Actress Lindsay Frost on son Lucas Giolito: Baseball was ‘a foregone conclusion’ – Chicago Tribune
Lindsay Frost once had an acting teacher who was a big baseball fan and liked to compare the two crafts.
Frost is a longtime stage, TV and screen actress, and she can see the similarities as she watches her son, Lucas Giolito, work his way through his professional baseball career.
“When you think about it, you are alone in front of a lot of people, you have to be in the moment and you have to breathe,” Frost said. “You have to listen and work with the people around you. There are a lot of similarities actually. Those were my bits of advice for him.”
Giolito will pitch Thursday in his third Cactus League game for the White Sox, looking to continue a strong spring showing thus far. He spoke earlier in camp about emerging as a professional athlete from a family of actors, something Frost told the Tribune recently was “a foregone conclusion.”
Frost said Giolito has “a great presence” but was never drawn to the stage like she was. Instead the signs of a baseball career were there from the start.
Frost said Giolito’s first word was not “mama” or “dada,” but “ball.”
“Later we said it should have been strike instead of ball,” Frost said, jokingly.
Giolito’s parents didn’t play baseball — his father and uncle did play on a fastpitch softball team in Los Angeles made up of players from the TV show “Twin Peaks” — but they were always fans. In his fifth-grade yearbook, Giolito wrote he wanted to be a major-league pitcher. And by the time he was 12 years old, Giolito, who was always tall for his age, threw so hard he had to move from Little League to travel baseball.
“The desire came first, the physical attributes and then the hard work,” Frost said. “He realized early on the dedication and the sacrifices he had to make, and he just took to it.
“We kind of realized it was getting serious maybe when he was 12 or 13 or 14, just how hard that ball was coming out of his hand. It was not necessarily on target or pinpointed, but the velocity was there and the desire was there.”
Coming from a competitive career, Frost said she has been proud of how Giolito has handled the bumps he has encountered over the past year. He struggled with his mechanics last season with the Nationals and posted a 6.75 ERA over the first six major-league appearances of his career.
The Nationals then included him in part of the Adam Eaton trade with the Sox, and he has put up a 1.80 ERA in five innings of spring work.
“We all have periods of time where we have struggles,” Frost said. “It’s how you handle them. I thought he handled it very well. A lot of the time last summer, he was a 21-year-old kid. The peaks and valleys were so monumental, but he just kept soldiering through. That’s what it takes. To have a career in anything, you’re not going to be perfect day one, and it’s ridiculous to think you can be. He’s very excited about his new opportunity.”
ckane@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @ChiTribKane
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