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Boston’s ace isn’t just hurt — he’s stacking diagnoses, and that’s a five-alarm problem
The Red Sox were already holding their breath over Garrett Crochet and his pitching shoulder. Now they’ve got a second line item on the injury report: a low-grade lat strain, confirmed by MRI after Crochet felt tightness in his side while throwing batting practice late last week, according to ESPN. Interim manager Chad Tracy broke the news after Tuesday’s game, and while he tried to frame the lat finding as minor, the bigger story here is unmistakable — Boston’s ace is running out of clean body parts, and the season is slipping away.
Two injuries, zero clarity on a return date
Here’s what makes this genuinely alarming: Crochet was already on the shelf for shoulder inflammation when the lat issue surfaced. He wasn’t in a game rehabbing under load. He was throwing batting practice — one of the most controlled environments in baseball — and still couldn’t get through it cleanly. That tells you the body isn’t ready, regardless of how the MRI language gets softened. Tracy’s framing — that Crochet can resume throwing once he’s asymptomatic — is a reasonable medical answer, but it’s not a timetable. “Asymptomatic” is a moving target when you’re managing two separate issues simultaneously.
The counterargument is that “low-grade” is doing real work here. Lat strains exist on a spectrum, and a truly minor strain in a pitcher who was otherwise progressing could resolve in a matter of weeks without setting the clock all the way back to zero. That’s the optimistic read, and it’s not crazy. But it requires believing that the shoulder — the original problem — was actually trending toward health before the lat flared. There’s no public evidence that was the case.
The cruel context of a down year on top of bad luck
This injury mess lands on top of an already rough 2026 for Crochet. According to ESPN, he was placed on the 15-day injured list on April 29 after struggling to a 3-3 record and a 6.30 ERA — a jarring drop from the 18-5, 2.59 ERA campaign he put together in 2025. The Red Sox bet heavily on Crochet being their anchor, and right now they’re getting neither the performance nor the availability. Two injury designations, a bloated ERA before he even went down, and an “asymptomatic” precondition standing between him and a mound — that’s not a rotation cornerstone. That’s a question mark the size of Fenway’s Green Monster.
Boston needs to be honest with itself: there is no reliable Crochet return window right now. Planning around him is guesswork. The front office and coaching staff have to treat this rotation as a Crochet-free unit for the foreseeable future and build accordingly — because waiting on a pitcher managing overlapping injuries to heal on a convenient schedule is how franchises waste summers.
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