How Cubs hope to leverage Arrieta’s comfort into bounce-back originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
Chris Young’s coworkers haven’t let him forget that former Cubs ace Jake Arrieta slumped for two years under his watch in Philadelphia.
“We like to give C.Y. a lot of a lot of crap about messing up Arrieta when he got over there,” Cubs manager David Ross said of his bullpen coach in a Zoom press conference Sunday. “But it’s all in jest.”
When Arrieta signed with the Cubs this offseason, he joined an organization that knows his throwing motion better than any other. Arrieta’s new manager caught him for two seasons and was behind the dish for one of his no-hitters. The core of the team is made up of Arrieta’s former teammates. And while the Cubs staff diagnoses Arrieta’s decline over the past few years, Young can offer insight from his time in Philadelphia.
Now that Arrieta is healthy – he battled injury in all three seasons with the Phillies – the Cubs are hoping to leverage their familiarity with the veteran right-hander into a bounce back season.
“All those things are only going to lead to positive outcomes,” Arrieta said, “being somewhere that you’ve been before with a lot of high-quality relationships that have been developed over the last six or seven years, being familiar with the environment, the people in the organization and understanding what this Cubs organization is truly about. They’ve continued to put great people in the right places, allowing the players to maximize their potential.”
So far, so good.
In his first spring training start of the year Sunday, Arrieta gave up a single and issued a walk to the first two batters he faced. Arrieta’s timing was a little off, he said. But he retired the next three batters he faced to get out of the inning unscathed.
Arrieta threw a quick second inning: flyout, groundout, groundout.
“Synching up that lower-body/upper-body connection is something that I’m going to continue to wok on over the next few weeks,” he said.
At age 35, and at the beginning of spring training, Arrieta’s pitches don’t have quite the same zip as they did when he won the 2015 NL Cy Young. On Sunday, his fastball touched 93 mph, but he sat around 90-91.
The Cubs understand that and are trying find the balance between adjusting with age and identifying where Arrieta got off track.
“I think being comfortable with the group around you,” Ross said, “opens you up to trust and maybe trying new things that you may not do somewhere else.”
Ross’ reasoning makes sense. The Cubs clearly tapped into something as Arrieta developed into one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball in his first Chicago stint.
“Does that mean that I couldn’t have pitched somewhere else successfully (this year)?” Arrieta said. “No.”
But a reunion couldn’t hurt.
Gordon Wittenmyer contributed to the reporting of this story.
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