LOS ANGELES — Jake Arrieta’s solidification came loud, clear and dominant.
No-hitters tend to do that. But when they do it for an ace on the rise who's on a team thinking about the World Series, they do so with more authority.
Already in the midst of greatness this season, the Chicago Cubs’ right-hander fired the game of his life Sunday night at Dodger Stadium, striking out 12 on his way to a no-hitter and a 2-0 Cubs win.
His ball danced. It ducked. It shimmied. It disappeared. And there was almost nothing the Dodgers could do about it except rely on a scorekeeper’s call to keep them from being no-hit for the second time in 10 days.
The no-hitter was Arrieta’s 14th consecutive quality start, the most for a Cubs pitcher since Greg Maddux in 1992. He was already hot coming in, but this latest outing proved him to be one of Major League Baseball’s premier aces.
“He has that kind of stuff nightly,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. “It's really crazy. The ball looks like a whiffle ball from the side. You can see the break on the slider, the cutter and the curveball.
“Right now he’s pitching at a different level. And he deserves it. This is not a surprise at all.”
Nor should it be. Arrieta was already a topic for the national media this season, and talk of the 29-year-old was ramping up as the Cubs visited markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
National media exists in the Midwest, and it existed in New York when he and the Cubs visited there a couple months ago. But, as Maddon noted, his star is different right now. The Cubs are legitimate playoff threats, and Arrieta is showing to be their ace.
On the Cubs’ latest road trip through the Bay Area and Southern California, the national media was out to talk to Arrieta, not just about his team’s surprising rise but about his own out-of-nowhere emergence as one of the league’s top starters.
In both cities he was posed questions about what has changed for him—what has taken him from a starter too familiar with disappointment to one capable of dominating an entire league and possibly starting a wild-card game with his team’s life on the line.
“I guess you want to get used to that kind of stuff,” Arrieta said. “It means you’ve been good for a while, right?”
His last 52 starts, not counting for the occasional hiccup, would definitely qualify as being good for more than a while. Going into this no-hitter, Arrieta, 29, had a 2.37 ERA, 0.986 WHIP and 2.42 FIP in two full seasons with the Cubs, covering the previous 51 turns.
In parts of four seasons with the Baltimore Orioles before being traded in 2013, he had a 5.46 ERA in 69 games, 63 of them starts for a right-hander who was rated as a top-100 prospect in consecutive years by both Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus.
That was a time when Arrieta was out of his baseball mind, entrenched in overthinking his delivery and what others—coaches, scouts, other pitchers—thought he should look like.
Then, as he was finding ways to rid himself of that thinking, Baltimore traded him for Steve Clevenger and Scott Feldman. The Orioles had given up on Arrieta because they needed bullpen help in the midst of a playoff run. Arrieta was not finding success in the big leagues fast enough, and Baltimore’s then-current needs trumped its desire to wait him out.
“Sometimes it’s just a change of scenery, and it can be a bit of a wake-up call for guys when they get traded,” Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said. “I don’t know his situation specifically, but I think we look at him and we know he’s a handful.”
In a way it did shake up Arrieta. It prompted him to stop thinking so much and to focus more on the art of pitching, not the mechanics of it. His delivery became freer, his fastball ticked up an mph and the rest of his arsenal fell in line.
The results were immediate.
Arrieta pitched 13 innings and allowed one run in his first two starts with the Cubs, and he finished that season with eight more starts, allowing two runs in his final two games. Then, last season, he blossomed. He was dominant in 25 starts, striking out 9.6 hitters per nine innings and giving the Cubs a 2.53 ERA in 156.2 innings, earning a ninth-place finish in the Cy Young Award voting.
The numbers say he’s been just as good this season with his 2.22 ERA and 2.57 FIP entering Sunday. The difference is he is doing it for longer—he’s pitched 183 innings this year—and for a contending team trying to secure a postseason berth.
And that ninth-place finish last season should improve considering he’s been the undisputed ace of the staff even with Jon Lester's $155 million pact from last offseason.
“I don’t know who has better stuff,” Maddon, who saw plenty of the Baltimore Arrieta when he managed the Tampa Bay Rays before this year, said of him. “The slider’s the best. The curveball, I want to know who has a better curveball. But, to me, the biggest difference is he knows where his fastball is going.”
With it and the rest of his weaponry, Arrieta has propelled himself into the upper echelon of National League starting pitchers, along with helping the Cubs and their faithful dream of breaking their World Series curse.
With that would come entirely new forms of questions, ones Arrieta would also be perfectly happy answering.
All quotes, unless otherwise specified, have been acquired firsthand by Anthony Witrado. Follow Anthony on Twitter @awitrado and talk baseball here.
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