Everyone can learn something from Jake Arrieta’s no-hitter

Jake Arrieta threw another no-hitter. We were just here! I was watching him pitch a no-hitter, I had opinions, and then I woke up and he was throwing a no-hitter again. Gary Ryerson was there trying to sell me insurance, and ... why, tomorrow, I bet I’ll wake up and he’ll throw a no-hitter, and this will never end.

A Groundhog Day scenario would be a very creative way for the Cubs to avoid winning a World Series. I’ll give them that.

But, no, it’s a different day, a different game, a different season, and Arrieta is merely remarkable again. You’ll spend the next decade dreaming about the big-armed, erratic young pitcher in your favorite team’s system because of Arrieta, and he’ll never be Arrieta. It’s unfair to you, and it’s unfair to the big-armed, erratic young pitcher. There’s only one Arrieta, and the Cubs have him.

Which means it’s time to explore the no-hitter and what it means to you, me, the Cubs, and the Reds. No-hitters don’t have to mean anything, but you don’t have to squint if you want to peel back some layers on this one.

I don’t know, a guy who throws really hard with great command and breaking stuff threw well enough to prevent the other team -- a very bad one, mind you -- from getting a hit. Even though hits are the sort of things that just happen when you make contact, occasionally even miserable contact, which is what the Reds were doing for a lot of the game.

No-hitters are, again, a combination of five parts skill and one part luck. That’s what baseball is, too. Every team that ever wins a championship is five parts skill and one part luck. If you’re complaining that they’re four parts skill and two parts luck, you’re haggling over the fine print on the third page of the contract.

You can’t even imagine. Not just the no-hitter. Jake Arrieta in general. He’s a fully formed leviathan, the Platonic idea of a No. 1 pitcher. This is just confirmation of what Cubs fans were already aware of, but there’s something more to it. What’s the Cubs’ official motto?

Nothing good ever happens to the Cubs.

Yeah, that. And -- checking, I’m not sure if that’s the official motto, but stay with it -- this is something good happening to the Cubs. Again. As if it’s supposed to happen, as if we’re supposed to expect it, which we are.

Do you know what it takes to go a century without winning a championship? It takes an absence of found money. The Royals struck gold with Edinson Volquez last year. The Giants got it from their entire infield the year before. The Red Sox had it with David Ortiz for over a decade, and they especially enjoyed it the year before that. Every championship team has found money.

Here’s the Cubs’ latest, greatest example. They’ve found players like this in the bushes before. They got Fergie Jenkins for a pair of pitchers who were over 35. They picked Greg Maddux in the second round, right after the Mariners chose Mike Christ. They signed a 27-year-old Ryan Dempster, just released by an awful Reds team, and he turned out to be an excellent closer before he was the ace on a 97-game winner.

Yeah, but this is different. And that’s not a glib, manufactured way to avoid reality. Every team needs free money? Well, here’s the best example in the majors right now. And it’s not exactly free. The Orioles didn’t just let a fully formed ace go because they screwed up the paperwork. Arrieta was a mess. The Cubs figured him out. They just took a bad pitcher and chipped away all of the parts that didn’t look like an ace. Or they used scouting and acumen and organizational philosophy to refine a pitcher with latent talent.

Still, he’s not just an ace on a useless team. He’s an ace on a team that suddenly has all of the talent. They’re not Vegas darlings because a bunch of yokels are betting on a lark. They have so much talent right now. They’re winning a bunch, and that’s even though their hitters weren’t hitting a bunch before Thursday night. This is a team that would be in desperate need of an ace if he didn’t exist.

And here he is, existing. If you needed proof, here he is, no-hitting a division rival. I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m pretty sure the past doesn’t mean an overstuffed outhouse when it comes to the specific fortunes of individual baseball teams. The next World Series winner will need a story like Arrieta. The Cubs kind of have the best version.

Well, poop.

Maybe the language is stronger, but do you know what it takes to be a Reds fan right now? It takes a special type of bad-team perseverance that you wear like a merit badge. It’s looking at Scott Schebler and wondering if he’s the next Reds thing. It’s letting the three-hour losses wash over you, and it’s finding the positives in the four-hour losses.

Take a moment to think what it’s like to be a fanatic of a bad team. An absolute fanatic, who still checks in with the blogs, still has opinions on Twitter, still gets mad when the closer blows a save. It’s beautiful. It’s slightly rational hope for a team playing an irrational game in slightly rational world. The Reds aren’t good now, but we’ll keep annoying you with the truism that it takes three years for a deplorable team to be a contender in laboratory settings.

The 2003 Tigers, then, are one of baseball’s greatest motivational posters. You can look at every team in the majors -- no matter how bad -- and know that it’s possible for them to be interesting in two years, and in the World Series in three. Any team. The clear ace of the 2003 Tigers, Nate Cornejo, had a 4.67 ERA, striking out 46 of the 842 batters he faced. Their former top prospect, Eric Munson, was one of the worst defensive third basemen the game has ever seen over a full season. Chris Mears led the team with five saves. They didn’t have a particularly good farm system.

They made the World Series within the next three seasons.

The Reds have way more going for them than that. They have a bounty of prospects from an offseason sell-off. They have younger players doing things in the upper levels, younger players doing things in the majors, and stars on the active roster. If you complain about Joey Votto, I’ll cut you.

That doesn’t mean this isn’t a downer. The bad Reds were no-hit by the good Cubs, and because of the unbalanced schedule, they’ll see each other 300 times over the next two years, give or take. But Reds fans get to look at Arrieta and think, yeah, soon. Soon they’ll have their own. It might take three years, or it might take 20, but focus on the three. They’ll make a nothing trade for -- /pulls name out of hat -- Tommy Hunter, and he’ll be an unexpectedly dominant force in their championship run.

It just sucks right now.

That’s the no-hitter of Jake Arrieta through different partisan lenses. It was meaningless, slightly meaningful, and entirely meaningful, depending on your perspective. Most importantly, that was some right fine starting pitching. Jake Arrieta is good at that.