SAN FRANCISCO — Brandon Crawford stood on the field after Sunday’s 5-2 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, looked around at the crowd and addressed the fans.
“From the grand slam in Milwaukee to the World Series wins to today, you guys always showed me love. My family and I appreciated so much. You guys are the best,” he said.
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He was telling the story of his career. From the first hit to the World Series championships to that moment where his baseball career is uncertain and he’s addressing an Oracle Park crowd. Those are the bookends of a long, successful career. Maybe Crawford will play again, and maybe he won’t. He told reporters after the game that he typically needs a month to evaluate his plans for the future.
That’s the accurate timeline, alright. It starts with an unlikely grand slam. It progresses into some unlikely championships and some of the best times a fan base can ever enjoy. What an outstanding career. What a series of contributions for a very grateful franchise and fan base.
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That doesn’t quite describe the perfection of Crawford’s San Francisco Giants career, though. No, to understand the perfection of Brandon Crawford’s career, you have to go back even further. Way before a rookie hit a grand slam for his first major-league hit, there was an adorable little fella in a local newspaper.
To describe the perfection of Crawford’s Giants career, you have to study Li’l Glum Crawford.
In 1992, the “San Francisco Chronicle” sent photographer Tom Levy to Candlestick Park to cover what was supposed to be the last Giants game in San Francisco history. They were gone, signed, sealed and delivered to Tampa, who had a fancy new “domed” ballpark that would surely stand the test of time. Levy snapped a picture of a 5-year-old kid with chocolate malt on his face. He was next to a sign that read, “Mr. White: Do what’s right! Keep Giants in SF.” The kid looked glum. And for good reason.
Brandon Crawford as kid at Candlestick. pic.twitter.com/loxWAwPH7f
— Batting Stance Guy (@BattingStanceG) October 6, 2016
The situational awareness of most 5-year-olds is debatable, but they half-understand the concept of “gone forever.” The Giants were going to go away forever. Giants games are where he got to chew on the tiny wooden spoon that came with the chocolate malt. It’s where the baseball players from his cards came to life. It was the baseball-god equivalent of Jack Handey’s trip to Disneyland, a burned-down warehouse where the happiest place on earth was supposed to be.
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The perfection of Crawford’s Giants career starts with him being at the nexus of Giants and no Giants. There’s only one player who could have looked around Oracle Park and understood how awesome and improbable it all was. That one player is Li’l Glum Crawford, all grown up. He knows instinctively that San Francisco baseball didn’t have to keep happening. But it did.
Now look at the picture again, and realize it’s a kid who wants to be a baseball player when he grows up. Of course he does. We all did. I was the best player on the 1982 Mustangs, but it became clear shortly after that I wasn’t going to be a baseball player when I grew up. (Had the talent, decided to be a writer, long story.)
It’s one thing to want to be a baseball player, though, and it’s another to get a chance to play for the team you grew up with. There are long odds to play NCAA Division I baseball, and there are long odds to get drafted, and there are long odds to reach Double A, and there are long odds after that, et cetera, et cetera. Once you finally reach the majors, that lone baby turtle has to move from egg to ocean without getting eaten, even to get a single plate appearance. There are never guarantees that you’ll ever play for your team because there are never guarantees that you’ll get to play for any team.
But there are definitely no guarantees that you’ll get to play for your team. In 2008, the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted a shortstop three picks ahead of the Giants’ selection of Crawford, except they went with Chase d’Arnaud. If one of their area scouts was a little bit louder about the soft hands and rocket arm of that kid at UCLA, that picture from the Chronicle is a curiosity and nothing more. Maybe there would have been some additional irony to mine when someone found the picture and realized that Li’l Glum Crawford grew up to be the player who hit the grand slam against the Giants in the 2014 NL Wild Card Game.
Crawford would have been more than fine with that career, I’m sure. He would have been a big leaguer and a successful one, which is what he worked toward his whole life to that point. Whichever team drafted him, it would have worked out. We’re all just corks bobbing on the ocean, trying to control only what we can control.
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Crawford was drafted by the Giants. They passed him by several times, convinced that Conor Gillaspie and Roger Kieschnick had a better chance to be everyday players, but they eventually took him in the fourth round, and it was the perfect situation in multiple ways. His family could watch him regularly, he was with an organization that had an acute need and the resources to help him develop. He joined an organization that he watched growing up. He knew what those tiny wooden spoons tasted like. He was on the Giants now.
Except, he wasn’t exactly on the Giants, not yet. He had to grind his way through some offensive struggles in the minor leagues. The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly talked with Brian Sabean earlier this week about Crawford, and here’s what he said:
I don’t know that I remember in (my) two organizations a guy who developed as much at the major-league level with the bat and became such a contributor, especially at that demanding position. He had a little bit of a blind spot with the fastball up. He got disciplined enough to lay off that pitch. He put a lot of work in. It was the type of offense where we didn’t live or die with one or two guys. We needed contributions from everybody. He pulled his own weight and the rest is history. It’s amazing to see that he lived out his childhood dream.
The perfect baseball career doesn’t have to be so arduous. You can be on the cover of Sports Illustrated at 15 years old, with an article titled “Baseball’s LeBron,” win the Rookie of the Year a couple of years after that, then win an MVP shortly after that. You can slug your way to the Hall of Fame without ever remembering a time when you weren’t slugging your way to the Hall of Fame. Bryce Harper is having a perfect baseball career, of sorts.
But give me the struggle, the moments of doubt, the perseverance, the skepticism. Crawford was an all-glove, no-bat player, a coin flip with Ehire Adrianza when it came to future contributions at the position. All the Giants wanted was for him to be better at hitting baseballs than Neifi Pérez or Rey Sánchez had been. But if he couldn’t hit that much, they’d be fine with it, as long as he picked it as well as they did.
Crawford learned to hit in the big leagues. He played just 29 games in Triple A, and he wasn’t that far removed from a discouraging .258/.294/.365 season in Double A, but he gradually got better and better, eventually winning a Silver Slugger and hitting 20-plus homers twice. It’s easy to overlook that from the future, where we know how everything worked out, but don’t take this development path for granted. If you’ve ever thought, “Boy, it sure would be cool if Tyler Rogers could throw 95,” then you know what it’s like to suddenly have Crawford helping a major-league lineup with his power. It seemed like an unrealistic-but-fun alternate reality. Then it happened.
So not only was Crawford playing for the only team he cared about for most of his life — a team that shouldn’t have even still been in San Francisco — but he was making wildly exciting defensive plays, and he was hitting baseballs hard, which was the thing that nobody expected him to do. That’s a career that’s already approaching perfection, in its own way. If you’re uneasy with the idea of “perfection,” then start talking percentiles. How many of the kids who dream of hitting baseballs hard for the only team they ever cared care about get to do that? Maybe .0001 percent. Crawford did it.
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Then there’s the success. Beyond the four Gold Gloves and All-Star appearances. We’re talking about championship success. There are 14 numbers that have been retired by the Giants in franchise history. You can see them on the other side of the left-field foul pole. Those are 14 players who made everlasting contributions to Giants baseball and the sport in general. Those are the inner-circle legends. Not a single one of them was a part of a championship Giants team in San Francisco. That’s because baseball teams in San Francisco didn’t win championships. Not until Crawford was in the organization.
While the first one happened with Crawford still in the minors, he still helped the Giants win two championships. He was a part of one of the greatest defensive plays in postseason history. He hit a grand slam earlier that postseason that’s as memorable for the audio as the visual.
There aren’t multiple championships without Crawford. All of this puts his career on the short list of fairytale careers in any sport. After the game, Crawford said, “A dream come true doesn’t even cover it,” and that’s right. This doesn’t happen in sports. Not like this.
A perfect career comes with your kids on the field, throwing the first pitch of the game.
What else would you expect from the Crawford crew 🤗 pic.twitter.com/98oxNGB0cz
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) October 1, 2023
The backflips will get the headlines, and rightfully so, but I’m just as impressed that his second-youngest kid knew to jump over the foul line on his way to the mound. That’s a healthy respect for the baseball gods at a young age.
OK, fine, it wasn’t a literally perfect career. Crawford began his career with a .584 OPS in 2011, and he might have ended it with a .587 OPS in 2023. If Crawford could have added a couple hundred points to either one of those seasons, it would have been a little close to actual perfection. There was some controversy in the later years.
The final game itself wasn’t pretty, either. The Giants lost Sunday, and it never felt close. They had three or four hits, I can’t remember exactly how many, and neither can you. Kyle Harrison threw five slightly stressful no-hit innings, and the first Dodgers hit came on a sharp liner in the sixth inning that just went under the glove of a diving Crawford. It was 102.5 mph off the bat, so the takeaway isn’t that a younger Crawford gets to that ball. It’s that you’ll rarely get a chance to see another shortstop who made you think he had a chance to get to it. Even now, at the backend of his career, it looked like he had a shot on a baseball that shouldn’t be turned into an out.
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The end of the story wasn’t perfect because nothing really is. Crawford didn’t hit a game-winning Roy Hobbsian home run in the ninth inning, as the lights exploded around him, which would have been weird during a day game. He didn’t get a chance to make a signature turn on a double play or range deep into left field for an absurd over-the-shoulder catch. His at-bats were rough, even as the crowd was primed to go bananas.
After the game was over, there was a metaphor. Lou Seal was standing on home plate and pumping T-shirts into the crowd with an air gun, with fans scrambling after the ones that came their way. One of them wasn’t rolled tightly enough, though, so it unfurled at its zenith and floated harmlessly down, where it brought joy to absolutely no one. That’s one of the last things that happened at Oracle Park this season.
During the game, there was another metaphor. Right before the ninth inning was going to begin, Crawford came out of the game.
A moment for Brandon Crawford. pic.twitter.com/Mgph7yxNGc
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) October 1, 2023
While all of that was going on, Marco Luciano jogged out to take Crawford’s place at shortstop. It was an honest-to-goodness changing of the guard. Now there’s a metaphor. The future’s bright in a lot of ways.
It’s incredibly unlikely that Luciano will have the same kind of hyper-specifically perfect career, though, because nobody will. Brandon Crawford did everything that a baseball player could ever want to do, and he did it in a spectacularly storybook fashion, for the team he grew up watching, the team he was going to lose forever but ended up becoming intertwined with forever.
It wasn’t a perfect career, but it’s as close as anyone is going to get with any team. Brandon Crawford was the Giants for 13 seasons, and the Giants will be Crawford for longer than that.
What an absolute gift that he got to have that career, and what an absolute gift we got to watch it. What an absolute gift that he got to live it.
(Photo of Brandon Crawford tipping his hat to the crowd: John Hefti / Associated Press)
