To What Extent Is Lucas Giolito Back?

The Boston Red Sox enter the final week of the regular season with a one-game cushion in the AL Wild Card race, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. With Boston and Detroit at 85-71 and Cleveland and Houston at 84-72, with the AL Central and two Wild Card spots on the line, this is a four-goes-into-three situation. Factor in that the Astros have been pretty anemic of late, and the Tigers — who actually end the season with a three-game set at Fenway — look like they couldn’t find their own shoes with a flashlight and a map right now, and you have to like Boston’s chances.

Our playoff odds give the Sox an 89.9% chance of making the postseason. That’s not what I’d consider a lock, but it’s pretty close. Close enough to wonder about what their playoff rotation is going to look like.

The state of starting pitching — and the ruthlessly unforgiving nature of playoff baseball — means that almost nobody has enough. Even good teams that have thrown dozens of draft picks and/or hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem of finding four healthy arms who can give you six innings in October. Who can credibly claim to have that right now? The Dodgers, probably, just don’t ask too many questions about what happens when the bullpen comes in. The Mariners, most likely, assuming Bryan Woo’s pectoral injury turns out to be safe.

But even the Phillies, with their $100 million rotation, are scrambling. With Zack Wheeler out, do you go with Taijuan Walker twice through the order or risk playing Missile Command with an extremely wobbly-looking Aaron Nola? Are the Yankees staring down a potential Cam Schlittler playoff start?

The Red Sox didn’t start with anything like that wealth of starting pitching depth, and elbow injuries to Tanner Houck, Richard Fitts, and Dustin May have only made the pool shallower.

Garrett Crochet is a bona fide ace, a flame-throwing, inning-eating monster. The kind of pitcher you trade half your farm system to acquire and lavish a $170 million contract on to keep. I’d as soon have him on the mound for Game 1 of a playoff series (or Game 7) as anyone in the league. An ideal no. 2 starter probably gets more strikeouts than Brayan Bello, who’s carrying a FIP above 4.00, but we’ve seen ground-and-pound sinkerballers thrive in October pretty routinely.

After that, it gets murky. Does Alex Cora throw one of his rookie left-handers — Payton Tolle and Connelly Early — into the fire? And speaking of young lefties, Kyle Harrison has only allowed a single earned run in nine innings since his return to the majors.

Or can you start Lucas Giolito in a playoff game?

I mean, you can, it’s a free country. At least in this respect. In fact, the White Sox did start Giolito in playoff games in 2020 and 2021. He was terrific (seven innings, one run, two hits, eight strikeouts) in 2020 and pretty bad (five walks, four runs in 4 1/3 innings) in 2021.

But that was five years ago. If the Red Sox could count on their starting pitchers to retain their form from 2020, Walker Buehler would be in this rotation instead of out of the organization entirely.

Truth be told, this is the first time since 2021 that the 31-year-old Giolito has pitched well enough to even be in the conversation for a playoff rotation spot. In 2022 and 2023, he ran ERAs close to 5.00. Actually, he was pretty good for the first two-thirds of 2023 as well. Then the Angels traded for him as part of the desperate last-helicopter-out-of-Ohtaniland push before dumping him on the waiver wire a month later.

In 12 starts that year for the Angels and Guardians, the team that claimed him, Giolito allowed 21 home runs in just 63 1/3 innings, en route to an ERA of 6.96 and a FIP of 6.87. His clubs went 2-10 when he started. Then he sat out the entire 2024 season after tearing his UCL a second time.

Giolito, who starts against Kevin Gausman and the Blue Jays tonight, has been quite good this regular season: 10-4 with a 3.46 ERA, in 25 starts and 140 1/3 innings. I’ve made this point before, but there are pitchers who get a team through the postseason and pitchers who get a team to the postseason, and the infrequent overlap between those two categories does not negate the importance of the latter. The Red Sox are 22-9 when Crochet starts, 16-12 when Bello starts, and 17-8 when Giolito starts. Without him, they’d be in a far less secure position.

That ERA is basically comparable to Gausman’s, and nobody’s questioning whether he’s going to get a playoff start for Toronto. In fact, when you factor in the hitter-friendliness of Fenway Park, Giolito is slightly ahead of Gausman in ERA-, 81 to 83.

Nevertheless, I remain concerned about Giolito’s underlying numbers.

That’s not awesome! The ERA is great, but Giolito’s strikeout rate is down more than a third from his peak and down more than 20% from when he was getting knocked around right before the injury. Hitters are chasing less and making more contact — a lot more contact — than they were even in the dark ages.

There are 72 pitchers who have thrown 80 or more innings in the majors this year and are currently on a team with a pulse in the playoff race. That’s not a perfect proxy for the pool of playoff starters — some late-arriving rookie aren’t on here, while various injured or suspended or ineffective pitchers are included. But it’ll do for a rough illustration. Here’s how Giolito fits in various key categories.

Look at it this way: 12 playoff teams times four rotation spots per club equals 48 total starting pitcher slots, and by the numbers Giolito is just about there. Especially considering that Boston’s rotation is not one of the more imposing options. On Monday, some chucklehead named Kiley McDaniel ranked the 14 playoff contenders’ rotations and placed the Red Sox ninth. (I included the Diamondbacks in my list of teams with a pulse, while Kiley didn’t. They’ve only got single-digit playoff odds, but it feels uncharitable to exclude a team that’s only a game out.)

The 48th-best starter from that group of teams should start a playoff game, right? In theory, yes. In practice, probably not. Many teams — including the Red Sox — will consider a rookie, or a bullpen game, or some sort of piggyback situation. It’s possible that Giolito does start a game, but gets yanked when the first tough left-handed hitter is due up a second time.

That’d be a tidy place to end this exploration of Giolito, but I was curious about what’s different about him this year, compared to 2023 (when he was terrible) and 2021 (when he was awesome). Especially because there’s been startlingly little variation in his repertoire.

Giolito is throwing the same four pitches (three pitches, really, since he only throws the curveball a couple times a game) in the same quantities, at the same velocity, and yet he’s gotten incredibly different results over the years.

You can see that Giolito’s stuff, in general, is down a tick from 2021. The pitches that are supposed to spin are spinning more slowly; the changeup, which is supposed to knuckle, is spinning faster. It’s a bummer, but it happens to everyone sooner or later.

And while the four-seamer was never Giolito’s primary weapon, there’s a difference in the quality of his secondary pitches. Where his changeup and slider were tying hitters in knots in 2021, now they’re only about average: fewer whiffs and much better quality of contact.

It’s a little weird, because Giolito’s changeup has much better arm-side movement than it did in 2021, and that movement — and the consistency of his pitch location — seems to be just as good now as it was then, if not better. Giolito’s arm angle has come down a few degrees since 2020-21, and he’s getting an inch or two less extension. Maybe it’s something at the margins. Maybe hitters are just getting better that quickly, or they’re figuring out a pitcher who hasn’t changed a lot over the past five years.

If you’re not moving forward, you’re standing still, after all. Maybe Giolito should try adding a cutter.