Jake Arrieta, Number Three Starter?

Cubs fans should be well-versed in the idea of cognitive reframing, even if they don’t know to call it that. It’s the need to find positive alternatives to negative experiences, and for Cubs fans, that’s a need that creeps up with regularity. This idea gets its name from a psychological practice developed in the 1960s that was used (almost too fittingly) to help treat patients with depression. Put simply, it helped — or was meant to help — those patients see their lives and the events in them from a fresh perspective.

These days, the Cubs are headed to the playoffs again and as October approaches, there’s no shortage of reminders of the ghosts of Cubs teams past, so a fresh perspective is almost a necessity to stay sane at all. The Chicago franchise has re-branded itself and built a juggernaut capable of not just consecutive playoff appearances, but probably much more than that.

Granted, this year they’re doing so under the weight of season-long expectations that only heighten as the temperatures cool outside. Last year was a fun surprise, but this year it’s happening. Or, at least, the Cubs are as well equipped on paper to win it all as any team in baseball. The October baseball caveats are a well worn path, of course, but this team seems to have built something truly special and somewhat unique.

But again, Cubs fans can be forgiven for feeling leery of banking on any success, so that reframing will take some time. And understandably so. There’s just a lot of history to overcome before Chicago’s north side fans can relax a little. Right now, there is a more immediate and more specific need for some reframing, however.

That need has come because Jake Arrieta touched baseball immortality last season and put himself in the same sentence as pitchers like Bob Gibson. For nearly three months every fifth game was cause for both celebration and unbridled assurance that the Cubs would win. Arrieta couldn’t be touched.

But even though we watched in awe while the bearded Pilates enthusiast torched opposing hitters with god-like dominance in 2015, we understood that no mortal could keep that up. For all its romanticism, baseball forces us to be realists in the end.

It was expected, and even embraced, that a regression to human-like pitching would come, and that even 2014-esque numbers would still leave him at the top of this year’s Cubs rotation. A quick scan of what he did that year shows that there would have been plenty to be happy about:

In many ways, Arrieta’s 2014 was strikingly similar to the numbers he compiled last year, though admittedly in fewer total innings. Pitching for an 89-loss team has a way of overshadowing those individual performances sometimes. The Cubs of 2016 are far, far different from just two seasons ago, and if Arrieta were pitching to those tempered expectations, there would be little to complain about. But, here’s what 2016 last looked like so far:

There’s definitely a problem. Not a drastic one, but we aren’t getting 2014-esque Arrieta. A cursory glance shows that his walks are up, his strikeouts are down, and offenses are hitting and scoring against him more easily. His mechanics have been in question for much of the season, and given that his velocity has remained on par with what he’s always done, there might be an easy fix to what’s going on — but it could be one that needs an offseason to address properly (look out in 2017?).

With all of this understood, the plain reality is that because of the performances of Jon Lester and Kyle Hendricks this year, Arrieta fits better in this rotation as the number three starter, and he should probably be viewed that way going forward. And that’s not a bad thing. When stacked up against other probable number three starters on the other National League teams that are currently expected to grab a playoff spot, he’s on par with his opposites on each of those teams.

So what Cubs fans need is reframing of a different kind. When viewed as a number one starter, he no longer fits the mold and will leave us forever frustrated and probably disappointed.

With this in mind, it’s worthwhile to compare how Arrieta looks when compared to the other likely number three starters on playoff-contending teams. As the standings are now, that means the Nationals, Dodgers, Mets, Giants, and Cardinals. Here’s how they look:

There are certainly other measures to test the quality of a pitcher, but with Arrieta in mind as a number three starter, he fits much more comfortably this year than as a number one, especially with the postseason in mind. While projecting a playoff rotation is probably material for a different piece than this one, I’ll admit briefly to being in favor of Arrieta being used as the game three starter in a playoff series. A few strong arguments can be made for pairing Lester and Arrieta back-to-back in the playoffs and saving Hendricks, the budding Cy Young candidate, for that third game, but the four man playoff rotation of Lester, Hendricks, Arrieta, and John Lackey makes it very hard to go wrong no matter what.

Whatever does happen in that regard a few weeks from now, we need a fresh perspective – a reframing – when it comes to Arrieta. He is still fully capable of monster performances like he showed in April against Cincinnati, but when taken as a whole, he’s just not the pitcher we still want to think he is.

But that’s okay. He’s still really damn good.

Lead photo courtesy Jake Roth—USA Today Sports.