Aces Aren't Wild: The Re-Education of Spencer Arrighetti
Spencer Arrighetti playing for the Fayetteville Woodpeckers (astrosfuture.com)
How does a Lafayette, Louisiana Ragin’ Cajun 6th round rookie right-hander get into the conversation for a rotation trying to pitch its way to an 8th straight ALCS? It doesn’t make any sense, especially when the Astros are cast aside as the worst farm system in baseball. They have no top 100 prospects and allegedly no one meaningful to step up for a next wave. At least, that’s the narrative. But what if being an ace isn’t just an innate talent getting called up to the show? What if it’s about becoming an ace – taking the lights-out stuff into the school of strategy, rather than just relying on the tactics of velocity and break?
Spencer Arrighetti popped up on my radar via fantasy baseball, when I do that, “so… which no-name is killing it WHIP/K-wise in the last two weeks?” query from a Sunday afternoon recliner on my ESPN app. It’s nice to shorten the window of statistical history with pitchers, because you can start to sense anomalies often quieted in the numbers noise of a 162 game season.
Arrighetti, a 24-year-old who was drafted out of UL (17th Ragin’ Cajun to reach the MLB) wasn’t on anyone’s radar. His highlight in college was striking out 11 batters in a 7.1 inning 3-hitter against Coastal Carolina, while sporting a 3.12 ERA over 83.2 innings pitched in his final year at school (2021). Interestingly, while at UL, Arrighetti majored in kinesthesiology, which seems to tie into his passion for the data and analytics behind pitching. Indeed, in his interview with FanGraphs’ David Laurila, Arrighetti shares,
“I’ve found it very useful to use TrackMan and Edgertronic to fine tune the pitches I’m throwing. Everybody wants more hop on their fastball. Everybody wants more sweep on their sweeper. Everybody wants to throw really nasty stuff. So yeah, I would say I’ve been chasing movement profiles for a little while.”
This interview was back during spring training at the end of February, and in the rest of the dialogue, one can sense Spencer’s affinity for being a student of the game and his own body. I think the study of kinesthesiology indicates his value for body/mind alignment as has been discussed in the pieces on Cole Ragans and Trevor Bauer. It’s not just a pseudo-spiritual phrasing; the alignment of what the TrackMan shows with the force vector of well-tuned mechanics becomes the graph itself, rather than this de-coupled, clunky process of “pitch, now, go think about it”. Analytics as a body-mind alignment, rather than a neurotic, guess-and-check method is how “analytics guy” hurlers set themselves apart from becoming victims of their own mind – that age-old albatross of any MLB pitcher: the tendency for overanalysis.
Yet, success in the bigs eluded Arrighetti. His TrackMan-popping sweeper and “hoppy” fastball didn’t translate well in his MLB debut, as Spencer got called up perhaps prematurely to staunch the bleeding Astros rotation with most of its starters on the IL in the early season. Regardless, through his first three starts, he got rocked to a 10.97 ERA. Yet, his stuff is still electric. Was the stage too big?
Spencer Arrighetti (Baseball Savant)
Suddenly, in an almost-homage to his collegiate highlight against Coastal Carolina, on June 26th, Arrighetti tossed a career-best, 7 inning, 3-hitter with 10 strikeouts. Granted, it was a breakout performance against the ailing Colorado Rockies, but that performance has seemed to demarcate a changed tone for Arrighetti on the season. Astros prospect César Salazar, longtime battery mate of Arrighetti in the minors, had been called up to catch him for that game as a replacement for Yainer Diaz who was out with a foul tip injury. The usage of Arrighetti’s sweeper shot up from 9% to 20% that game, and the familiarity with Salazar drove a lot of his confidence. Arrighetti commented, “"I don't know if you see him back there, he's pretty animated. He's hyping me up a little bit.” Postgame, Salazar said, “I noticed that in the bullpen, the fast ball was getting to me a little quicker than normal. I've never seen him that good. I've never seen him with so much conviction and executing every single pitch ... it was fun."
Spencer Arrighetti (Baseball Savant)
Arrighetti’s pitches move, and he gets a lot of chase. He racks up strikeouts when he’s on. Despite a couple hiccup performances since his June 26th start, Arrighetti has fought back to a respectable 4.63 ERA, striking out 12 and then 13 in back-to-back performances to start August. In his most recent performance on Wednesday (8/28), he took a no-hitter into the 8th inning against the first-place Philadelphia Phillies to the tune of 11 strikeouts. He ended up with only 2 hits on the day.
I couldn’t parse a meaningful change in pitch usage percentage, as this was the real secret with Ronel Blanco and other notable Astros 2024 successes such as Tayler Scott – two previous no-names that have emerged this season by relying more upon their changeup and 4-seam, respectively.
Spencer Arrighetti (Baseball Savant)
I was listening to the Space City Home Network broadcast during Spencer’s second-to-last start against the Orioles, where he pitched 6 innings with no ER and only 1 walk and 6 strikeouts. The broadcast was startled when they clocked his curveball at 3,019 RPM. His break horizontally and vertically aside, the profiling of his pitching was making it hard to pick up. The tightness – meaning rapidity – of spin made the spin itself invisible, baffling hitters’ eyes into seeing the pitch as a fastball and missing badly. Here’s what’s wild: an elite arm like Paul Skenes averages 2,518 RPM on his curveball and 2,369 RPM on his slider, compared to Arrighetti’s 2,800 and 2,623, respectively.
Screen shot from Space City Home Network broadcast, Wednesday August 29, 2024
The broadcast continued on, however, sharing that they’d spoken to Astros manager, Joe Espada, who’d claimed Arrighetti’s success was largely due to his increase in game planning. Coming up from the minor leagues, he had not relied upon studying batters as much as his own pitches. Becoming a big league pitcher has meant blending the study of self with the study of others: in a league where everyone can hit a homerun if you put a meatball across the plate, it’s not just break or velocity that will earn you an immaculate record, it’s knowing how to profile and shape your pitches into a tunnel, relative to each player. Lastly, it’s about shaping those shapes across the at-bats of the same player, and then across the unit of games against that player.
Those three tiers of abstraction start to take a pitcher from merely having stuff into being an ace. Firstly, one must understand the data and body alignment behind their own pitch shapes. This is the first abstraction layer – the layer of self. Next, there is the layer of “other”, which involves tunneling pitches and pitch sequencing per at-bat. Finally, there is the outermost abstraction layer: the game. This is where your tunneling and sequencing occurs between at-bats and across games. Arrighetti had become a fast student of the first abstraction layer, as indicated by his RPMs, his movement, and his ability to get chase. These all indicate both raw talent but also a dedication to the data that drives development.
As for the last two abstraction layers, it takes time and willingness. When asked about his ace performance against the Phillies’ lineup on Wednesday, Espada pivoted to saying Arrighetti’s successful outings have been because of getting 0-1 on hitters. That’s important, as it opens up Arrighetti’s devastating, horizontally-breaking sweeper to put away hitters, but I tend toward Joe’s first analysis in the Baltimore game from Arrighetti’s previous start. By logging the approach of a specific hitter across at-bats and across games, taking into context your pitch sequence to them, you gain leverage in confusing the hitter. You can use their short-term memory against them by becoming a long term memory repository of sequences and pitch shapes.
To get an idea about the pitcher’s thought process in the last two abstraction layers, here’s a mound self-dialogue of Trevor Bauer’s, talking through why he’s going to throw a curveball on 0-1 because of both the global context of the hitter’s tendencies and the local context of their first plate appearance that game. I strongly urge you to watch it; it’s clipped at the right spot – no time investment. With these contexts taken into account, the concept of pitch tunneling becomes more valuable. It’s no longer just concealing your intent, pitch to pitch, it’s using a hitter’s memory of their previous at-bat against them, as well. Here’s a diagram of pitch tunneling:
Baseball Prospectus
Tunneling pitches just means using the previous pitch as a trojan horse. “Sharing a tunnel” means if you throw a breaking pitch that will miss a bat from the same release point and at the same location as a fastball you threw before it, the hitter may pick it up as you are going back to the same pitch. In his FanGraphs interview with David Laurila, Arrighetti admitted his use of the tunneling approach: “I like to call it ‘throwing it from the basement’ as opposed to throwing from above your head. That’s where you find the vertical approach that is more down to up”. To him, this is how he gets around not throwing 100 MPH, nor having the “rising” fastball (minimal vertical break) of, say, a Cristian Javier. His manager, Joe Espada, discussed how Arrighetti has had to mature as a pitcher and really do his homework on opposing lineups. I believe that this has raised his game to a higher abstraction level, giving him and his natural stuff an edge in terms of strategy.
We’ll be tracking more pitcher profiles here at Painting Corners, and are eager to hear feedback on what you think makes an ace an ace. Sometimes, just looking at the number of a Baseball Savant page – no matter how red-hot they scream – deprives us of valuing a pitcher correctly. Their mental approach and becoming a student of the at-bat, the game, and the opposing lineups they face gives them an advantage. Position players have the next half inning to think about, and have the numbers against them; failure is more common than not, so their desire for success is increased per unit of at-bat. Their success window only gets more narrow as they get further back in the count. Pitcher’s, on the other hand, have all week to research their next start and the lineup they’re facing. Profiling, strategy, tunneling – these are the advanced tools of data and analytics – not just the numbers on the TrackMan. In turn, these are the traits that grow no-name arms into the aces of today.
MLB – Farm System Rankings 2024 Season
Fan Graphs – Astros Pitching Prospect Spencer Arrighetti is All in With Analytics
Chron – With familiar face behind the plate, Spencer Arrighetti has best start
Instagram Reel - Joe Espada discusses Astros 10-0 win against the Phillies
YouTube - Trevor Bauer talking through at bat
*Stats are as of 8/29/2024
