Crazy

When she hit against them, my daughter hated pitchers. When she had them as teammates, my daughter just scratched her head. They were impossible to figure out, a Mars and Venus kind of thing. I was reminded of that yesterday watching Lucas Giolito pitch against the Twins. More often than not this season, Giolito has underperformed in his starts, which is how you end up with a 2-4 record and an ERA scraping 5. Listen to Giolito after one of those blah outings, and he offers an irritating mix (to me, at least) of Norman Vincent Peale positive thinking with techno jibber. I just have to visualize the jet pack on my shoulder, or words to that effect. All of which is to say Giolito went eight innings against the Twins, giving up but one run on two hits and three walks vs. eleven strikeouts in a 2-1 White Sox win. In his postgame interview, Giolito did the Mr. Positivity thing, along with his skipper, future ex-Sox manager Tony La Russa, who gushed about “his talent and his guts.” Pitchers are just nuts; you just have to put up with them, especially the good ones. It’s sort of like what Casey Stengel said about catchers. Try to win a game without one. But managers are a dime a dozen. They can be replaced, and, in this case, should be.