This One Change Will Allow Astros Rising Star To Produce Breakout Season

Over the last few years, the Houston Astros have turned into an impressive pitching factory.

There have been plenty of examples of pitchers who came to the organization from another team and saw an immediate uptick in success on the mound. 

Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton are two prime examples, and Hayden Wesneski is hoping to be the next after landing with his childhood favorite team as part of the Kyle Tucker blockbuster over the offseason.

Players who are fortunate enough to start their career with the organizaiton and move through the ranks of their minor league system benefit from that help right from the start.

One of the pitchers who is looking to captialzie on that opportunity is Spencer Arrighetti.

2024 was a pretty successful rookie campaign for the 2021 sixth-round pick. He made 29 appearances, 28 of which were starts, throwing 145 innings. His ERA wasn’t great at 4.53, but he showed flashes of brilliance at times.

If he can figure out how to achieve that kind of success on a more consistent basis, he will become a reliable top-of-the-rotation arm.

Those flashes are part of what makes Arrighetti a breakout candidate in 2025, in the opinion of Ryan Phillips of Sports Illustrated.

“Arrighetti has a mid-90s fastball with life and movement and a hard, biting slider that can be devastating to right-handed hitters. He looked dominant at times last year and should be more often this year,” he wrote.

What is going to help knock down that ERA and improve his overall effectiveness is improved control.

Arrighetti had 65 walks and a 4.0 BB/9 during his rookie campaign; across 253.1 minor league innings, his BB/9 was 4.4. It was a massive struggle for him during spring training, where he walked 16 batters in only 17 innings of work.

Harnessing his natural stuff and pinpointing pitches with regularity is only going to help improve his numbers across the board.

Being effectively wild has its perks, such as Arrighetti striking out 171 batters as a rookie for an impressive 10.6 K/9 ratio.

He has gotten things off on the right foot in his sophomore campaign, cruising through six innings of work against the New York Mets in his debut.

Arrighetti surrendered only one hit and two walks, resulting in a single earned run to go along with five strikeouts.

His emergence would give Houston a very strong trio, along with Framber Valdez and Hunter Brown, to keep pace with the other contenders in the AL West and the league as a whole.