3 High School Teammates All Starting On MLB Opening Day

LOS ANGELES, CA — Only 30 Major League Baseball pitchers are among the opening day starters on Thursday. Ten percent of them went to school together, at Harvard-Westlake School, an independent college prep in Los Angeles’ Holmby Hills neighborhood.

Not only are Lucas Giolito, Max Fried and Jack Flaherty alums of the prestigious school, but they all attended there at the same time and were teammates on the high school’s baseball team.

Fried takes the mound for the Atlanta Braves in their opener at Philadelphia, as Flaherty is the St. Louis Cardinals’ opening day starter at Cincinnati. Giolito will be in the Los Angeles-area for his start, pitching for the Chicago White Sox in their Thursday night opener in Anaheim against the Los Angeles Angels.

James E. Corter, a statistics professor at Columbia University, told WCVB the probability of three pitchers graduating from the same school in the same year all end up pitching in MLB and selected as opening day starters the same year is “less than one in a billion.”

“That’s crazy,” Fried told The Associated Press. “I’m really happy, really excited for those guys. They worked extremely hard to put themselves in that position. To be pitching the same day as those guys is pretty cool.”

Somehow, the three major league aces didn’t win a state championship in California in 2012, the year they all played together, according to WCVB. Harvard-Westlake went 24-5-1 that year and lost in the second round of the playoffs.

Opening day starters in baseball are traditionally the team’s best pitcher. Giolito cemented his role as the White Sox ace a year ago when he tossed a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates.