Expect to see Quinn Mathews soon, and Crooks not far behind.
With a major league squad poised to be mediocre, it can be hard to drum up excitement for the upcoming season. What takes much less effort is getting excited for prospects, specifically prospects on the verge of making their MLB debut. Though I would consider one much closer to making his MLB debut than the other, the battery of Quinn Mathews and Jimmy Crooks III are easy to fantasize about for the future.
Mathews certainly makes an impression. He grew up wanting to be an investment banker, not a baseball player. He is really into crypto, wanting to put a lot of money into dogecoin, though his mom was able to curb those impulses. (“It was a short conversation” when he asked her)
“He’s a left-handed pitcher for a reason,” Crooks joked about Mathews being a little different.
He’s on the verge of the big leagues, because he is ultra competitive. The kind of competitiveness that will work when you’re a professional athlete and be less convenient when you’re doing anything else.
“That’s kind of my issue when I’m not playing games is that sometimes being a little too competitive can be a little taxing on the people around you just because you can’t really do anything for fun,” Mathews said.
Pro baseball was not really on his mind while attending Stanford. He grew up in a family that valued academics first, so that was a bigger priority in college than what his pro career might be. He thought he might get a good opportunity in the pros after a good junior season.
“I was basically the fireman out of the bullpen, winning a ton,” Mathews said. “This is as good as I’ll get. I’ll have a great opportunity in professional baseball. Professional baseball told me pretty politely ‘hey you’re not that good.’ Alright cool. My senior year I wasn’t even worried about pro ball, I was more worried about proving people wrong. I was so pissed off.”
Yes, he is the Michael Jordan “And I took that personally” type of athlete. He had a chip on his shoulder about all the teams that passed him (he was drafted in the 19th round). When he was drafted in the 4th round in 2023, he still had that chip because teams still passed him up. That’s the kind of competitive he is.
He had a great 2024, so you’d think the chip would be gone. No, he’s not happy about how his season ended.
“I didn’t end the season as well I thought I should have,” Mathews said. “Going into this offseason, it was a very fresh reminder. It wasn’t like it was an old, you know, bad month of May or bad month of June, it was September that I remembered about the season. When I think back on the season, it’s that last four games. It was a fresh reminder that I’m not as good as I think I am.”
Don’t worry about him losing that chip on his shoulder or that motivation, because we are dealing with the sport of baseball. He will make bad starts every year. He was asked if he felt validation for winning Minor League Pitcher of the Year.
“In my opinion as a pitcher and as a professional athlete, if you need validation from the outside, you’re probably going to struggle,” Mathews said. He later continued, “I had a lot of bad outings. It’s super cool that people are like you had a really good year. I’m like ‘I made 28 starts and at least 10 of them weren’t very good,’ so if I didn’t have that self-confidence, I think I would struggle more.”
In his first offseason, everything was geared towards Mathews gaining more velocity, which was a success.
“Last off-season approach was velocity-based, because that was the big knock on me for the longest period of time,” Mathews said. “I still don’t throw very hard, but I throw harder than I did.”
He doesn’t just want to just pitch better in September. This offseason is about being able to pitch into October.
“How do I get 7-8 more weeks out of my body?” he said.
Every time a reporter asked him what a court would call a leading question, Mathews would zag. When he was asked if pitching in big games helped him, he said the biggest game he pitched last year – his Low A debut – he sucked. He was asked if gaining velocity was his biggest improvement in his career. He doesn’t think so.
“It doesn’t allow you to be a great pitcher,” Mathews said. “You can go through the minor leagues at any team, any organization, from the lowest levels, there are guys throwing 100 mph. I’m not saying they won’t be great pitchers. Velocity’s really cool, it just buys you a little bit of grace, but it doesn’t make you a great pitcher. I think learning how to pitch has still probably been the biggest thing in my career through high school and college specifically.”
It’s an interesting dichotomy seeing Mathews both understand why he struggled in September but at the same time, those are the four starts that are fueling him. He knows he didn’t have his best stuff in September.
“The duration of the season kind of got to me in September I would say physically as well as mentally,” Mathews said. “I was asking my body to do things in September that it had done all year long and I just didn’t have that same kick.”
One of those things was his curveball stopped being an effective pitch. He realized that when someone hit a 400 foot homer off it. One of his focuses was getting back the shape of his curve.
“I don’t need it to be my best pitch, but I need it to be competitive and usable to get strikes, especially early in counts, so I don’t have to throw one of my better secondaries or even my fastball as often,” Mathews said. “You have an offering with a little more depth that can also help the fastball play off of it.”
His slider also changed midseason. This was a more pleasant change though. He went from a sweeping 7-8 inch break to a harder 4-5 inch break. The benefit was that the harder slider was a much tougher pitch to right-handed batters. This was not on purpose. His release axis had changed. It caused his slider to be somewhere between a slider and cutter.
“I’m trying to get it probably in between where it was at end of the year and at the beginning of the year,” Mathews said. “I do think the added velocity did help, because you can get in the hands of right-handed batters easier. But at the same time I don’t really mind the sweep as much – the 7-8 – against the left-handed hitters. So I probably prefer something in the middle of the two. At first it wasn’t intentional, but then I just kind of went with it because I was seeing so much success with it against the right-handed hitters with it.”
Last offseason was the first time Mathews was completely focused on baseball, which he actually thinks was part of why he was successful as much as, if not more than his added velocity.
“I got to go 100 percent in which I don’t know what value that really brings – it may be 0, it might just be the weight training, the velocity training – but I also think it could be 50-60-70 percent, because it let me go all-in on something I’ve never been all-in on,” Mathews said.
Mathews saw four levels last season, and actually made most of his starts in AA, which means even though he only made 9 starts there, his most frequent throwing partner was presumably Crooks. There was an instant connection.
“Jimmy is the man,” Mathews said. “I don’t want to rank them. But Jimmy is probably my top guy. Not even from the catching aspect, he’s obviously a great catcher, I don’t need to tell you guys that. The human being that he is, our personalities mesh extremely well. Those are the relationships that, especially as catcher and a pitcher, that sometimes you just don’t have it with guys. For whatever reason, Jimmy and I kind of hit it off from day one.”
One of those things you don’t really imagine when looking at game logs or box scores is the weirdness that comes when you get promoted to a new level and have to throw to a catcher you’ve never thrown to before.
“We got along really well,” Crooks said. “We kicked it off right from there, because it was a start day two days after that. So I got to learn a bunch about him, what he likes, what he doesn’t like. Just go through what his arsenal is, where he wants me set up, how are we gonna attack hitters. He kept it pretty simple for me, he made my job easy, I hope I made his job easy.”
Forming relationships with pitchers is an underappreciated job of a catcher, something that Crooks seems to value. It wasn’t his bat that he thought took the best step forward last year, but his catching.
“I really took pride in my catching,” Crooks said. “Getting along with every pitcher you that you can, being a leader of the team. You’re the only one who sees the field all the way through. You got to know where you place players and stuff like that.”
I won’t say he doesn’t value his bat, but it seems like he places a lot more importance with what he does defensively.
“If I do bad job at the plate, I’m not going to take that to catching, because catching’s really important,” Crooks said. “That’s something you can control. You’re controlling what you’re calling, you control how you’re handling your emotions. With the hitting side, you’re going to fail 70% of the time.”
One can’t ignore the fact that he had a 156 wRC+ last season with the bat. He does not overcomplicate his approach.
“Just keeping it simple, gap-to-gap, and I’ll run into a couple,” said Crooks.
Crooks played in 90 games last season, and in his last 46 games, he hit 10 of his 11 homers. I asked him if anything changed that caused his power to show up.
“I was hitting over .300 for the first half, but my hands were a little bit farther back and I wasn’t getting any separation, I was getting little singles and little duck fart hits over shortstops,” Crooks said. “Talked to my hitting coach, Casey Chenowith, we both talked about just moving my hands out in front of me and getting that big separation where I can start driving it to all the fields and start hitting tanks.”
For both players, they’re just focused on controlling what they can control and not focused on when they will make the big leagues. Mathews was asked if his goal was to make the starting rotation out of spring training. There is no way Frank Cusamano, who asked the question, expected the answer Mathews gave.
“I don’t love the world goal. I don’t have goals. I don’t believe in the word goals, so sorry.”
Crooks was not asked that same question, because nobody thinks he’ll make the team out of spring training, but he was asked about his thoughts on making the team at some point.
“I’m just going to be happy where my feet’s at,” Crooks said. “You can’t really determine how and where you’re going to be. I’m just going to play baseball to the best of my abilities.”
If they have anything like the season they had in 2024, we will see them together as a pitching and catching unit sooner rather than later.