Lucas Giolito Just Completely Emasculated The Best Lineup In Baseball
Lucas Giolito has ARRIVED ladies and gentleman. Completely dominated the best lineup in baseball. Sure it’s missing two of it’s stars, but even so this lineup destroys the ball.
Here are their offensive ranks entering today:
3rd in runs scored, 3rd in home runs, 1st in batting average, 1st in OBP, 1st in slugging, 1st in OPS, 1st in fWAR, yada fucking yada
and Gio spun off this line tonight:
He keeps getting better, and better, and better. Today he did so pairing mostly fastball/slider, a change from working fastball/changeup in his recent starts.
And that fastball/slider combo command was straight up lethal:
His stat cast numbers haven’t updated yet tonight, but he was touching 95-95 T97 the entire game, including the 9th. And it almost resulted in a Maddux, AKA a complete game shutout sub 100 pitches (he had 107).
But let’s talk about his slider – a slider is designed to look like a fastball until it gets to about 2 feet from the plate before breaking off the plate, generating weak contact or avoiding the bat all together. Giolito’s mechanics went from being one of these things you see outside a carwash:
To a repeatable, efficient, and clean delivery that facilitates his ability to make every pitch look like his fastball. Rob Friedman’s GIF above is a perfect example. His mechanics when throwing a fastball are a carbon copies of his slider gather/release/follow throughs. And that is how you dominate big league hitting, by making every pitch look the exact same until the last second, all while locating them at will.
Lucas Giolito – ACE. Don’t try and argue with me about this. He’s going to be one of the White Sox All Star selections this summer and it’ll be much to the dismay of all the haters who wrote him off as a 23 year old 2nd year pitcher. The improvement is just absurd:
PS – I *kinda* know what I’m talking about with baseball. I’m expecting apologies from all of these commenters after they called me out for this blog below: