The shame of the 2015 National League Cy Young race is that only one pitcher can win it. Really, the award wouldn't be misplaced on any of the three finalists' mantelpieces.
If there is an odds-on favorite for the award, though, it's probably Jake Arrieta.
That's the opinion of ESPN.com's Cy Young predictor anyway, and it's believable. Arrieta accumulated plenty of numbers to please the Cy Young voters, including an MLB-best 22 wins and a 1.77 ERA that ranked second in MLB. He also was historically awesome after the All-Star break, posting a 0.75 ERA that ranks as the best ever in the second half.
But when the winner is announced on Wednesday evening, be warned: There's a chance it won't be Arrieta.
Instead, the Cy Young could go to Los Angeles Dodgers ace Zack Greinke, whose 1.66 ERA was the lowest MLB had seen in 20 years. Or it could go to fellow Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw, who became MLB's first 300-strikeout pitcher since Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson in 2002.
In case the Cy Young doesn't go to Arrieta, do yourself a favor and resolve not to weep for him. He would not be the victim of robbery. He would merely be the victim of a really, really close competition.
But regardless of whether Arrieta walks away with the Cy Young, we're going to pay proper homage to his 2015 season anyway. Even if he doesn't get a shiny trophy for it, he showed us what perfect pitching looks like.
Look, a pitcher's job is straightforward. He's not supposed to allow the opposition to score any runs, and...Well, that's it.
As for how a pitcher is supposed to do his job, let's pretend that there's a stone tablet on an ancient pitcher's mound somewhere that says the following:
- Thou shalt not issue walks.
- Thou shalt collect strikeouts.
- Thou shalt not get hit hard.
Amen. Avoiding walks means avoiding free baserunners. Chasing strikeouts means chasing the easiest possible outs. Avoiding hard contact will mostly mean getting even more easy outs.
Following all three of these commandments should be every pitcher's goal. If a pitcher can master all three, then he'll be nigh impossible to beat.
Which brings us back to Arrieta. He actually was nearly impossible to beat in 2015, and it was indeed because the 29-year-old mastered the three commandments of pitching.
We already knew coming into 2015 that Arrieta could handle strikeouts, as the main ingredient of his big breakout in 2014—you know, the one where he had a 2.53 ERA in 25 starts—was a career-best 27.2 strikeout percentage. He kept right on going in 2015, posting a 27.1 K percentage that put him in MLB's top 10.
But where Arrieta merely held course there, he got even better with his control and contact management.
Regarding the former, he dropped his walk rate from 6.7 in 2014 to a career-low 5.5 in 2015, good enough to place him at No. 21 in MLB. Regarding the latter, Arrieta allowed the fewest hits (5.9) and home runs (0.4) per nine innings of any pitcher in baseball, and those numbers weren't accidents.
No, sir. Arrieta was a top-five ground-ball artist with a 56.2 GB percentage, and Baseball Savant tells us that his average exit velocity was the lowest among all pitchers who allowed at least 190 balls in play:
This is what it looks like when a pitcher takes the next step following a big breakout. Arrieta remained elite at striking batters out, became elite at limiting walks and, if we take it from FanGraphs' Tony Blengino, emerged as the contact manager of the year in the National League.
And yeah, he earned all of it. Arrieta didn't just produce like a perfect pitcher. He also looked like a perfect pitcher.
How does one look like a perfect pitcher? You can start with stuff, command or ingenuity. But it's hard to argue with the notion that the perfect pitcher needs to have all three. And in 2015, this is what Arrieta achieved.
Even going back to his rocky days with the Baltimore Orioles, Arrieta has always had stuff. This, of course, became especially evident in his breakout season in 2014, and it became even more evident in 2015.
As Brooks Baseball can vouch, the first thing Arrieta did was simplify his arsenal to a point where he was essentially a three-pitch pitcher. He used his four-seam fastball and changeup only as show-me pitches, and relied mainly on his sinker, slider and curveball.
Good call. Per Baseball Prospectus, Arrieta's sinker and slider boasted elite velocity. And according to Mike Petriello of MLB.com, Arrieta's sinker and curveball produced elite spin rate that equated to nasty movement.
That was particularly easy to see in his curveball, which on a good day was capable of doing this:
Oddly enough, Arrieta's slider did not have that elite spin. But that could be related to how his slider is actually two pitches, both of which were nasty even without elite spin.
Sometimes it's a cutter with late, sharp glove-side run. Other times, it's more of a traditional slider that can do this:
These are the tools Arrieta used to not only get strikeouts, but to manage contact.
His increased reliance on his sinker explains where his ground balls came from. And in general, Arrieta's stuff was so wicked that it allowed him to post the league's lowest exit velocity off pitches in the strike zone. Even when he gave hitters good pitches to hit, they couldn't hit them.
As for where Arrieta's improved command came from, that's more of a complicated story.
Arrieta basically didn't have any command earlier in his career, as he walked over 10 percent of the batters he faced between 2010 and 2013. At the root of that problem were mechanical inconsistencies that he had to overcome. According to the man himself, he has.
“There’s no perfect delivery; there are no perfect mechanics,” Arrieta told Eno Sarris of FanGraphs last spring. “It’s all about being able to have a comfortable delivery that you can repeat a hundred times per start, which is what I have now.”
As Sarris highlighted, Arrieta has a delivery he can more easily repeat now in part because his mechanics don't have as many moving parts as they used to. And as Harry Pavlidis highlighted at Baseball Prospectus in 2014, Arrieta has seemingly benefited from having "balance" and "posture" ingrained in his mind by Cubs pitching coach Chris Bosio.
The result? It would indeed appear that Arrieta has settled on a release point that suits him. That led to a career-best 64.3 strike percentage in 2014 followed by a new career best of 65.2 percent in 2015.
Despite all this, it's noteworthy that Arrieta isn't actually throwing more pitches in the strike zone. His 44.6 zone rate in 2015 was only a tick below his career 44.9 zone rate. So what gives?
Well, throwing strikes isn't always about throwing pitches in the zone. That's not always the equivalent of throwing good pitches. For that, Arrieta has become a perfect case study.
As one American League scout told Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune, Arrieta showed in 2015 that he knew "when to throw a strike, and when to throw a ball." This is an incredibly difficult point to illustrate with data or imagery, but it will ring true if you go back and rewatch one of Arrieta's starts from 2015—particularly one from the second half of the year.
Do that, and what you'll see is not a pitcher pounding the strike zone, but a pitcher using location and movement to toy with the strike zone. Using primarily his sinker and slider, Arrieta could entice hitters to expand the zone by painting the edges and also catch them looking after setting them up with pitches outside the zone.
This allowed him to enjoy the best of both worlds. In addition to his par-for-the course 44.6 zone percentage, Arrieta also got strikes by inducing a career-high 35.0 chase percentage. That is to say, his ability to mix his awesome stuff with pinpoint command and clever sequencing earned him strikes from both umpires and hitters.
In all, everything worked together in beautiful harmony for Arrieta in 2015. He came into the year with awesome stuff, improving command and pitching know-how. His stuff remained awesome, and he improved his command and pitching know-how even more. We shouldn't be surprised that he excelled at the things at which all pitchers should strive to excel.
If Arrieta has his druthers, he'll be rewarded with the National League Cy Young on Wednesday. If not, he'll be able to rest easy knowing that he at least has the admiration of all those who know perfect pitching when they see it.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked. Special thanks to The Pitcher List for the GIFs.
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