There are a lot worse things in life than a .241 batting average, like having to hurtle down Interstate 5 in the middle of the night with your wife, who just learned that her 38-year-old sister died of an asthma attack.

Looking at your nieces, ages 9 and 7, and knowing how hard that first Thanksgiving and Christmas will be for them — for everybody.

Fretting about something as simple and fun as the family’s annual fantasy football draft. Jen loved fantasy football, and her absence will be felt.

“It’s going to be tough for everybody,” Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford said in the solitude of a room aside the home clubhouse at AT&T Park.

And yet the batting average is there to be seen, dissected and criticized. A major-league ballplayer cannot hide his numbers.

Crawford has maintained his Gold Glove defense but has had a bad year at the plate. There are no asterisks next to the numbers that say that when he goes on the road, his wife, Jalynne, tells him the trips seem longer this year, even when they aren’t, because when he is not home she has more time to think about her sister.

The numbers do not speak to the two early-term miscarriages Jalynne has had since Jennifer Pippin died April 12, as the Crawfords try to add to their family of five. Nowhere in the launch-angle and spin-rate lists can you deduce that Brandon has lain in bed at night holding Jalynne’s hand while watching video of his swing, searching for a clue why, at one point, he had lost 50 points off his batting average since last year.

The easy answer is that Crawford has been distracted by the heartache — his, Jalynne’s, his nieces’ and everyone else’s in their large extended family. But Crawford does not believe it is the right answer.

“When I’m out there I’m thinking about baseball,” he said. “I’m not thinking about anything else, really. I’m thinking about what I have to do to help our team win, whether it’s on defense or a big situation at the plate. I’m not thinking about Jen or Jalynne and the kids.”

Hitting coaches Hensley Meulens and Steve Decker have watched a lot of video and seen the same swing. They witness a lot of hard-hit balls that used to be hits and now are caught because of shifts. Meulens has told Crawford to be himself at the plate.

The 30-year-old shortstop knows that for most of the year he has been a tick off. His lower half did not fire as quickly as usual, maybe the residual effect of a groin injury that he suffered April 25 when he rounded first base after a single in his last at-bat before he was to take a brief leave from the Giants to attend Jen’s funeral.

Crawford is loath to blame injuries, saying, “It just bugs me more than anything. I can’t really attribute that to my struggles, maybe partially.”

He swung at more balls and made more weak contact in hitters’ counts, which frustrated him.

Only recently has Crawford begun to look more like he did last year. He went 10-for-24 with four doubles and two home runs on a seven-game homestand that ended Wednesday and entering Saturday had raised his average 17 points in the nine games since he hit a second-half nadir of .224.

On one hand, Crawford is glad he has more than a month of the season left to build his numbers and make a solid contribution on the field before he goes home for the winter. On the other, he knows the sooner he can be there every day for Jalynne, the better.

“There are times where she’s by herself and she starts thinking about her sister,” Crawford said. “It’s a lot harder when I’m not there.”

Life has not returned to normal for Jalynne and her five living siblings, whatever “normal” is.

“You don’t move on, because you never move on, but you move forward,” she said by phone. “You have a life to live, a husband to support, kids to raise and nieces to love, love, love. They’re having a hard time, but they’re resilient.”

Jalynne Crawford believes her husband is resilient, too. Sometimes — not regularly — she has felt compelled to remind him that he leads the Giants in RBIs and that he saves hits and runs daily with his defense. She mostly stays silent about baseball unless he brings it up.

Most ballplayers’ wives cannot intimately understand the pressure Crawford feels. Jalynne can. Like two of her sisters, she was a gymnast at UCLA, where she and Brandon met. She would train hour after hour, week after week, knowing she will be judged on a 4-minute routine.

“I would like to say we’re both very emotionally stable, easygoing people,” she said. “Honestly, he does a really, really good job not bringing baseball home with him. It helps that I was a high-level athlete because I know what it’s like to go through those struggles and come out of them.”

And make no mistake. Crawford believes he can come out of them and hit because “I’ve done it before. It’s that simple. Look at the WBC. I was hitting a lot of balls hard, getting some hits. There are stretches this year I’ve done that. I think it’s there. I just need to be more consistent with that.”

In the moments after the United States beat Puerto Rico for the World Baseball Classic championship March 22, Crawford — still wearing goggles to protect his eyes from Champagne — posed for a photo with his sister-in-law, Jennifer, her husband, Chris, and nieces Kaylee and Kyrie.

Three weeks later, that picture tragically changed, and everyone in the family is trying to make life better for the girls. Jalynne’s twin sister, Janelle, volunteers at their school so they have family close. The girls have come to San Francisco to watch their uncle play ball. There was a Disneyland trip and a visit to a camp Crawford ran to raise money for the Giants Community Fund.

Not to keep the children’s minds off their mother, Jennifer, but to remind them they will be just as loved going forward.

“It’s something they’ll never get over,” Crawford said. “It’s not something the family will ever get over. I don’t think it will ever get easier, but it’s something they have to deal with and try to remember the good times you had with her. That’s all you can do.”

Henry Schulman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: hschulman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hankschulman