In baseball as in so many other aspects of life, a little delayed gratification isn’t the worst thing. Since two spring trainings ago—when he’d just turned 21, was coming off a solid half-season in Reading, and was a consensus top-five prospect across the game—we have been tapping our feet and ostentatiously looking at our watches, biding our time for J.P. Crawford to reach the majors and emerge as a cornerstone of the next great Phillies team.
But he, and we, had to wait for it. A lackluster performance in triple-A after a midseason promotion kept him out of the Show in 2016, and a worse start at the same level last year all but knocked him off those same prospect lists.