Oh boy is it good to have this Jake Odorizzi back.
Sometimes the knock people put on Odorizzi is that he doesn’t have a strikeout pitch. That’s not quite right. No, neither his curve, nor his slider, nor his cutter are elite swing-and-miss offerings. No, his splitter—“Thing #2”—isn’t the type of pitch (like Thing #1 was) that can stand on its own. But what this criticism misses is the rises on Odorizzi’s four-seam fastball, and the fact that when he can set it up, climbing the ladder with his four-seamer misses bats like very few other fastballs in the league can.