Chicago White Sox: Lucas Giolito is a legit ace
Lucas Giolito made his postseason debut yesterday for the Chicago White Sox and established himself as one of the games true aces.
Chicago White Sox pitcher Lucas Giolito has shown the past couple of years that he is definitely capable of being the best pitcher on a good baseball team. With a 3.41 and 3.48 ERA the past two years with 11.62 and 12.07 K/9 in the past two seasons, he’s shown that his stuff is comparable to the best in the game.
To go along with his dominant no-hitter performance earlier this year, his first career postseason start was special. Lucas Giolito took a perfect game into the 7th inning and finished the win with 7 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 BB, and 8 Ks.
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Being able to put up a performance like that in your first postseason start is not something that many starters in the majors are capable of doing. Giolito did it and made it look easy.
Out of 100 pitches that Lucas Giolito threw, he generated swings and misses on 28 of them. His best pitch of all on the day was his slider which was nearly untouchable.
Giolito threw 26 sliders on the day and got 6 whiffs on 9 swings with the pitch. A 67% whiff rate is insane. The slider also registered 5 called strikes and only 2 balls put in play. Neither of the balls put in play were hard-hit balls either (95 MPH+ Exit Velocity).
Giolito ranked 7th in the majors this year with a 12.07 K/9 and ranked 2nd in the majors in SwStr% (Swinging Strike %) at 17.3%. His SwStr% was only behind back to back NL Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom.
These stats don’t show us much about Lucas Giolito that we didn’t already know because we know what he is capable of doing any night.
But for him to do what he did today, it shows he is capable of doing it when his team needs it the most and being able to do it against a very good Oakland Athletics baseball team.
After having the worst ERA in the MLB in 2018 among all qualified starting pitchers, Lucas Giolito has made some tremendous adjustments with the short arm action over the past two years and shown he is one of the nastiest pitchers in the entire MLB.
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His tremendous postseason debut was just another major solidification of the fact that Giolito is a true ace for the Chicago White Sox.