New gas for the heater
After wearing out in the playoffs, Giles plans to shore up the weakness, not dissect it
WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. — Ken Giles knows that being removed from the Astros’ closer role during their World Series run inspired concerns about his reliability to finish games this season. And he does not care.
“I really don’t give a rat’s (expletive) what everybody thinks, or what happened,” Giles said at The Ballpark of The Palm Beaches.
Records of the team’s epic run will show Giles with an 11.40 ERA in seven outings. Only when gifted a 7-1 lead in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series did he exit an October game without allowing a run.
The franchise won its first championship despite Giles rather than because of him.
“We played to win, and that’s all that matters,” he said. “Are there things I could’ve improved on? Yeah. But you know what? First time through everything can’t be perfect, and I wouldn’t change it for the world, what happened to me.”
A nasty attitude propelled the first 100-mph fastball to zip from Giles’ fingertips. A seventh-round pick out of Yavapai College (Ariz.) in 2011, who the Astros acquired in a 2014 trade with the Philadelphia Phillies, he has not stopped feeling like he can “raise the middle fingers to all the doubters.”
Astros manager A.J. Hinch repeatedly has backed Giles as the closer, even dating to the World Series.
Only 3½ months later are they conceding “a weakness,” as Giles called it, that they could not admit when the closer had clung to whatever confidence he had left.
“I’m not invincible,” Giles said earlier this week. “I always have this mentality that I am and feel like I am the majority of the time. I just basically ran out of gas toward the end. I was relied on a lot during the second half of the season, and it took its toll.”
‘Fatigue … decreases execution’
Giles, 27, did not know it at the time, but firing pitches last year as hard as he could, starting on Valentine’s Day and through Halloween, wiped him out.
He has thrown more than 1,100 pitches in each of the past three seasons, but Hinch expects the righthander to learn from the experience without requiring a reduction in workload.
“We could sense there was a bit of a grind for him,” Hinch said. “Hitters responded to his pitches a little differently. In the moment you could sense a little bit of fatigue. Fatigue usually decreases execution.”
Pitted in baseball’s cat-and-mouse dynamic, hitters bested Giles near the beginning and at the end of his long 2017 season.
On June 6, a 12th consecutive win seemed guaranteed for the Astros. They led the Kansas City Royals 7-3, but four relievers blew the game, none worse than Giles. With the game tied in the bottom of the ninth, he worked through the middle of the order to get two outs. Then he allowed a single and hung a slider that Mike Moustakas hammered for a walkoff home run.
Spoiling the winning streak saddled Giles with a 4.24 ERA and punctuated the nadir of his season.
It also marked a turnaround. Hinch brought in Giles the next night. He pitched a perfect eighth inning.
“It’s not a matter of rebuilding Giles,” Hinch said. “He helped us win a lot of really close games throughout the regular season into the early postseason.”
Giles dominated from June 7 through the end of the regular season: a 1.14 ERA and 12.4 strikeouts per nine innings.
The Astros love spin rate. They threw a greater percentage of off-speed pitches than all but three teams last year. But Giles recovered by establishing his fastball. Batters had realized his tendency for first-pitch sliders and let them dive out of the zone. So, he began throwing fastballs more often to get ahead and almost exclusively to climb back in counts.
His slider became more effective. Hitters whiffed on it four percent more often, according to Brooks Baseball.
Then batters undid his plan in the playoffs.
Platitudes about the different atmosphere of postseason baseball do not reveal the advantage teams get from more scrupulously curated scouting reports.
Playoff hitters either adjusted or figured out the approach that had righted Giles’ regular season. They laid off sliders for balls and waited on easier pitches to clobber. Both the strike rate of his breaking ball and miss rate of his fastball dropped 10 percent.
When a lefthanded batter got ahead, he was guaranteed a fastball from Giles 100 percent of the time.
Game 4 of the World Series spun Giles around like the Moustakas home run on repeat. He squandered a good chance for the Astros to take a 3-1 series lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers and then win it at home the next night.
Hinch trusted Giles to handle the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 hitters in the top of the ninth with the score 1-1. He lasted eight pitches. Each batter reached base and runner scored. Cody Bellinger passed up a slider before lining a double that ended Giles’ night.
Giles did not pitch again in the Series. He sat idle in the bullpen with a hoodie shrouding his face. The Astros seized the title by winning two of the final three games without him.
“Manning up” to the bad stretch feels like enough to Giles. He avoids dissecting it.
“It gives me the motivation to work on something that I was actually weak at, that I never really noticed in myself,” he said.
Working out the frustration
The day after the Astros won Game 7, Giles vented his disappointments to his wife, Estela Pinon, a former college and professional softball pitcher.
“She knows the mentality,” Giles said. “She’s been on the diamond before.”
He did not talk about the matter again. He said he did not discuss or watch anything related to baseball in the offseason.
Giles, whose muscularity and height resemble that of an NFL safety, also insisted on not breaking from ambitious weightlifting to prepare for another grind.
“I’m going to beat my body into the ground until it’s going to fall apart,” he said.
His hyperbole captures the physical and mental burden a closer embraces. Giles’ ability to look past poor performances will be tested unlike before. Although he does not revisit his failures, he will be reminded of them until he redeems himself in the playoffs.
“Everybody has a weakness,” he said. “The only way to overcome that is to work on it. And that’s all I do. I prepared for it.”
Despite what the world watched last October, he still sees himself as 100-Miles-Giles. He will hurl and push at a maximum effort until something gives.