Jake Arrieta was ready to hop on the phone and catch up.
Well, almost.
“I am playing tennis for a couple of hours this morning,” he explained via text.
After that, then?
“After tennis, I have a marathon training run. Does the weekend work?”
Some specimens never change.
Now 40, the former Cubs great is no less of a “serial hobby collector,” as he cleverly puts it, than he was in his heyday as a player. Back then, he took big bites out of cities the Cubs visited, routinely rising early to procure a bicycle and seeing everything he could. For a while, he worked hard at learning to play guitar. He ran, too, though he wasn’t great at it.
“I ran out of necessity for my career and developed a love-hate relationship with it,” he said. “A lot of professional athletes don’t like to do things they’re not good at, but I like that feeling of learning new skills and trying new things. I see a triathlon on the horizon. Whatever it is, I want to stay in the best shape I can throughout my life.”
Arrieta ran his first marathon in San Antonio in December. Via Garmin app, he’s training for this year’s Chicago Marathon with a long-distance partner — ex-Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo — as part of a fundraising effort for first-timer Rizzo’s foundation, which supports children with cancer and their families.
“He’s getting after it,” Arrieta promised.
As the Sun-Times planned to check in with key members of the Cubs’ 2016 World Series championship team throughout this 10th anniversary season, Arrieta — a pitcher who got after it like few others — was as high on the wish list as anyone. More than anyone else on that team, he experienced what it felt like to be at the absolute top of his craft, to be the proverbial baddest man on the planet. But he also experienced, as that curse-busting season wore on, the reality of beginning to slip off his perch.
Cubs fans well know Arrieta was the very best starter in the game in 2015, when he led the majors in wins (22), complete games (four) and shutouts (three), tossed his first no-hitter, had a record second-half ERA of 0.75 and won the Cy Young.
What many might have forgotten is that, for much of the first half in 2016, he remained just as dominant. Rotation mates Jon Lester and Kyle Hendricks finished second and third, respectively, in Cy Young voting that year, while Arrieta faded a bit to ninth. But 10 years ago on May 24, Arrieta woke up 8-0 with a 1.29 ERA and already with his second no-hitter. The next day, he won again to get to 9-0, with the team 10-0 in his starts. To that point, still, nobody could touch him.
How extraordinary must it have been to be in his shoes?
As he considered his answer, Arrieta, who lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two kids, was perched on a stool, flipping baseballs to 14-year-old son Cooper in a batting cage.
“I was kind of on top of the pitching world,” he said.
“In that particular stretch of time, I almost knew I was unbeatable. Maybe there was a little bit of arrogance, but in a lot of senses it was a reality for a particularly long period of time. I had the utmost confidence, and I think that also brought ultimate confidence in the clubhouse with teammates, with the front office and in the fan base.”
As the glory-bound Cubs tore out to a huge division lead, Arrieta was the same guy who’d walked up and down the aisle of the team plane en route to Pittsburgh for the 2015 wild-card game, a glass of wine in hand, telling teammates, “Get me one run tomorrow and the game’s over.” It was no lie: Arrieta shut out the 98-win Pirates in what he counts as the finest game of his career.
“I felt the same in 2016,” he said. “But in the back of your mind, we’re human. There was some, ‘How long can this possibly last?’ We know that all good things must come to an end. It wasn’t what I wanted to have happen, but, being realistic, I’m not going to throw shutouts or go seven, eight innings, one run, every time I go out there.”
The Cubs lost all five of Arrieta’s starts in July. He finished the season 18-8 with a 3.10 ERA, still very good, of course, and delivered mightily in the postseason.
But how hard was it to lose his grip on invincibility?
“I tried to not pay a ton of attention to it, but it gets hard,” he said. “If you’re not getting texts after games, it means you probably didn’t play well. You throw a shutout, you get back in the clubhouse and have 250 texts. It’s hard to not think about it a little bit, but I feel like I did a really good job of it. We kind of had blinders on. That’s why we had 26 guys, a five-man rotation. If a team is leaning on only one guy on the mound, it’s only going to go so far.”
A few months back, Rizzo and John Lackey were at Arrieta’s house, and Rizzo expressed to both what it had meant to that team to have starting pitchers who wanted to pass the baton to one another and see the next guy one-up the last.
“I’d be the first guy on the top step,” Arrieta said. “There were no egos.”
What an experience it turned out to be.
“For me,” Arrieta said, “to go from the best second half in baseball history to winning a World Series with that team? Some of it is almost unbelievable.”
