Arrieta has been ... ok this year. Not good, but not awful. He's kept the Phillies within reach in all of his games, though hes not going deep enough, and within reach is relative given the pen. If we had a shut down pen we'd have gone to extras in two of his losses, and lost by one run in todays game. Obviously its unrealstic to expect the pen to pitch 4-5 shut out innings
Four games so far:
@ Yankees 5 IP, 3 ER 4 K 0 BB
v Braves 6 IP, 0 ER 6 K 1 BB
v Orioles 4.2 IP 4 ER 4 K 1 BB
@ Red Sox 4.1 IP 4 ER 3 K 4 ER
His underlying metrics before todays game look decent, FIP of 3.40 and a BABIP of .349. On the other hand Statcast indicates that his hard hit rate has increased from 37.6% to 46.7%, but in this small sample thats equivalent to an additional 1.3 hard hit balls per game. One good performance would bring that back in line with last years numbers.
Today he didn't have command of his pitches but the zone was all over the place too. I think that was probably more of an issue for the hitters though?
Its also not like we have a bunch of options waiting to come in and take his place. If we could swap him for a similar player struggling with another team then sure, but as it is hes an alright 3rd/4th option behind Nola and Wheeler.
Looking at the hard hit rate for our other starters is mostly a positive story by the way. Among qualified starters Hun Jin Ryu is the leader with 23.5%. Zach Wheeler is 11th with 28.4%. Howard and Eflin don't appear to be qualified but at 31.3% and 32.4% they would both be in the top 25 of they qualified. Both are having bad luck with BABIP too so hopefully we see some regresson there over the rest of the season.
Vinny is getting crushed at 61%, and it wasn't like he was great last year (40.1%),.
Interestingly Nola seems to be having a lot of luck. His hard hit rate is 40.4%, 44th among qualified starters, and his BABIP is .204, so he should probably expect to see some more hard hit balls drop for hits going forward.
https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=sta&lg=all&qual=y&type=24&season=2020&month=0&season1=2020&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&startdate=2020-01-01&enddate=2020-12-31&sort=11,a
