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…