Here's An Ode To Lucas Giolito, Who Just Had One Of The Greatest Turnarounds In MLB History
Lucas Giolito was shut down for the season yesterday with a mild lat strain. NO BIG DEAL. Everyone in the org and Lucas himself said there’s no point on rushing back to maybe make one final start in the 2019 season:
DISCLAIMER: this is a long, 3 part blog. If you’re a baseball fan, you’ll like it. If you’re not, then don’t bitch. Take your first and fuck yourself.
We are going to talk about three things here:
1. A big ol’ fashioned FUCK YOU to myself, Carl, White Sox fans and both the national and local media who said Lucas Giolito would never amount to shit and
2. A patting of myself on my back that said Giolito’s mechanical adjustments would lead to a better season in 2019 and
3. An ode to Lucas Giolito, who arguably had the best turnaround any pitcher has ever had in the history of baseball
We’ll start with number 1:
Say it with me: HEY CARL AND DAVE YOU DON’T KNOW FUCKING DICK ABOUT BASEBALL!
While I’ll disagree, I will say we were all over Lucas Giolito last year on Red Line Radio. Not necessarily because of his “shit” or his pitching arsenal, which we’ll get to later in this blog, but more because we both thought he was a mental midget on the mound. I’m not going to go back and listen to our primitive episodes, but we both said he was such a head case that he’d never really amount to shit. This wasn’t an unpopular opinion either; if there are people out there who said Gio would flip a switch to this extent, I’d like to meet them and pick their brains.
What drove me the most bat shit crazy about Giolito in 2018 and prior were his mannerisms on the mound. His body language was brutal. Throw a ball? He’d kick the dirt and fix the divot his plant foot makes. Umpire fucks up a call? He’d throw his hand up, sink his knees and seemingly beg for it to be a strike. It was not a pretty sight, and Giolito himself has admitted this. He was always thinking about the last pitch instead of thinking about the next pitch. That’s a recipe for disaster for any pitcher, let alone a 24 year old. Mentally, he just was not in a good spot to succeed.
I knew it, you knew it and he especially knew it. And he took to “brain training” exercises to help fix this. Long story short, he did neuropathy training which reorganized his brain waves which lead to helping him focus on both breathing and being more confident.
Fast forward to 2019: he gives up a dinger? Whatever, focus on drilling a corner with the next pitch. Ump blows a call? No big deal, that’s out of his control. Record an out next pitch. Walk a hitter? No big deal, even Pedro circa ’99 walked hitters. Get the next guy.
It was leaps and bounds different. Night and day. Black and white. Apples and oranges. You get the point. And it proved myself, Carl and everyone else completely wrong. And let me say this: I’ve never been so happy to be wrong in my entire life.
But I will say this: I did correctly identify his mechanical changes in early March, NOT TO BRAG
I get that I’m not a great writer, not by a long shot. I get that I can’t chew gum and walk at the same time, that I mumble like a moron on radio, blah blah blah. But I will say that I spent a LONG TIME prior to being hired full time at Barstool working directly with a lot of professional coaches at the college level and higher on breaking down baseball mechanics. I will take that to the grave that I can, to at least some extent, break down physical baseball mechanics pretty well. I was paid to do so. And in March I saw Gio pitch on TV and then a week or so later in person and knew that his mechanical adjustments would lead to improved command at the very least.
And I wrote that detailed breakdown here
And reverberated it on Twitter:
Prior to 2019, Giolito reminded me of one of those things you see blowing outside carwashes. Just flailing all over the place:
His coordination and repeatability were terrible. That’s a recipe for disaster when trying to command 3-4 pitches against big league hitting, and his stuff wasn’t good enough to be “affectively wild”
In 2019? He was more controlled and balanced, which I knew would directly lead to better repeatability, which would lead to better command of all pitches, which would lead to an improved statistical output. Now I didn’t think it’d be one of the greatest turnarounds of all time, but I knew it’d be better nonetheless.
He went from this long, loopy ass arm swing:
to a shorter, more compact arm swing:
but what I didn’t foresee was the uptick in pure “shit” that he had. Here are his fastball velocities from 2018 to 2019:
It may not seem like much to the naked eye, by a ~2MPH increase in velocity year over year is a huge spike. He also adopted the Astroball method of pitching as well: 4 seam fastballs up in the zone, offspeed pitches down/out of the zone. He got rid of his sinker that he was using 20% of the time in 2018 and switched it up with a 4 seamer that he used 55% of the time in 2019. With new-aged hitting mechanics preaching upper cut swings, the path a sinker takes will travel right into the path the bat takes when reaching the zone. The best way to combat this is to throw the ball over the bat path.
High and hard, soft and down.
Pair all of that with his improved mechanics that dropped his BB/9 from 4.67 in 2018 to 2.9 in 2019, and we saw a MASSIVE spike in K rate. He went from 6.49 K/9 to 11.52 K/9 in one year. That’s a Bananaland number, and if you’re an advanced stat guy, he went from .1 fWAR in 2018 to 5.1 fWAR in 2019.
And because of that, I’d like to give a MASSSIVE…
…Shout out to Gio. Unbelievable improvement
And all of his peripherals suggest he’s here to stay. So here’s an ode to Lucas Giolito – what he did over the course of one offseason is incredible and we as White Sox fans are incredibly lucky to have him as the anchor of our rotation. He took a baseball and shoved it down the collective throats of all of us.
And the best part is… I think he can still get better. I know ERA is an outdated stat but Gio was mainly fastball/changeup this year. He did mix in sliders here and there, yes, but he was also known for having a wipe out hook as he ascended through the minors. Should he work on a better 4 pitch mix in 2020 instead of just being, more or less, a 2 pitch pitcher, he will have Cy Young type numbers. That’s a promise from me to you.
The rebuild is fucking dead. Done. It ceases to exist.
Sure Hahn has to supplement the core that is blossoming before our eyes with quality free agent signings, but with how little money they have committed to 2020 I have no doubt that’s going to happen. Call me too positive, say it won’t happen, but I have nothing but hope. I couldn’t be more optimistic about the position the Sox are in, and Lucas Giolito is one of the major reasons why.
The White Sox are back, and I cannot wait to shove them down everyone’s throats next year. It’s go time.