“When I went down my senior year and he had to cover for me, stepping right into the rotation, and it was like, ‘Oh my God,’” White Sox starter and Harvard-Westlake alum Lucas Giolito said. “His feel for pitching at that age was ridiculous. When I was a sophomore in high school, I couldn’t throw a ball over the plate. And he was spotting up sliders and it was crazy. We never had any doubts. We knew where we were going to be.
This NLDS Game 5 will be the fifth for the Cardinals, and in each of the previous four the Cards’ ace started: Matt Morris, 2001; Chris Carpenter, 2011; Adam Wainwright, 2012; and Wainwright again, 2013.