Positives overshadow growing pains in Arrighetti's 1st start since early April

MIAMI -- The biggest takeaway for Astros manager Joe Espada from right-handed pitcher Spencer Arrighetti’s performance Wednesday was that he was healthy and back on the mound for the first time in four months. For a pitching rotation that’s been ravaged by injuries, adding Arrighetti back to the mix was a positive development.

Arrighetti was also able to take some positives away from his 86-pitch outing in the Astros' 6-4 loss to the Marlins in loanDepot park in which he gave up 11 hits and five runs and struck out five batters in 3 2/3 innings. He registered 16 swings and misses -- which are the fourth-most in his career -- and induced a lot of soft contact, though four infield singles proved to be as costly as the hard-hit rockets.

“I thought he kind of missed some pitches out over the plate,” Espada said. “A combination of that and some soft contact also. A little rusty there, but stuff-wise, I thought he was spinning the ball well. The shape of his pitches was pretty good.”

After Christian Walker slugged a two-run homer in the first, the Marlins came out swinging against Arrighetti, who was making his first start since April 5. Six of the first seven batters reached on base hits, pushing across three runs. Arrighetti limited the damage by striking out Troy Johnston and Graham Pauley to strand the bases loaded.

A leadoff double to Xavier Edwards in the second led to a run and Heriberto Hernandez hit a leadoff homer in the third to make it 5-2. The Astros had their chances offensively, but never recovered from the early damage done against Arrighetti.

“Gotta be better, you know?” Arrighetti said. “I want to give the team more of a chance. Obviously, it's not how I drew it up, but I feel like I made some pretty good pitches for the most part. Obviously, I had some mistakes in there, and a lot of weird baseball stuff, which kind of is how it is.”

Indeed. Arrighetti gave up seven balls hit harder than 94 mph, which accounted for five hits -- including a homer to Hernandez -- and a sac fly. But he also gave up four balls hit 77.2 mph or softer, and four of those were singles.

“Yeah, it's definitely frustrating, but I feel like I could have done a little bit of a better job to mitigate some of it, obviously, having it mainly all happen at once it's just not ideal,” Arrighetti said. “But I think there's a lot of things that I did all right. There's a lot of things I did pretty well, and there's a lot of things to work on. So in general, just got to flush it and get better.”

Coming off a solid rookie season in which he logged 145 innings in 29 games (28 starts), Arrighetti made two starts at the beginning of this year before he broke his right thumb when he was struck by a line drive during batting practice on April 7. He didn’t need surgery, but the recovery and build-up cost him four months of the season.

Arrighetti threw 11 innings in three Minor League rehab starts and admitted there were some growing pains in his return Wednesday. He mixed all his pitches, relying most on his four-seam fastball, curveball and cutter, which he threw mostly to the six lefties who were in Miami’s lineup. He averaged 93.3 mph on his four-seamer, hitting 94.4 mph.

“I mean, obviously there was a couple of mistakes in there, like fastballs that would stay over the middle, and I feel like I'm definitely better than that, and I know that I can command the ball better than that,” Arrighetti said. “So I wouldn't call it rusty necessarily, just kind of growing pains at getting back out on the mound.”

Arrighetti said the soft contact and the 16 whiffs (on 45 swings) give him something positive to build on in his next start, which will come at home next week against Boston.

“I feel like any time you're getting guys that miss that often, usually it's going to be going pretty well,” Arrighetti said. “I feel like that's [whiffs] up there with some of my better games in the big leagues, so I'm definitely encouraged by that. There was a lot of soft contact. Usually when that happens, it's gonna turn into outs, so yeah, I think there's definitely some good things that happened.”