As Brandon Crawford sipped an iced latte, the setting and the coincidence weren’t lost on him.
Two years ago, he sat on this very same patio at this very same Starbucks location in North Scottsdale when he met newly hired Giants manager Gabe Kapler for the first time. The conversation involved more than introductions and pleasantries. There was room for an explanation, too.
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Kapler had traveled to Arizona after attending the 2019 winter meetings, where in one of his media sessions, he remarked that Crawford had been “at times a plus defender up the middle.” It was an uncharitable description for a three-time Gold Glove award winner, especially one whose pride and belief did not match his declining metrics.
In that initial coffee meeting, more than the milk was steamed.
“I might have mentioned a few things,” said Crawford, “and there were a few things he wanted to tell me. It was a good talk.”
The relationship didn’t begin with the strongest of foundations, but trust was infused over time. Crawford stayed open-minded to learning from Kapler and his young, innovative and high-volume coaching staff. Kapler and his coaches stayed open-minded to the possibility that a 32-year-old legacy player coming off the worst season in his career still had some ceiling remaining in his major-league development.
It culminated in not merely a resurgent 2021 season but the best of Crawford’s career, which included his fourth Gold Glove (and his first since 2017) when Rawlings announced its annual winners on Sunday. Crawford was chosen ahead of the Mets’ Francisco Lindor and the Pirates’ Kevin Newman. He joined first baseman J.T. Snow, left fielder Barry Bonds and center fielder Willie Mays as the only four-time Gold Glove winners in Giants history.
His defensive value paired with his best season at the plate should merit Crawford significant MVP consideration. Although he’s expected to finish behind players with flashier offensive numbers such as Bryce Harper and Juan Soto, a case can be made that Crawford, the best player on a Giants team that led the NL with a franchise-record 107 victories, had the best overall season.
It’s a season that ended abruptly with a blown checked-swing appeal call on Wilmer Flores in the ninth inning of a one-run loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the NL Division Series. Crawford has not publicly addressed that night, or his season in total. He was too shocked at the way it ended, too much in disbelief that the season was over, and too preoccupied with saying farewell to longtime teammates that he might never play alongside again. He wasn’t among the Giants who went to the interview room or met reporters in the dugout.
So that’s why, on a trip last week to cover the Arizona Fall League, I asked if Crawford would like to meet for coffee. He knew just the place to have a chat.
You began this season hitting eighth, wondering if you’d be platooned and entering the final year of your contract. You finished it as the best player on a 107-win team that won the NL West and you’ve got a two-year extension as a result. What are your overall emotions behind just how everything played out for you?
I mean, other than winning a World Series, it went about as perfect as I could have planned it. Entering the season, I wanted to be a Giant for my whole career, and it looks like I’ll be able to with the two-year extension. And then the team playing beyond anybody’s expectations, I mean, honestly, probably even our own — I don’t think in spring training we were thinking we’re gonna set franchise records …
I don’t think the Dodgers expected to win 106 or 107 games. Nobody does.
Right, and we had higher expectations than most, but not anything like that. To do that and win the division that nobody had us winning, you can’t play it out much better than that, other than winning the World Series.
Your captain, Brandon Belt, has said multiple times that it was the best clubhouse he’d ever been a part of. Did you feel that way too?
I mean, we’ve had some really good clubhouses. It’s hard to compare one against the other, but there were no issues with anybody. There weren’t any guys that we had to kind of just deal with, you know? Or like, ‘Yeah, our clubhouse is great except for this guy.’ It was just a bunch of good guys who all had the same goal. We were just out there to beat whoever we’re playing that night. We weren’t worried about platoons or getting pinch-hit for or anything like that. And that can be hard for some guys. I know it was hard for me, at least at the start of 2020. There just weren’t any egos. We all bought into the common goal.
You batted in the lineup everywhere from third to eighth. It’s wild to think you hit eighth and you’re an MVP candidate. But you had your most consistent year and the team mirrored that. The Giants didn’t have a month with a winning percentage below .600. Did you ever see that coming?
That’s why we’re able to win so many games. We didn’t have any super hot stretches and then a cold stretch. We were just consistently good all year. To me, that proves even more than the total number of wins that we were a really good team. I think a great team does it consistently all season.
A team might get most of its production out of a couple of star players, but no matter how good anyone is, everyone goes through individual slumps. Perhaps the Giants were slump-proof because they received production from everyone.
And we’ve seen that with the Giants in a bunch of years. But I think we were able to not only use a bunch of different players, but win with different parts of the game. We won with really good pitching some days. Some games, our offense had to carry us. We were able to use all parts of our team to win so many games.
The team really did go as you went, though. You hit .335 with a .994 OPS in wins and .215 with a .673 OPS in losses.
Good thing we won a lot of games!
Even going back to how the team improved in 2020’s pandemic-shortened season, has this time with this front office and coaching staff caused you to rethink what goes into building a winning team?
I just think there was growth from a lot of different parts of this team. Someone like me, yeah, I can say that I see the value in using pinch hitters or the bullpen earlier than a traditional team would. And then from a management side, there was a lot of growth as well. I think they learned to see the value of veteran presence and trusting your guys to go out there and perform. There was growth on both ends there. It’s trusting from a management side that there are players who have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing out there. And having that buy-in made a big difference.
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It’s interesting you say that, because we’ve talked a lot about the importance of veteran players buying into the coaching staff. But it really did go both ways, didn’t it?
It was both ways. Kap and I have talked a lot the last couple years about a bunch of different stuff — in-game stuff, lineup stuff. A decent amount of it was about me, obviously, from last year. But he’d also ask my opinion on certain things. I’ve given plenty of feedback and it was a two-way street. We bought into their way of thinking or creating a lineup or pinch hitters and bullpen usage. But they also bought in on some of the things we mentioned to him, whether that was having a little more trust in the starting pitcher, or how one or two at-bats against a left-handed pitcher might not matter as much because you’re in the rhythm of the game, and that might cause you to have a really good third or fourth at-bat late in the game. So eyes were opened on both sides. There are always changes going on in the game and I think Kap did a really good job of managing our whole team this year.
That didn’t happen right away, did it?
Well, 2020 was a weird year. I didn’t know if it was just the shortened season for why Kap wouldn’t budge on certain things. I wasn’t sure how it would go (in 2021). But this year, yeah, he gave us a longer leash. They combined their thinking with our thinking. They made it a special combination.
Why do you think you were able to be so consistent at the plate?
My swing is night-and-day different and better than it was before. I was in a better position to do damage than I ever have been in my career. And approach always has something to do with it. I was able to make constant changes with help from our hitting guys, whether it was pitches to look for or what a pitcher will do to attack me — just better scouting reports than we had in the past. And it was having an idea of how my swing feels on a given day, and knowing myself. It’s, ‘What can I try to do against this pitcher?’ Because there was a stretch after the All-Star break when I’d been on the IL with the oblique and I didn’t hit a homer for a month. But I hit .370 or something at the same time. At that time, I wasn’t going to necessarily hit the ball over the fence. So I was doing a really good job hitting soft liners to left or ground balls against the shift. So I wasn’t ever worried about getting into a two-strike count because I could go back to that swing that had been working for me.
And you even bunted one off the third-base bag.
That was against the Dodgers. And that’s a good example, actually. My approach there was, ‘I’ve faced this guy one time, he has a decent slider, we’re in the shadows because it’s an ESPN (afternoon) game, they were shifted, I’m not seeing the ball great. I might as well try to bunt.’ I knew even with my swing really good, I’m probably not going to do damage here so I’ll get on base any way I can.
So many of your offensive metrics reflect the massive improvement in your ability to do damage at the plate. Your 43.3 percent hard-hit rate and 11.5 percent barrel rate were the highest of your career. So was your 10.2 percent walk rate. Your 19.1 percent strikeout rate was your best since 2016. You hit .353 with runners in scoring position. I expected to see a huge improvement in your chase rate, but it was 27.9 percent — not drastically better than your 29.4 percent career rate. There was a significant change in your chase contact percentage, however. It’s in the mid-40 percent range over the last two seasons. It was nearer to 60 percent in your career prior to that. So when you chased, you swung through pitches instead of putting them in play. And you clearly made less weak contact as a result. Was that a conscious change?
In 2019, I don’t know those numbers off the top of my head, but there was a ton of soft contact — a lot of ground outs to second, a lot of ground outs to first. Probably mostly on offspeed. But my swing was so rotational and across in 2019, and probably even before that. I mean, it was the worst year of my career. It’s easy to pick on. I would be on time with the fastball and I’d still ground out to second and it was like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ I couldn’t figure it out. So that’s definitely a reason why I hit the ball harder this year. Even when I’d chase, I didn’t make contact so I still had two more pitches.
Were you less worried about covering the plate because you were looking in specific areas of the strike zone to do damage?
Probably. And some of it is pitchers are better, also. Pitchers have stuff they haven’t had in the past. You see a Blake Treinen slider down and in and it’s like, ‘I’m glad I didn’t make contact with that. I wouldn’t have done anything with that pitch and now I get another one.’ But it’s also going up there with an attitude like, ‘I’m going to do some damage.’ I could get a borderline pitch where I started my swing, I committed too early, and so you just continue with the swing. Don’t worry about making contact. That’s really hard to do sometimes.
You just touched on it. You and Buster Posey, especially, had the seasons you had in your mid-30s all in the context of facing pitching that is probably the best it’s ever been. And that might be the most impressive part.
That’s the biggest change from early in my career till now. The pitching is so much better than it was before. Earlier in my career, pitchers might have done a better job locating their stuff, but you could still make contact. It’s a 91-mph sinker and it’s a good pitch when they hit the corner, but you can still make contact. Now it’s 100-plus and ‘Here you go, try that.’ And guys are throwing more offspeed than ever before, along with that.
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Do you follow the Pitching Ninja on Twitter?
I don’t follow him. I don’t like seeing stuff like that. I’ve seen it a few times, but hitting is hard enough already. (laughs) I don’t need to go into the box thinking about that.
Whenever we talk about the Giants’ hitting coaches from this past season, it’s always all three of them: Donnie Ecker, Justin Viele and Dustin Lind. You almost never hear one of them mentioned without the others. Out of them, who gave you the most ideas or was the biggest architect in your swing changes?
They did such a good job over the last couple years of coming together with ideas and solutions for different guys and what they needed at the time. There wasn’t ever a time when we were working in the cage and one of them would say, ‘Hey, I think this.’ It was always, ‘We think that this drill will work.’ Or, ‘We were talking and maybe try this.’ So it’s hard to say exactly who had the most influence on the changes I made because they all worked together so well. I really don’t know who the mastermind was.
Now Donnie Ecker is headed to Texas to be the Rangers’ bench coach and offensive coordinator. Did you anticipate it would be tough to retain him after the year the Giants had?
I didn’t really think about it because I figured we had such a good thing going, why would anyone want to leave? But it’s a step up for him if he ever wants to manage. I’m happy for him but I’m sad he’s leaving. I worked with him a lot and obviously he’s made us a better team.
Reflecting on your defensive season, in what areas were you most improved? What stands out as things you’re especially pleased with or proud of?
It was probably the most consistent year I had defensively, just making the plays I should be making. And it’s knowing myself. I’m not going to dive for a ball that I don’t need to anymore. That’s just going to cause things to hurt at this point. A ball in the 6-hole with Trea Turner running, unless I’m trying to save a run, there’s no point. Part of that is knowing that staying healthier will help my defense. If my body is feeling good, I know I’ll be able to make plays.
Did you think it would be possible to have one of your best defensive seasons as a 34-year-old when you’re four years removed from your last Gold Glove?
I did, yeah. Because I personally thought there are some years where I made a few more errors than I should have. But I always thought I was still pretty good defensively. I never lacked confidence no matter what the metrics said. I still thought I played a pretty good shortstop. So yeah, I had faith I could do it again. And I think a lot of it was staying healthy. I took fewer ground balls in pregame work and BP than I ever have. Honestly, I think that helped. We’d take our ground balls before BP started so they were concentrated ground balls. We didn’t have to worry about the hitter in the cage or people running around the field. You could do your work in a concentrated way and then get off your legs a little bit more. That paid off.
Were there any other ideas that this coaching staff had enhanced your defensive game?
Maybe I had a bit more faith in the shift than I had before. Now it seems like every left-handed hitter gets shifted at some point in his at-bat. I don’t trust it that much, but maybe a little more than I did before. And (bench coach) Kai (Correa) did a great job letting me go off what I was seeing, whether it was something from my experience in the past against certain guys or something I was seeing in the game, and allowing me to go off of our card when I felt like it.
Game 5 ended so abruptly. Did you have a hard time accepting the season was over? It felt like the buzz in the ballpark was, ‘That’s it? It’s all over? Really?’
That’s exactly how I felt and other guys I talked to felt the same way. Like, ‘That doesn’t seem like it should be the end of our season. What time is the game tomorrow?’ That’s partially why it took so long for me to get home after the game. I was just sitting there, like, no way is our season over. It seems way too early. Part of that is we don’t have a whole lot of experience losing in the playoffs. But also, I felt like we had played the Dodgers so tough and done so well. We’d beaten them so many times that it felt like it was over too quick. We maybe needed a couple more games. In a seven-game series, who knows what was going to happen? Maybe it was going to come down to the last inning. I guess we just felt like it was going to be a break for us, not for them. So it was more feeling shocked, surprised, disappointed. I think after our regular season, we all had the confidence we could win the World Series. So you’re thinking about that and you’re also hanging out with some of the guys you don’t know if you’ll get to play with again, including a couple guys I played with a long time.
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Is it weird to think that you and Brandon Belt might not be together next year?
That’s definitely one of the guys I was talking about. Yeah. He’s one guy I would obviously love to have back. We’ve played together for so long. He’s not just a teammate. He’s a friend.
I wouldn’t have predicted this, but it seemed like the Giants missed Belt following his fractured thumb even more than the Dodgers missed Max Muncy in the NLDS.
I think so too. As good as our depth was, you couldn’t replace Belt on both sides of the ball, especially with how hot he was at the end of the year. We all knew he had that potential for a long time. He’d just always get hurt. He’s been streaky where his home runs come in bunches. But this year, whenever he was healthy, he was a huge threat. Which … maybe he shouldn’t have bunted in Colorado.
You finished 12th in the MVP balloting in 2016, which is the only year that you received votes. You’re certain to finish a whole lot higher this year. What are your expectations?
My chances to win? They’re pretty low. There were some really, really good players in the National League this year. It’s a tougher and tougher award to win every year. If you look at some of the guys who won in the past, my numbers stack up against them. But those numbers aren’t winning MVP awards now. For the most part, it’s an offensive award.
Should it be?
I don’t think so, no. And that’s not just because it would improve my chances. I just think it should be an overall player award. I mean, I’m assuming Shohei Ohtani will win in the American League even though Vlad Guerrero’s numbers are ridiculous also. But he’s special because of how he pitched as well as how he hit. Pitching is different, obviously, than playing defense. But pitching is his defense.
It’s run prevention, basically.
Exactly. So in the National League, why wouldn’t defense be taken into consideration? Obviously you help your team win by producing runs. But you also help your team win by preventing runs. I’m not saying it should be an equal split. Somebody who’s really good on defense and doesn’t have great offensive numbers shouldn’t be in the running. But if someone has really good offensive numbers and also is helping their team win a lot of games on defense, they should be considered along with somebody who’s just putting up video games numbers offensively. And I’m not talking about anyone specifically at all, in any year.
And if you finish top-five?
I think that would be really cool. It would definitely be special and it’d be representative of this season. It’s pretty special to get MVP votes. I know even just getting a handful in 2016, I thought that was pretty cool.
(Photo: Harry How / Getty Images)
