Justin Crawford - 5/16/23

Checking in on the Phillies 2022 1st round pick

Prospect Spotlight 🔦

Justin Crawford CF – Age: 19 – B/T: L/R, 6’1’’ 175 – Phillies (Low A)

• Born: 1/13/2004 (Phoenix, AZ)

• Draft: 2022, Philadelphia Phillies, 1^st Round

The 2022 MLB draft was one of the more unique drafts of the past few years because of all of the top prospects with fathers who played in the major leagues. Druw Jones (19) - ARI (A) (father: Andruw Jones), Jackson Holliday (19) - BAL (A+) (Matt Holiday), and Cam Collier (18) - CIN (A) (Lou Collier) all had dads who played the majors for eight or more years. Rounding out this list is Justin Crawford (19) - PHI (A), whose father Carl Crawford had a 15 year big league career as stolen base machine with decent ability at the plate. While nobody expects a 15 year career out of any draft pick, Justin plays a lot like his father with his speed and bat. This exciting set of tools made him the 17^th pick in the 2022 draft, one pick ahead of Cam Collier. Now that we are approaching the halfway point of his first full season of professional baseball, I wanted to look at the type of prospect he was heading into the draft, and how he has looked so far.

From a tools perspective, the most impressive tool Crawford shows off is his speed. While not the most valuable tool on its own, Crawford is a clear double plus runner with the ability to turn doubles into triples and run down fly balls in the hole. He is an excellent athlete, who rotates extremely well and leads to above-average bat speed. From a power perspective, he should grow into above-average raw power. That being said, Crawford’s bat path is suboptimal and leads to him hitting a lot of grounders. This is to be expected of speed-oriented hitters, where more balls in play means more chances to use their speed, but Crawford is not a particularly gifted hitter either. His swing is somewhat awkward and his feel for contact is merely average. Defensively, it’s easy to dream on him becoming a lockdown defender in center due to his speed, but he’s fairly raw and doesn’t show overwhelmingly pure instincts in center.