Lucas Giolito spoke with FanSided’s “Baseball Insiders” podcast hosts Robert Murray and Adam Weinrib in conjunction with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Giolito is a massive fan of the series (“Whew, it goes back a while. I remember when Call of Duty 4 came out, I might’ve been 12, 13 years old, and I was just locked in from the get go. From thereon out, I played damn near every title every single year.”) and was thrilled by his early look at this year’s drop.
From top prospect with a pedigree to scuffling starter to Cy Young candidate, White Sox righty Lucas Giolito has seen it all since his early days in the Chicago clubhouse.
When 2023 arrives, Giolito will have a new manager at the helm, who’ll be replacing Tony La Russa. He’ll also be entering a season tinged with uncertainty, especially after an up-and-down season in 2022 that leaves him fighting to regain his status as one of the league’s best ahead of free agency.
Massive expectations are nothing new for Giolito. After all, he’d encountered and transcended them long before his MLB career had begun, sharing a high school locker room with future MLB stars Jack Flaherty and Max Fried, as well as his current pitching coach Ethan Katz.
His relationship with Katz isn’t nostalgia-based at this point, though. Now, it’s all about results.
“Those days are over. When [Ethan] got hired, there was a little bit of that, but then it was all business, man,” Giolito told FanSided. “I credit the work he did with me in high school, taking me from a talented kid to a prospect to a complete pitcher. But when he came over to be our pitching coach, he’s not just responsible for me. He’s got a whole roster of guys that he has to work with.”
Giolito’s results came as the 2022 season progressed; he wrapped with his best stretch of the year in six starts in Sept./Oct., posting a 3.48 ERA and 35 Ks in 33.2 innings pitched. Now, his attention turns to the offseason, where he’ll be preparing for a pivot point season in his MLB career. This is his last year of club control with the White Sox, and he’ll be seeking a free agent deal at season’s end, without any substantive extension talks with Chicago to date.
“I would like to be in a much better place than I was physically last season,” Giolito noted. “I don’t really set specific goals, numbers-wise, because I don’t want to be in the middle of a season looking at my stats like, ‘I need X amount of strikeouts’. That kind of puts pressure on yourself.”
“For me, I love competing. I just want to put myself in position to be the best competitor and give myself a chance to win every time I take the ball. If I were to have one statistical goal, I want to throw 200 or more innings. I still haven’t done that yet. I really, really, really want to hit that 200+ innings mark, and that requires staying healthy, being very consistent in your mechanics and release point, and making quality pitches.”
As Giolito noted, everything else a pitcher could want to produce typically follows a 200-inning season. Next season, staying consistent and hitting his marks every five days could determine his next landing spot.