3 HIGH SCHOOL TEAMMATES now opening-day pitchers.
Lucas Giolito, Max Fried and Jack Flaherty were teammates nine years ago at Harvard-Westlake, a prep school in Los Angeles.
Today, all three will be starting pitchers on opening day in the major leagues.
And they didn’t even win a California state title the year they played together.
“If you point at a particular high school and ask, ‘What is the probability that three baseball players graduating this year will wind up pitching for MLB teams, and get selected to be this year’s starters on opening day?’ The probability is less than one in a billion,” said James Corter, professor of statistics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
“But if you assume that there are maybe 10,000 high schools in the U.S., and elsewhere in the hemisphere that field baseball teams who play at a level that might get them noticed and recruited, the odds that it could happen somewhere, with some high school, rise considerably. So now we’re talking more like one in 100,000. Still, pretty unusual.”
Giolito becomes the first White Sox right-hander to make consecutive starts on opening day since Jaime Navarro in 1997 and 1998 when Chicago opens under new Manager Tony La Russa at the Los Angeles Angels, and Flaherty will start his second opener in a row when the St. Louis Cardinals are at the Cincinnati Reds. Fried takes the mound in an opener for the first time when Atlanta plays at Philadelphia.
“It’s pretty cool when you know 10% of the league is starting opening day from the same high school,” Giolito said. “We’ve been working together for a long time, pumping each other up. It’s pretty weird and wild.”
Flaherty was 6-1 with a 1.77 ERA and a save as a sophomore for the Wolverines, and Fried was 8-2 with a 2.02 ERA as a senior. Giolito got hurt early his senior season and finished 2-1 with a 0.84 ERA.
Harvard-Westlake’s baseball team went 24-5-1 in 2012 and lost to Valencia 3-1 in the second round of the playoffs. One year later, Flaherty pitched a six-hitter and had an RBI single to beat Marino 1-0 in the 2013 California Interscholastic Federation championship game at Dodger Stadium.
“The most fun was getting to go to bed the night before and knowing that I had somebody really good going to the mound the next day,” said Matt LaCour, Harvard-Westlake’s baseball coach from 2002-15 and now one of its athletic directors. “There wasn’t a whole lot of sleepless nights during that that period of our program’s history.”
Fried first attended Montclair Prep in Van Nuys, then transferred after his school eliminated baseball and other extracurricular activities. Flaherty was entering his sophomore year in 2011-12, considering himself a shortstop, and Giolito was starting his senior season. By 2012, Giolito had reached 100 mph in a winter league game and was projected as a possible No. 1 pick before spraining the ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow, which led to Tommy John surgery that Sept. 13.
“I knew they were going to be successful based on the talent, the work ethic. Did I think that all three of them would be starting opening day? No, I couldn’t imagine that,” said pitching coach Ethan Katz, then with Harvard-Westlake and now starting his first season with the White Sox.
All three became firstround draft picks. Fried was selected seventh by San Diego in 2012 and Giolito 16th, while Flaherty was taken 34th by St. Louis in 2014.
Giolito, a 26-year-old righthander, became an All-Star in 2019. He was 4-3 with a 3.48 ERA last year and is 31-29 in four seasons.
Fried, a 27-year-old lefty, went 7-0 with a 2.25
ERA last year, improving to
26-11 in four seasons. He won a Gold
Glove and finished fifth in
NL Cy Young
Award voting.
Flaherty, a 25-year-old right-hander, was 4-3 with a 4.91 ERA, leaving his re- cord at 23-22 in four years.
During offseasons, Fried and Flaherty still work out at Harvard-Westlake.
“I’m really happy and really excited for those guys,” Fried said. “They’ve worked extremely hard to be able to put themselves in that position. To kind of share that and be able to be pitching at the same day as those guys is pretty cool.”