538 Breakdown of Giolito Mechanics Change (Cameo by Jordan Hicks)

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GeddyWrox
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538 Breakdown of Giolito Mechanics Change (Cameo by Jordan Hicks)

Post by GeddyWrox »

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lu ... g-his-lead
Since the start of the 2019 season, Lucas Giolito has been one of the best pitchers in all of Major League Baseball. In 284.2 innings of work, he has pitched to a stellar 3.57 ERA and 3.46 fielding-independent pitching mark, and he ranks eighth during that span among pitchers in FanGraphs’ wins above replacement with 7.5. So it’s easy to forget that, just a year before his string of dominance began, he was a far cry from the pitcher we know today.

In 2018, Giolito struggled to miss bats and find the strike zone with consistency, as evidenced by his 16.1 percent strikeout rate and 11.6 percent walk rate. (The major league averages for strikeout and walk rates that year were 22.3 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively.) Of all of the pitchers who qualified for the ERA title,1 Giolito was actually baseball’s least valuable pitcher, pitching to a 6.13 ERA and 5.56 FIP — just a shade above replacement level. Though Giolito had been a highly regarded prospect, selected out of high school by the Washington Nationals with the 16th overall pick in the 2012 draft, it had been such an abysmal year that he knew he needed to make changes if he was going to be a successful major leaguer.

But between the 2018 and 2019 seasons, Giolito saw a dramatic shift in performance. His strikeout rate more than doubled to 32.3 percent (and has hovered around the 30s ever since), and his walk rate plummeted to 8.1 percent. Giolito’s seemingly overnight success was no fluke, though — the tools were there all along. Rather, it was a slight mechanical change that unlocked his potential — a change that seems to be sweeping the rest of baseball as well.

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Re: 538 Breakdown of Giolito Mechanics Change (Cameo by Jordan Hicks)

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He still ain't no Jack Flahertys.

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Re: 538 Breakdown of Giolito Mechanics Change (Cameo by Jordan Hicks)

Post by GeddyWrox »

Reading this and thinking back to my pitching days... I had a pitching coach in 7th/8th grade. He was great about teaching compact, quiet, repeatable motion for consistency. But he also taught getting the arm down and back as far as you could. I remember thinking "this kind of hurts my shoulder" but I tried to do it like he said. After a couple of summers of being overused and jacking my arm back further than it probably wanted to go, my shoulder was pretty much dead. Looking at the "after" photos in this article, I think my natural positioning (before that coach got ahold of me) was in line with what Giolito and the others are doing now. Makes me wonder if I could have pitched into high school or legion ball if I hadn't had my arm die on me.

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