Is Lucas Giolito the most important player on the 2025 Red Sox?
This is, in one sense, a silly question. On every baseball team, the most important player is the best player, duh. And on the Red Sox, that man is Garrett Crochet, who is the single biggest reason the Red Sox are now looking ahead to the postseason instead of playing out the string on another season of mediocrity.
But biology has hard-wired into human beings an unfortunate tendency to get used to things, which is to say, to take things for granted. Take a look around you at this very moment and you will find that the world is filled with amazing, wonderful things: a cup of coffee made from beans that were harvested on the slope of a volcano 3,000 miles away; electric cars that turn what used to be a day’s journey into a comfortable 45-minute drive; a piercing blue sky that looks like Ming dynasty porcelain. Amazing, all of it.
And yet, that first sip of coffee you took today probably just felt like a routine part of your morning instead of a human miracle of agricultural genius and global shipping logistics. You probably got annoyed at the traffic. You might not have even bothered to look up at the sky after you checked your weather app. You got used to the miracles around you.
Red Sox fans haven’t quite gotten used to Garrett Crochet yet. Not since Pedro have we had the pleasure of witnessing such dominance every five days and there’s a giddy buzz throughout the the fanbase every time he takes the mound. But when forecasting the postseason ahead, we’ve already started to take him for granted. Crochet, we know, will do his job in the opening game of the hypothetical postseason series that awaits us. So it’s game two that we fixate on. Do the Red Sox have that vaunted number two starter? Do they have a chance if they don’t?
The number two starter role looked like it was going to be a problem ever since Tanner Houck went down with an injury after a disastrous start to the season. Then Lucas Giolito stepped up (and, yes, Brayan Bello too, of course, but it’s Giolito who is getting his flowers today). Giolito dominated the Orioles over eight innings in Baltimore last night, continuing an extended stretch of outstanding pitching that dates back to early June: 85.2 innings, 72 strikeouts, 27 walks, and a 2.31 ERA. It’s ok to admit that you probably didn’t see this coming. Very few people did.
Giolito has been a great pitcher before, most notably back in 2019, when he put up an ERA+ of 134 and finished sixth in the Cy Young voting. But inconsistency has been the defining trait of his career. Just the year before that great 2019 season, Giolito led the league in earned runs and walks. Four years and three Cy Young vote-getting seasons later, his ERA+ would again dip below league average and he would lead the league in home runs allowed. And after missing the entire 2024 season with Tommy John Lite, he didn’t seem all that likely to find his form again at age 31. But the fact that he has may have just saved the Red Sox season.
This is why Giolito can seem so important, maybe even more important than Crochet. Garrett Crochet is the blue sky you see out your window right now, the one you expect to see on a late summer morning (and gripe about if you don’t). Lucas Giolito is the blue sky you get on a surprisingly mild morning in the midst of an otherwise brutal early March. He’s the sky that ignites your imagination and gives you hope for the days ahead.
The Red Sox now have a viable number two starter (actually, they have two). October is coming, and the forecast looks beautiful. Bring it on.
