The Sox have their ace for a while, and you don’t need to care about the deal anymore.
I already know how Garrett Crochet’s summer is going to go.
It’s going to start soon with a big strikeout game, something to properly introduce himself to the fanbase and catch the attention of people who would otherwise flip back to the Celtics. A few weeks later there will be an eighth inning K that leaves two stranded on the way to a walk-off bloop. In June there will be a pitch up and in to Ben Rice in Yankee Stadium (I don’t know why it will be Ben Rice, it just will) that leads to players tumbling out of dugouts and launches a thousand blog posts about the return of the rivalry. In August there will be seven innings of three-hit ball to halt a four-game skid. And in September there will be a crisp night when he doesn’t have his best stuff but guts his way through six innings anyway, with the whole ballpark and everyone at home scoreboard-watching in between each pitch.
This is what the summer has in store for us. Maybe.
Every baseball season begins as a locked box of possibilities — an infinite number of ways to tell an infinite number of stories, any of which could end up being the story of the baseball season. But only one of those possible stories sneaks out of the box. We watch baseball to find out which story that is, whether it’s the one with happy ending or the sad, the one that drives us crazy or the one that makes us sing.
If we get the one that makes us sing this year — and if it’s Garrett Crochet supplying the music — then we’re the luckiest sons of bitches in baseball. Whether it ends in glory or not, there aren’t many baseball seasons that are more fun than that first season with your new pitching phenom. Ask anyone who had a pulse during the summer of 1998 about that.
I think Garrett Crochet is going to give us the music this year, I really do. But, even if he did, there would’ve been the slightest threat of clouds amidst the summer sunshine. The contract. We’d be talking about it nearly as much as we’d talk about the standings. We’d joke about how much money he was making with each strikeout, we’d gripe about giving a bag to reclamation projects instead of him. Then some of us would start talking him down, a defense mechanism employed against the fear of losing him — Is any pitcher really worth a big deal? Does he even want to stay in Boston long-term? If we sign him, we won’t be able to extend Anthony and Mayer.
That’s a terrible way to watch baseball, viewing the players as segments of a portfolio instead of, you know, baseball players.
With the news tonight that the Red Sox have signed Garrett Crochet to six-year $170 million contract extension, we now know that the story of the 2025 season won’t be one of fretting over unspent money. We don’t have to spend the next six months debating opt-outs and contract terms and compensation picks. We can just watch Garrett Crochet and let the story of the season unfold.
The best thing about the Red Sox extending Garrett Crochet is that we don’t have to care about the Red Sox extending Garrett Crochet anymore.
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* (Until, you know, he blows out his elbow, falls of a bike, and busts a TV, in which case the extension will then become the only thing we care about again. But forget about that. Don’t think about that. Seriously, who would even bring that up? Why are you still reading this? Go to bed.)