If you’re in the Northeast, it’s a pretty good day for a late-afternoon nap, and not just because of the daunting heat on this first day of summer. You’re going to want to rest up so you can catch the match-up of the week tonight with a 10 p.m. EST first pitch, when the Los Angeles Dodgers host the Washington Nationals.
Clayton Kershaw and Stephen Strasburg are squaring off for the first time. Both are coming into this game with 10 wins. Strasburg is undefeated and Kershaw has only one loss. They’re two of the top pitchers in the National League, which has all of a sudden become loaded with aces. Established talents like Zack Greinke, Madison Bumgarner, and Max Scherzer, Strasburg’s teammate and still the nominal ace of the Nats staff, have been joined Noah Syndergaard and Jake Arrieta, who both enjoyed breakout seasons in 2015.
The 30-year-old Arrieta, who struck out 11 Pittsburgh Pirates on Friday and is scheduled to take on the St. Louis Cardinals Wednesday, has famously been one of the big stories the last two years. To wit: a mid-career move to the Cubs transformed a back-of-the-rotation starter with the Orioles into the National League Cy Young award winner and the game’s most dominating pitcher. Analysts credit Arrieta’s pitch selection, his mastery of a slider-cutter hybrid, and Cubs pitching coach Chris Bosio for the right hander’s metamorphosis into a stud. All those things must be true, but there’s something else, too, which is what baseball old-timers still sometimes refer to as intangibles. Maybe it’s better to think of that collection of ineffable traits that make up a big-league ballplayer as character.
The Orioles drafted Arrieta out of Texas Christian University in the fifth round in the 2007 amateur draft. A 6’4″ pitcher at a major Division 1 program who throws hard, 93-97 miles per hour at the time, is sure to get a lot of attention from scouts, but he was a never a sure bet as a major league pitcher, never mind a star. Strasburg, on the other hand, went first in the 2009 draft, and if you check out what was said about him at the time, everyone was certain he was going to make it—a once-in-a-generation talent, one report said. Kershaw was the seventh pick in the 2006 draft. When a club takes a player in the first round, they will do whatever they can to make good on their financial investment and get him to the big leagues, because the reason they gave him a big bonus to begin with is because he is already understood to be a certain big league talent. If a number-one pick doesn’t make it, heads may roll somewhere in the organization, like scouting or player development. Look at reliever Matt Bush, who made it to the major leagues with the Rangers 12 years after he was taken number one by the Padres as a shortstop. It’s like being born anointed—only you can screw up your fate.
The guys who are drafted in the late rounds have very little hope of making it to the big leagues. Sure you get a Mike Piazza every once in a while, famously taken in the sixty-second round as a favor to his father from friend Tommy Lasorda. And then there are lots of guys drafted late because the clubs know that for some reason they’re unlikely to sign the player but they take a chance anyway. Generally, they know they won’t sign him because they’re not going to give a high school player enough money not to go to college, where the ballplayer hopes to drive up his price in a future draft. Lots of kids are drafted two or three times (or more) before they sign with an organization. But most of the players taken in the late rounds are just there to fill out minor league rosters. Basically, they’re getting paid to play catch with the real prospects until the studs, the number one picks, make it to the big leagues.
At TCU, Arrieta disappointed in his junior year, a draft-eligible year, and was taken in the fifth round, but signed for a $1.1 million bonus, much more than a fifth-round slot like that usually earns. Sure, he was represented by agent Scott Boras, who always gets top dollar for his clients, but this also seems to suggest there was uncertainty around Arrieta from the beginning of his professional career. Is this guy going to make it, or wash out?
Some people blamed the Orioles organization, and one pitching coach in particular, but Arrieta rejects that explanation for a career that remained lackluster until his move to the Cubs in 2014. So what changed?
“I’ve learned to be my own coach and trust my gut, instead of trusting everybody I come in contact with,” Arrieta told ESPN last year. “I knew for a long time I could pitch my way and have success, but it was hard to do that. You want to be coachable and try to listen and learn from people, but everybody normally doesn’t have all the information. Sometimes you have to be your own coach and try to figure it out on your own.”
Okay, it’s baseball language, but he’s saying something important here, humanly important. What Arrieta means is that he figured out how to trust himself. It sounds simple, but it’s not an easy thing for anyone, in any pursuit. It’s especially difficult in baseball to learn the things you need to know in order to know yourself, since there is so little time to do it. It’s hard to know who you are through the things you do in such a short period of time.
I think it was Emerson who complained to a friend that just as he was learning how to write—meaning, explore the real depths of writing, how it is not just intellectual complexity that shapes prose style but also tragedy—and already he was getting too old to have the energy for writing.
Now imagine a young ballplayer. Maybe you’re 14 when you realize you might have the ability, as well as the desire, to sustain a career in organized baseball. The next several years, in high school, perhaps college, as well, are about mastering the physical craft, mostly how to control your own body. In the professional ranks, you not only continue an advanced study of your own form, but must learn the responses of other bodies as well, namely hitters, and how they perform against you.
All during this advanced course you see that the window is not only opening onto possibility but also shutting on it. You see light at the end of the tunnel, but also realize there is a kind of darkness after it. Your time to learn about the world through your prime form of engagement with the world is limited not by death but rather by the end of youth. You console yourself: Sure, you’ll lose some steam off the fastball, but you will gain knowledge. And yet, even if you become an encyclopedia of pitching, like Greg Maddux, at some point you won’t be able to manage the physical act anymore.
What Arrieta means is that pitching is a test of self-knowledge. And his career shows us that this is why pitching is so hard, even for the most talented athletes. It is how you come to know yourself as a young man, your strengths, your weaknesses, your fears, and still you are a young man, and already it is going away. Just when you get good, it is already getting late. Pitching is an act of courage.
