Are LEGO®s the key to Brandon Crawford’s success?

“McDeep Dive” is our new series that spotlights one Giants player every day for a week. We’ll move backwards and forwards through time, look at on the field stuff, off the field stuff, and see if we can learn something new about them. Here’s the last look at Brandon Crawford.

Here’s perhaps the first and only “folk tale” on record about Brandon Michael Crawford:

This commercial came out in 2016 and when I went to see if that story had any truth to it, the only thing I found that would confirm it was this interview Crawford gave back in 2015:

So, if Brandon Crawford is a Master Builder, it might have helped him become a Master Baseballer. Even if it’s not true, it’s a strong note to end on for this particular McDeep Dive.

We knew a lot about Brandon Crawford’s abilities because most everything he does has a huge impact on the field. Even if the numbers don’t say so, you can feel the leverage he has on every game. We also know that he’s part of the Brandon & Brandon blog series — we know he has a sense of humor and he has a bit of depth.

What I’ve learned is that Brandon Crawford has intense focus but the kind that doesn’t cause him to shutout the world. He’s not a Sheldon Cooper. He’s not a Tony Stark. He’s not even a Madison Bumgarner. Somehow, he’s ability to retain his humanity throughout the focus and the world only seems to amplify his strengths and not diminish them.

There are ballplayers out there with his talents who don’t have huge families, who aren’t generous with their time and their mind and their love because they need to maintain their focus. Crawford’s superhuman strength appears to be the ability to incorporate distraction into his focus. He embraces everything around him and maybe that’s why the way he plays defense sometimes makes him look like he’s in The Matrix.

If you just hear his voice on radio commercials, you might not jump to the conclusion that he’s full of charisma and a variety of interests. But assumptions and prejudices (in this case, against monotone voices) are why human beings get into so much trouble. They’re also why learning unlocks the best versions of ourselves: the more we learn, the better we are, and no Giant seems to embrace that idea more than Brandon Crawford.