Jake Arrieta

I've caught one.

Uh, thank you, Jake Arrieta, and I always thought it would be this amazing moment for me that I just navigated the line-up.

Like, I saw this, I saw that.

It was nothing like that.

Jake Arrieta shook me off so much, 'cause he felt like he didn't have control of his secondary, he later told me, so he went to a lot of just two-seamers.

He said this two-seamer was working, um, was really sinking, and he felt like he had the most control over that, uh, and the Reds just beat it into the ground.

Uh, I remember being so nervous, 'cause it was like 16 to nothing, 16 to one, something like that, so all I was thinking about was this no-hitter, and I really felt like Jake walked me through that.

I don't think I've seen this player on people's lists, and so I am proud of that.

And so number four, I put Jake Arrieta in 2015.

And when you hear these numbers, I think you're gonna go, "Oh yeah, he should be fourth." 1.77 ERA, .185 opponents' batting average, 236 strikeouts in 229 innings.

Led the league in wins, led the league in complete games, led the league in shutouts.

Like, well, it's not a one-man show.

And that's, I think, the issue, right? It's almost gotten to that point where, kind of like Jake Arrieta in 2015, where you're looking around like, okay, well, we need you to do this because, you know, hey, and if you don't, then we don't know what to do with it.

I don't know, but that was a rough one.

Was there any doubt in

He's got the sixth highest average VLO on the Pirates.

And this is a guy who was throwing, you know, 98 – So that was – he obviously still has a ton of stuff, but he just – he does not – when you see Mizorowski out there or when you see Scoble, like those guys scare you and those guys you just feel like, okay, just please get past him.

Skeens doesn't have that same kind of monolithic – He used to be like the 2015 Jake Arrieta where you're like, okay, this is going to be a loss.

Cool, just win the other two games in the series.

I don't like the trust, the amount of trust that Craig Council has been giving to Matthew Boyd late in the season.

he's treating him like prime Jake Arrieta, setting him back out for the eighth inning.

You know, with 85-ish pitches, he walks leadoff hitter in the sixth, and he just keeps on letting him go back out there to the tune of, he got another three batters after that leadoff walk in the sixth inning.

It went walk, single, double, strikeout, take him out, and then Aaron Savali comes in, eventually gives up the game-winning hit and unties the game 4-2.

And we've gone a bit Harry Hill.

Which was better? Jake Arrieta's 2015 Cy Young season or Pete Crowe Armstrong's 2026 MVP season? There's only one way to find out.

Yeah, and it's for us to goons to chat about it.

TV Burp would have been a very different show if that was how he ended that segment.

He's always been very good and he was unbelievable at the start of last season.

But since June or so, he has just gone to a level that we have not really seen that often.

in the sport in the last like 25 years and when it comes down to the cubs and this is why this came to mind is it's very clear that i think that he is currently having the best um header outfield um position player season that we've probably seen in our lifetime And that then led me to the question, well, is it the best season by a player that we've seen in our lifetime as Cubs fans? And the one that came to mind, obviously, is the pitching season from Jake Arrieta in 2015.

And I was driving, for context, I went to a stag last weekend in Cork.

Andrew McCutcheon continued being Andrew McCutcheon.

pirates won 17 games in september and cut the cardinals lead down to just two games normally that's the kind of finish that wins a division instead they ran into one problem the cardinals never completely collapsed so the pirates ended with 98 wins the second best record in major league baseball and all that earned them was a one game wild card showdown with a 97-win Cubs team led by Jake Arrieta.

It's one of the best seasons in franchise history and one of the cruelest reminders that sometimes great isn't enough.

Yeah.