I Love Lucas Giolito's New Throwing Motion And Think It's Going To Pay Big Dividends This Year

Lucas Giolito has had a pretty polarizing go of things thus far in his pro career.  He was drafted 16th overall by the Washington Nationals in 2012 out of Harvard Westlake HS, though he missed a lot of his senior year due to elbow inflammation.  As soon as he signed, within a month he was getting Tommy John Surgery to repair his UCL in his elbow.

As soon as he finished rehab and was no longer on an innings limit, he started dominating MiLB hitting.  He dominated it enough to find himself at or near the top of every major publications’ prospect rankings.

From then on it was few ups with MANY downs though.  He did find himself getting the call to Washington for 21 inning cup of coffee in 2016, but was promptly traded to the White Sox the following offseason as the headliner in a trade for Adam Eaton.

Since then?  There have been even more downs.  He saw a loss in fastball velocity to the point where he was topping out at 91-92MPH in both Charlotte and Chicago and people immediately were ready to write him off.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t exceptionally frustrated with him not playing to his prospect ranking, though I abide by the “prospects will break your heart” adage.

Lucas Giolito is a physical specimen.  He’s 6’6″, 250ish pounds.  That’s not fun to look at when you’re in the batter’s box.  But when I saw him pitch, I saw someone who was still figuring out how to handle his height, weight and coordination.

You know that one kid who’s like 5’2″ his sophomore year of HS that leaves for summer and comes back like 6’2″ and so wiry and gangly he can hardly walk because all of his coordination went out the window?  That’s Lucas Giolito IMO.  There are a TON of moving parts in a pitcher’s motion and for someone still figuring out how to handle height like I suspect Giolito was, finding repeatability is insanely hard.  And “repeatability” is the operating term for the rest of this blog.

Let’s look at Giolito last year.  Here’s a highlight real of his rookie season in Chicago:

Now, because he’s 6’6″, Giolito has LONG arms.  That’s a good thing for a pitcher, if they know how to hone their length.  Giolito, thus far, has not shown the ability to hone in that length.  More on this in a minute

The arm acts as a lever and the longer the lever, the more force one can get behind the baseball.  But it also impedes his ability to repeat his motion.

You ever been to a dog park and those snooty idiots have the plastic tennis ball throwers to play fetch with with their dogs?  These things?

If you’ve ever seen one of these things used, all you need to do is flick your wrist and you can send the tennis ball flying.  It’s because it acts as an extension of your arm and the lever puts more force on the ball when released.

The same concept applies to Giolito, except he doesn’t use a tennis ball thrower (obviously) he just has really, really long fucking arms.  And again that’s good, but you also have to be exceptionally coordinated to repeat your release point, motion and mechanics 100x a game and with 3-4 pitches in order to be truly successful.  Giolito hasn’t shown the ability to harness his length and I suspect it’s due to a lack of coordination from growing too fast when he was 20-21 years old.  It doesn’t matter how good your raw “shit” is if you don’t have proper repeatability in your mechanics, and Giolito did not.

Here’s a still gif from the video above of him throwing last year:

His arm starts at is chest, swings down under his back hip, and stops here before his momentum forces him to sling shot towards the plate:

That’s a loooooong motion.  A loooooong motion like that is really, really hard to repeat time and time again.  It’s a coordination thing, and somewhat hard to explain.  I am on the record saying that if I were Giolito, I wouldn’t really have touched weights all last winter.  I mean I would have, but my main focus would have been 99% on improving my coordination and repeatability in my mechanics.  My focus would have been on martial arts, balance drills, plyometrics, etc.  For a kid as young as him growing as fast as he did and needing to pinpoint his mechanics in order to maximize his ability, coordination would be the “walking” before “running”.  The last few years he was almost like a new born giraffe trying to figure out how his legs work.  Now after this offseason?

He looks like this:

KISS – keep it simple stupid.  He shorted his throwing motion a LOT.  Now instead of his arm swinging back as far as his body allows, he almost throws it like a catcher or a quarterback.  Here it is in GIF form:

This motion will be much, much easier to repeat on a consistent basis.  His arm won’t be required to play “catch up” with the rest of his body when it gets out of sync.  Now it’s just A to B, drive, throw, like the sequence below:

And with these simplified mechanics, improved command will follow.  With improved command, a better and more efficient statistical output will follow.

Now I have to touch on the fact that he has gotten hit around this spring a bit.  I don’t *really* care.  Sure it’d be nice if he hadn’t been, but spring is for working on things.  First few starts you’re mostly fastball and spinning off a few breaking pitches here and there.  He said in his last start he was more focused on finding the slotting/release point on his secondary pitches.  Because of that, it’s an exercise in futility to look at spring training stats.  They’re throwing pitches in atypical counts and a lot of times, hitters know exactly what they’re throwing.

Instead of looking at his spring stats, we should be focusing on the spring training process.  And so far, I really like how Giolito looks.  Reports are that he’s been 95-97MPH with his fastball and his breaking pitch has looked great so far.  IF and I repeat IF he can find the command of those two pitches with his already solid changeup, we have a nice starting pitcher on our hands.

I’m not saying that will happen.  But I am saying that this mechanical adjustments he made over winter that have appeared this spring are a giant step in the right direction.  Now it’s time to put up or shut up for him.