Garrett Crochet had just helped lead his Red Sox to a 3-2 win over the Brewers Tuesday night at Fenway Park when the ace was asked what life had been like waiting for his start while living through the losses, the weather, and, of course, the “Sell the team!” chants that had seemingly punctuated an awkward start to the season.
“I’ve heard it before, quite frankly. You know, it’s ….”
The pitcher paused for five seconds before getting into baseball-specific items that encompassed the realities for both him and his team, not returning to exactly what he had been referencing.
A little time later, after the meeting with the media, Crochet stood near his locker and elaborated on that seemingly innocuous sentence.
As it turned out, what the starter was starting to reference was an existence very few, if any, members of this year’s Red Sox team had experienced, that of playing a baseball game with the home fans showering their club with those three words: “Sell the team!”
“Not a ton have,” said Crochet when identifying players who have lived that life.
But for the Sox pitcher, been there, done that.
Crochet lived such an existence while playing for the White Sox in each of his big-league seasons until he was traded to Boston prior to 2025. Those fans at Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago weren’t shy about routinely issuing the same “Sell the team!” chant heard at Fenway in recent days, with their ire directed at White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf.
The pitcher has come to fully understand the entire dynamic.
“It’s weird because regardless of how you feel about the ownership group, the chants always come with you guys make an error, you guys walk a run in, you guys strike out with the bases loaded. They are (expletive) on us, but not saying it. It’s weird,” Crochet told WEEI.com. “It’s just passion, at the end of the day. We know when we’re doing bad. … I think it’s fair to want more and want us to get the job done and just play clean baseball. I don’t think that’s asking a lot of us to play clean baseball.”
Has Crochet tried to explain the impetus for such a chant to players who might be distracted by the out-of-the-ordinary fan reaction?
“I feel like it’s fairly intuitive. It’s not John (Henry) losing the games. It’s not (Craig) Breslow losing the games,” he explained.
"We feel good. We feel united. It’s just doing the job. I feel like we hit the nail a ton about how the WBC didn’t give us the chance to mesh. That’s kind of every team. WBC or not, when there are a couple of new players in the locker room, you need to win the one-run games and just get the ball rolling any way you can to know this group can do it.”
Crochet’s theory on how such a chant is born, and why it sometimes gains steam, was proven to be spot-on during the latest Fenway experience. Unlike Monday, when the fans’ reaction was somewhat constant throughout another loss, the hope that came with a game-winning, three-run, six-inning put the routine on the back burner.
Doing well will do that.
It’s a lesson Crochet has learned plenty of times, both in Chicago and now in his new home.
“Obviously, we know the caliber of players we have. We’ve just never done it together,” he said. “That’s kind of how it was last year. It was kind of like that last year until we found this is how we win.”
For at least one night, they found their win and lost the chants.
And it was all in large part to the guy who has experienced it all: Stopping losing streaks and silencing all of those three-word declarations.
“That’s why we call him Beast. He’s our ace,” Trevor Story said of Crochet, who allowed just two runs over six innings. “He went out there and did what he always does and set the tone from pitch one, attacking. And he stopped it, right where we needed to stop it. We needed this win tonight and we got it, thanks to Beast.”
