BOSTON — When Red Sox starter Lucas Gioito was asked how he would evaluate his first half of the season, he thought for a minute and then gave in to a little recency bias.
“The first month back didn’t go the way we wanted it to, obviously,” said Giolito, referring to a seven-start stretch that saw him compile a gaudy 6.42 ERA. “A few really bad starts and then a handful of good ones. But we made the adjustments, got my mechanics locked in, so happy with how I’ve thrown the ball here recently.”
Giolito has every right to feel some satisfaction. After tossing six shutout innings in a 10-2 win over the Colorado Rockies, he has now strung together six consecutive outings of six or more innings with two earned runs or fewer each time. In that span, he’s 5-0 with a 0.70 ERA and an 0.88 WHIP.
To put that into context: the only other Red Sox pitchers in recent history to throw 35 or more innings and record an ERA of 0.70 or lower in a six-game span are arguably the four best starters the franchise has known over the last 50 years: Luis Tiant (1972); Roger Clemens (1990-91), Pedro Martinez (2002) and Chris Sale (2018).
Giolito cruised through his outing, facing just two batters over the minimum while allowing only four hits. But despite retiring eight of the first nine hitters he faced over the first three innings, he didn’t feel locked into his delivery.
Pitching coach Andrew Bailey pointed out some flaws and Giolito was able to get some dry reps and threw a few balls into the net behind the dugout. The adjustments proved critical for him to finish strong over the final three frames.
“My ability to make the adjustment,” he said, “pitch to pitch, inning to inning, is probably the best it’s ever been.”
“He’s been doing that,” confirmed catcher Carlos Narvaez. “There were a couple of innings where he misfired on a couple of pitches. He went into the cage and said, ‘I did this; let’s continue to do this’ or ‘Let’s change something.’ When you have a guy like that, it’s pretty easy to work with. All the credit goes to him. It’s very easy for me to press the buttons (on PitchCom).”
Giolito typically pushes to stay in the game as long as he can, but at 92 pitches after six, he was candid in his dugout conversation with Alex Cora.
“He was very honest which is awesome,” said Cora. “Most of the time, these guys want to keep going and going and going. But he was like, ‘That’s it.’ And that’s where the relationship really (flourishes), because he was honest today and he had a shutout. So now, I know who he is and I know how he feels and I can let him go when he says he’s good.”
“That’s not normal for me,” Giolito acknowledged. “Usually, I just want to keep going until they take the ball and rip it from my hands. But today was the first time pitching in that really heavy humidity in the Northeast and some of those long at-bats were kind of getting to me. So I let him know that I might be done for the day there.”
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