It’s been a long and challenging road for Lucas Giolito.
Once among the most durable and productive starting pitchers in the majors, Giolito has endured one setback after another over the past two years. He missed all of last season after suffering an elbow injury in his first spring training with the Red Sox, and after missing the first month of this year with a hamstring injury struggled to find any sense of consistency.
But recently Giolito finally turned the corner, and over the past month he’s gotten back to being the pitcher the Red Sox believed he could be all along.
As the first half comes to a close Giolito goes into the All-Star break riding one of the hottest stretches of his career. He has delivered six straight quality starts since June 10, and over that stretch he’s allowed only three earned runs over 38.2 innings, good for a 0.70 ERA.
Giolito’s return to form has coincided with the club’s overall resurgence. Since June 7 the Red Sox had a 22-10 mark heading into Sunday, the best record in MLB over that stretch, after starting the season 30-35 before that.
“It’s been a weird long road since the elbow surgery,” Giolito said. “I’ve always been chasing consistency in my career and never had it, and to have that consistent output over the last month definitely is a relieving feeling, for sure.
“But I’m not satisfied,” he added. “I want to keep going, keep pitching well, keep giving the team a really good chance to win every time I get the ball.”
Coming off a chaotic 2023 in which he pitched for three teams after the All-Star break, Giolito signed with the Red Sox in hopes of recapturing some semblance of stability and serving as the workhorse the rotation badly needed at that point. Instead Giolito suffered an elbow injury and underwent internal brace surgery, ending his first season in Boston before it began.
This year he endured another setback when he suffered a hamstring strain on his very first pitch of spring training, and upon his return he seemingly veered between good and bad starts every time he took the mound.
Things reached a nadir on June 4 when he allowed seven runs over 1.2 innings against the Angels, but since then Giolito has finally righted the ship.
“I think the mechanical adjustment we made was important getting my slot to the right place, where it felt like I was throwing the ball naturally, throwing from my natural slot,” Giolito said. “Knowing I’d kind of crept down after the surgery so getting that back on track was a big turning point for sure.”
Sitting with a 6.42 ERA following the Angels start, Giolito has since lowered his season number to 3.36 while posting a 6-1 record on the year.
“It definitely feels good, it feels better than when you’re struggling and it’s like ‘eh it doesn’t feel right.’ You’re trying to work with what you have versus ‘cool I’m in a really good place, let’s keep staying there, develop a good routine within all the work to support being in that space of how your body is moving and everything like that,'” Giolito said. “Overall, very pleased we were able to identify that, make the change and keep working from there.”
While Garrett Crochet has been the unquestioned ace of the Red Sox staff, Giolito has given the team needed mid-rotation depth, helping solve what had previously been among the team’s fatal flaws. Prior to the start of the club’s recent upswing on June 7 Red Sox starters ranked 25th in MLB with a 4.53 ERA. Since then they’ve ranked second with a 3.19 mark.
Giolito will be first man up when the Red Sox resume their season Friday at Wrigley Field in Chicago, and with the club finally playing like the contender it expected to be all along, the veteran right-hander said he hopes to keep doing his part to keep things rolling.
“We’re having a lot more fun now,” Giolito said. “We’ve just got to stay on it though. We’ve been winning recently but we have to keep this kind of energy throughout the second half as well.”
