Jake Arrieta’s rise with Cubs not total surprise to Pirates’ Andrew McCutchen

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1:33 PM ET

PITTSBURGH — They played on the same team in the Arizona Fall League in 2007, and now one is an MVP and the other a Cy Young winner while their teams are two of the best in the National League.

Jake Arrieta and Andrew McCutchen will face each other Tuesday night for the first time since the NL wild-card game last fall, when Arrieta and the Chicago Cubs blanked McCutchen’s Pittsburgh Pirates 4-0. Arrieta has come a long way since the Phoenix Desert Dogs, according to McCutchen.

“He looks like a grown man,” McCutchen said Monday. “He’s really grown into his body. You can tell he’s put the work in. Physically, he’s there.”

Jake Arrieta will take the mound Tuesday night at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, the site of his greatest triumph — a complete-game shutout in last season’s NL wild-card game. Justin K. Aller/Getty Images

Like most who knew Arrieta back then, or when he made it to the majors, McCutchen agrees the righty’s stuff has always been elite. It was the rest of him that had to come along. McCutchen also noticed that Arrieta had a different motion when he played for the Baltimore Orioles; he wasn’t throwing across his body. It has been well-documented that when Arrieta arrived in Chicago, the Cubs let him be himself. Success soon followed.

“Sometimes you know yourself the best,” McCutchen said. “You give him that little bit, he’s going to take it. He had a tremendous season last year. … He’s basically on that path to duplicating what he did last year, if not doing better.”

Arrieta enters Tuesday’s game with a 5-0 record and 1.00 ERA. On Monday he won his third consecutive pitcher-of-the-month award, a first for a National League hurler. Now he takes the mound in Pittsburgh, where he had the greatest triumph of his career.

“It was short-lived,” Arrieta said, casually. “We moved on and had to play the Cardinals and the Mets, and our season was cut …

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