Giants’ Crawford set to hit another milestone even Posey, Belt won’t reach
Few Giants players know the organization’s history as well as Brandon Crawford, who grew up attending games at Candlestick Park and patterning his shortstop play from watching Royce Clayton and Rich Aurilia.
As a Little Leaguer, Crawford heard stories about shortstops of the past such as Chris Speier, Johnnie LeMaster and José Uribe, hoping one day to follow in their orange and black footsteps.
As the 34-year-old enters the final season of a six-year contract extension he signed with San Francisco in November 2015, there’s another former Giants shortstop who keeps popping up in conversations: Travis Jackson.
“I never really got a chance to watch him play,” Crawford said with a laugh. “I know he was with the Giants for a long time and was a really good player.”
Jackson’s last game with the New York Giants took place in 1936, more than 50 years before Crawford was born. Despite the 75-year gap between their playing days, Jackson and Crawford have been connected in Giants history because the Hall of Famer holds the only franchise records at the shortstop position Crawford hasn’t broken.
“I started to hear (Jackson’s name) a lot more in the last couple of years just because he played for the Giants for a long time and was a shortstop,” Crawford said. “So obviously I’m in that company.”
When the Giants take the field Thursday in Seattle, Crawford is expecting to start his 10th consecutive Opening Day game. He’ll break a tie with Jackson for the most Opening Day starts at shortstop in franchise history, taking possession of another record that once belonged to the former New York Giants icon.
Assuming Buster Posey and Brandon Belt make their 10th career Opening Day starts against the Mariners, the trio will join eight of the other most accomplished players in franchise history to cross that threshold.
Crawford, however, will join an even more exclusive club after Posey and Belt were not included on the Giants’ 2020 Opening Day roster. Along with Willie Mays, Barry Bonds and Robby Thompson, Crawford would become just the fourth player in Giants history to start 10 straight Opening Day ballgames.
“It’s not something I ever really thought about,” Crawford admitted this week. “That dream as a little kid of playing shortstop for the Giants, I never thought about how long I was going to be able to do it or you know if it would ever really even be a possibility. It’s a huge honor. I think getting any Opening Day start is a huge honor, but 10 in a row is pretty special.”
Since Crawford debuted in 2011, the Giants have made modest attempts to draft promising young shortstop prospects or sign international free agents who might one day supplant him as a starter. Two frontoffice regimes have worked to build depth behind Crawford, but neither has been successful.
Over the last nine seasons, Crawford has played at least 88% of the Giants’ games at shortstop each year, winning a Silver Slugger Award, making two All-Star teams and earning three Gold Glove Awards. The list of players who have backed him up is a who’s who of fringe major leaguers ranging from Kelby Tomlinson and Ehire Adrianza to Alen Hanson and utility men like Eduardo Núñez.
As the Giants prepare for the 2021 season, not much has changed.
President of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi has assembled a shortstop depth chart that features the team’s primary center fielder, Mauricio Dubón, as Crawford’s top backup. While Crawford obviously never had the chance to play alongside Clayton or Aurilia, Dubón, who attended high school in Sacramento, became a Giants fan in part because he loved watching Crawford dazzle at the shortstop position.
“He’s been teaching me a lot since day one,” Dubón said earlier this spring. “Every day we take groundballs, there’s something I’ll ask him and it’s crazy having his perspective and being so close to him. He’s a Gold Glover and there’s a reason why he is. He puts a lot of work in his craft.”
Crawford has faced doubt at every stage of his career, from the earliest days when there were concerns over his ability to hit enough to stay in the lineup to recent questions over whether he’s taken a step backward on defense. When the Giants started to platoon Crawford at the beginning of the 2020 season, a new staff led by first-year manager Gabe Kapler saw what a stabilizing presence the shortstop offers the team.
With Crawford out of the lineup, the Giants’ defense looked lost. With Crawford at his usual post, the infield immediately improved.
“Craw is an important piece for both our infield unit and our team defense as a whole,” bench coach Kai Correa said this week. “His elite defensive skill set, superb instincts, situational awareness and familiarity with the league have made him uniquely equipped to stabilize the Giants’ defense for nearly a decade, as names and faces have changed beside him.”
Since the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, Crawford is one of 11 players with 1,000 games played, 100 home runs, 200 doubles and 500 RBIs for the franchise. Along with Mays, Bonds, Posey, Will Clark and J.T. Snow, he’s one of six to hit all of those thresholds at the plate while also winning a Gold Glove Award.
With Elvis Andrus moving from the Rangers to the A’s after 12 straight years as Texas’ starting shortstop, Crawford is also slated to extend the longest active stretch of Opening Day starts for any team at the shortstop position.