Can Justin Crawford Get off the Ground, and Stay off the Ground?

I’m of the opinion that you usually don’t learn much from watching spring training. It’s glorified practice, with inconsistent quality of competition even before you consider the fact that some guys are going all-out while others are working on a specific issue rather than trying to win the game. This is especially true for position players who came into camp with at least an inside track on a starting job. It’s why I pay more attention to college baseball during February and March. Hell, the new season of Love Is Blind is out and I need to catch up so I can see if there are any ex-college ballplayers in the cast.

One exception to the rule that you don’t learn much from spring training: Justin Crawford.

The 22-year-old just missed our Top 100 Prospects list; he graded out as a 45+, while the global list only included players with a 50 FV or higher. Nevertheless, Crawford is going to be a vitally important player in the National League pennant race this season.

After a surprise run to the Fall Classic in 2022, the Phillies had kept the same core together ever since, and improved their regular-season record each year. But the postseason results had started heading in the wrong direction, and as the roster got older, the vibes were getting stale.

This was supposed to be an offseason of rejuvenation, but despite a flirtation with Bo Bichette, the Phillies really only held serve. Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto were retained, Nick Castellanos was replaced by Adolis García, and Matt Strahm replaced by Brad Keller. Ranger Suárez and Harrison Bader walked as free agents and were to be replaced internally by rookies: Andrew Painter and Crawford, respectively.

Back in October, I performed a postmortem on a 2025 Phillies team that certainly seemed good enough to win the World Series but got bounced in the first round for the second consecutive year. Only one team gets to win the World Series every year, so some of the things that sank the Phillies are outside the front office or coaching staff’s ability to control. You just have to cross your fingers and hope someone else knocks the Dodgers out, or that the wind blows your direction.

There were, however, fixable flaws in roster construction. Two in particular stood out: First, the total right-handed power void behind Bryce Harper and Schwarber, resulting from Alec Bohm’s being overmatched in a lineup position that should’ve been occupied by Castellanos. I don’t think they fixed that problem, but I’m also a major García skeptic, so maybe I’m wrong.

The other problem is the Phillies’ utter inability to rejuvenate the roster through internal promotions over the past four years. I don’t want to say they haven’t used their farm system, because they’ve traded from it liberally. The Phillies have two Top 100 Prospects this year, but they’ve traded two others (George Klassen and Eduardo Tait) to bolster the major league roster. That’s fine; that’s what prospects are there for.

But it also means they’ve gotten less major league production out of their own farm system than any other team in baseball. It’s Orion Kerkering and Johan Rojas, who’s a terrific defensive center fielder but hits like a pitcher from the 1990s. That’s not good enough while the rest of the core is old enough to get Homestar Runner references.

That flaw is getting fixed this year. Painter, the 27th-ranked prospect in baseball, and Crawford are part of the Opening Day plan, and Aidan Miller, the 2023 first-round pick and no. 13 overall prospect, could figure in the major league plan at some point this season.

The last rookie position player to start regularly for the Phillies was Rojas, who made 103 starts in center field in 2024. He posted a 66 wRC+ in 363 plate appearances; the standards for Crawford will be higher. Apart from Rojas, the Phillies haven’t started a rookie position player everyday since Bryson Stott in 2022.

The last 22-year-old position player to start regularly for the Phillies was Jimmy Rollins in 2001. Before him, Scott Rolen in 1997. You can get all the way back to Dick Allen, Johnny Callison, and Richie Ashburn without going outside the 10 most recent such players. It doesn’t happen often.

That’s a refreshing change, even if it is one made by necessity. Being the youngest Phillies regular since Rollins would be reason enough to follow Crawford closely, given that Rollins’ name is festooned all over the franchise record book.

But there are peculiarities specific to Crawford’s game that make him worthy of extra attention, on top of the normal questions, like can he adapt to major league pitching, and is he going to be a good defensive center fielder or is he just fast?

Some second-generation big leaguers have basically nothing in common with their fathers. (Cody Bellinger comes to mind here.) But if you predicted what the son of Carl Crawford would be like, you’d probably get pretty close to Justin: a left-handed-hitting outfielder with average-or-better contact skills and plus-plus speed.

At 6-foot-1, 175 pounds, Crawford fils is quite a bit leaner than his dad, who looked like he could steal 70 bases a year even if there were a cinder-block wall between first and second. But he’s so young he’ll probably put on some more muscle, and he’s plenty strong already. Eric Longenhagen flagged Crawford’s 46% HardHit rate in the minors and a maximum exit velo of 110 mph; just in terms of hitting the ball hard, that puts Crawford at or near major league average.

And the minor league results have been excellent. Starting with his first full professional season, 2023, Crawford has put up a wRC+ of 120 or better at every minor league stop, no matter how brief, and he’s posted stolen base totals in the 40s in every season of his career. Apart from an 18-game run in High-A two years ago, in which he batted .288, Crawford has also hit .300 or better everywhere he’s gone. In 2025, he spent the full season at Triple-A Lehigh Valley, and in 112 games he slashed .334/.411/.452, while nearly doubling his walk rate from 6.1% in Double-A to 11.5%.

I don’t care what your prospect pedigree is, that’s a great season for a 21-year-old in his first crack at the highest level of minor league baseball. Phillies president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski has said that Crawford would’ve made his major league debut last summer had the trade for Bader not eliminated a path to everyday playing time.

So how the hell is this not a Top 100 prospect? Eric actually spent a big part of Crawford’s blurb answering that obvious question. For all that monster batting average and hard contact, Crawford got a present 20, future 30 grade on his power tool. That’s because if you hit the ball hard in the air, it goes for extra bases, but if you hit the ball hard on the ground, it usually turns into an out. Sometimes two.

Crawford isn’t just a groundball hitter; his 59.4% groundball rate in 2025 was the lowest of his career. It also would’ve been the highest by any qualified hitter in the majors since 2023. By Eric’s explanation, it’s not really that Crawford is chopping down at the ball; the problem is that his swing takes a minute to get going, which leaves him late and swinging over the top of the baseball.

There are three possible outcomes here. The first: Crawford has actually gotten better at keeping the ball off the ground, believe it or not. In the low minors, he was hitting as many as five grounders for every fly ball. That ratio is now down to about three-to-one. Maybe that slow progression continues and he becomes a productive, if somewhat groundball-heavy hitter.

Tim Anderson produced 19.1 WAR and a 104 wRC+ over the first seven seasons of his career with a GB/FB ratio of 1.96 and a GB% of 52.0. He skirted the line of what’s survivable, and fell off a cliff in a hurry, but he also didn’t walk as much as Crawford does, or hit the ball as hard as Crawford has in the upper minors.

Outcome no. 2: Crawford encounters big league pitching for the first time, gets tied in knots, and turns into a frustrating amalgamation of Raimel Tapia and (to invoke another former Phillies shortstop) Wilson Valdez. The consequences of such an outcome I’ll leave to your imagination.

The third outcome: Crawford changes nothing and succeeds anyway. He’s got a weird offensive profile, but it’s not especially hard to understand. Except for one thing: He hasn’t gotten exposed yet. Every time he’s gone up the ladder, he’s thrived, culminating in the best season of his career at Lehigh Valley.

Is there a modern precedent for a hitter like this thriving in the majors? Just one, really: Christian Yelich. Yelich came up so long ago it’s easy to forget the baby-faced, rail-thin kid who debuted for the Marlins in 2023. That kid had a 4.58 GB/FB ratio as a rookie, and ran groundball rates in the 60s in each of his first three seasons in the big leagues. He was three years and more than 1,000 plate appearances into his career before he posted a double-digit home run season, and his first .200 ISO came in 2018, his MVP season with the Brewers. (And that with the aid of the late-2010s dynamite ball.)

Such an outcome, while possible, would require Crawford not only to hold his ground as he faces major league velocity for the first time, but also to get strong enough to hit the ball as hard as Yelich has throughout his career. It’s a tantalizing possibility, but a remote one.

So in this, his first camp as a projected big leaguer, Crawford will have to work with hitting coach Kevin Long to find a way to adapt without losing the contact skills that made him a first-round prospect in the first place. It’ll be a major challenge for both player and coaching staff, but it’s been four years since a Phillies rookie contributed regularly with the bat. Someone’s got to do it eventually.