Breaking down the Chicago White Sox prospect haul

3. Lucas Giolito, RHP

Giolito began the 2016 season as the consensus top pitching prospect in baseball and eventually made his MLB debut with the Nationals in June. By the end of the year, he had appeared in six games in the big leagues, with surprisingly bad results. In 21.1 innings, Giolito allowed 16 earned runs, seven home runs, 12 walks, and struck out only 11. After the disastrous debut, there have been rumblings that the Nationals were slightly down on the top prospect, and had even considered doing a one-for-one trade to acquire Andrew Miller.

Still, there is plenty to love about Lucas Giolito, and Fangraphs was not completely wrong when they called him “Earth’s Best Young Arm” shortly after his debut. At 6’6″ and 255 pounds, Giolito is built like a horse. His fastball sits in the mid-90s but can creep up towards 97 when he needs it to. His curveball projects to be one of the best in baseball. He throws it with great depth, and its 12-to-6 movement even has a little extra wrinkle at the end. Giolito’s changeup is clearly his third-best pitch, but it has plenty of potential to be a quality big-league offering.

Command is the big issue for Giolito, and not just flat-out throwing strikes. He did go through rough stretches with the strike zone at Double-A Harrisburg, but his bigger issue is properly locating his pitches within the strike zone. His fastball is not so overwhelming — and may have lost a few ticks by the end of the season — that he can blow it past hitters in the big leagues. And while his curveball is great, Giolito still needs to work on setting hitters up, something he rarely had to do in the minor leagues.

If the White Sox are smart — and that they are willing to enter a total rebuild shows that they are — Giolito will finally get an entire season at Triple-A before returning to the big leagues in September. Though the Nats were down on their prospect, there is still no reason not to believe he can blossom into a big-league ace.