years since he took the leap follicly, Crochet has weaponized that self-assuredness to shape himself into one of baseball’s best starting pitchers. Through 29 starts in 2025, Crochet has a 2.57 ERA, with 228 strikeouts in 185 1/3 innings, both of which lead MLB. He should conclude the year with the best campaign by a Red Sox pitcher in nearly a decade. Barring a late tumble from Detroit’s Tarik Skubal, Crochet will finish second for the American League Cy Young.
And next month, he’ll take the ball in Boston’s first playoff game, with a city on his broad shoulders, as one of the sport’s true aces.
It has been quite a swift ascent for a player just 17 months removed from his first MLB start. Although Crochet raced to the big leagues in 2020, debuting a few months after he was drafted 11th overall by the White Sox, he was deployed exclusively as a reliever through the 2023 season. That early portion of his career was also marked by a Tommy John surgery that kept him sidelined for all of 2022.
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But heading into spring training 2024, Crochet was determined to reestablish himself as a starter, and he shined in camp with the White Sox, sitting triple digits with his fastball. That earned him the surprise nod for Chicago in Game 1, making him just the ninth pitcher in MLB history to make his first career start on Opening Day.
“I threw well for that start, the next one and the one after, but then the next four were real s***ty,” Crochet recalled. “And I kind of was able to bounce back from that, figure some things out about myself and my arsenal.”
Indeed, on May 1 of last season, Crochet had an unsightly 5.97 ERA. Then, following the fourth of those aforementioned lousy starts, he turned a corner. Over the rest of the season, he delivered a 2.83 ERA season while striking out 162 hitters in 111 1/3 innings. As the 2024 White Sox raced toward infamy as the worst team ever, Crochet emerged as a sought-after trade chip. But at the deadline, the first-time All-Star stayed put, in part because he publicly insisted on signing an extension with whichever club acquired him. That request came from the thinking that if he were to fly past his previous innings total and put his arm health at risk, Crochet wanted to have secured his future.
That security came, in time, with Boston. In December, Crochet was dealt to the Red Sox for a quartet of prospects. Then, during the first week of the 2025 regular season, he and the club inked a six-year, $170 million extension. In the time since, he has earned every last dollar.
Crochet’s sensational 2025 has been powered by a revelation he made last season with the White Sox. As a reliever, he had been able to overpower hitters with elite stuff. But that strategy didn’t translate to life as a starter — navigating lineups, working deep in games, facing hitters multiple times. So during his skid last spring, Crochet changed the way he approached pitching.
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“I never did any scouting on my own, just because it was very foreign to me,” he explained, regarding his bumpy start in the bigs. “I felt like it would overwhelm me. I didn’t want to be on the mound overthinking. Now I’ve come to like doing my own and like to work my way through lineups with my mind, not just pitching.”
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That willingness to engage with the strategic side of the craft unlocked another level for Crochet. Since that rough stretch early last season, he’s preparing more, watching more video of opposing hitters and digging deeper into the advanced metrics of pitch selection. Understanding why he’s throwing a certain pitch in a certain situation against a certain hitter has allowed the bearded southpaw to execute with greater conviction.
“He came in with a really good routine, a really good kind of advanced scouting process that he does himself,” Red Sox pitching coach Andrew Bailey said. “And then we connect that day with the catchers, and it’s always dialed.”
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To be fair, Crochet still regularly overwhelms hitters with his special four-seam fastball, particularly early in games. But he has learned that heat alone won’t beat the best.
Back in early June, in his first home start against the Yankees as a member of the Red Sox, Crochet was putting on a clinic. Through eight scoreless innings, he had surrendered just three hits and one walk against a fearsome New York lineup. With one out in the ninth and the Sox up one, he squared off against Aaron Judge in a showdown for the ages.
After throwing Judge four four-seamers and a cutter, Crochet reared back for another heater. The pitch leaked back over the middle. Judge launched it over the Green Monster for a game-tying crank. But while Crochet ended up on the losing end of the battle, that he was permitted to face the game’s most dominant hitter for the fourth time in a one-run game is a signifier of his stature.
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“Once every other week, someone comes up to me and says, ‘Man, that at-bat was really special.’ And it was the at-bat that I lost,” Crochet lamented. “I just look back and wish I threw the sweeper.”
Even though Crochet was more of a “grip it and rip it” pitcher early in his career, he has always been a cerebral type. Former teammate Tanner Banks recalled a time when he and Crochet spent 45 minutes in a sauna together discussing books they’d read recently. That mental sharpness also applies to pitching.
“Some pitchers, when you talk to them, they’ll black out,” Banks explained. “They don’t remember what hitters they faced or what they threw. Garrett, you can go up and ask him, like, how’d you approach this guy? He could walk you through it, kind of like you hear with vintage Greg Maddux stories. He could walk you through each pitch in a sequence that he threw and the hitters he faced.”
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Combining that recall with dialed preparation and his immense physical ability has turned Crochet into a game-changing force. He can outsmart you and outclass you. In less than 18 months, he has gone from an enticing arm on baseball’s worst team to a frontline monster slated to start Game 1 of a playoff series.
And while the confidence, as showcased by his early acceptance of the bald lifestyle, has always been there, this version of Crochet is a different beast — the type of ace they tell stories about and build statues of.
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