Don’t get me wrong here. I’d greatly prefer that, every time he takes the mound, Jake Arrieta has the absolute best version of his stuff and command. I mean, of course.
But that isn’t reality. No pitcher will have all his best stuff, all his best command, working on all of his pitches, every single time out. And as Arrieta gets longer in the tooth – he’s 35 now – the ability, physically, to have all that stuff clicking every time out goes down. That’s just life, and that’s why pitchers adjust what they try to do as they get older.
So it’s against that backdrop that I found Arrieta’s performance yesterday impressive and encouraging. It was clear from the jump that Arrieta had almost no real command, which is why his pitch plot for the game looks like an almost completely random smattering of colors with so many non-competitive balls:
“I struggled to find the command with multiple pitches,” Arrieta said after the game, per NBC. “It was a battle from the get-go.”
The sinker kept getting lost arm-side, the changeup was consistently middle-up, he wasn’t getting the slider/cutter down and in to lefties, and the curveball was all over the place.
So, then, there were walks, there were elevated pitches that got hammered, and there were a lot of stressful situations. Yet Arrieta got through six innings allowing just the two runs in the 4th. Some of that was just sequencing luck, sure. And some of it was just BABIP luck (Arrieta allowed six balls at 99 mph or greater, and just two of them were hits – one was a double-play, so five outs gathered on balls that were smashed).
But some of the good results was owing to Arrieta’s execution. Consider that three of Arrieta’s four strikeouts on the day came with runners in scoring position. Consider that even after grinding all day, Arrieta came out for a 1-2-3 6th inning after the Cubs had taken the lead.
Oh, and about that shutdown 6th inning? Arrieta dropped a very Arrieta line (NBC): “I knew once we took the lead, going out there for the sixth, they weren’t going to score.”
That guy has confidence, man, and it’s impossible not to believe him. Shades of another start in Pittsburgh, when Arrieta knew what was going to happen even before he took the field:
So anyway, the point here is less that Arrieta had a great day. The results were solid, obviously, but it’s a meh Pirates lineup that hammered the ball quite a bit and took three walks in six innings. Arrieta has had much better results, and has looked much better, including his first outing of the year against them last week.
But without his command, he performed his best in the tightest spots, and then kept it together enough to give himself and his defense a shot to get through six innings at a low run total. That’s all you can hope to see on a day when a guy doesn’t have it.