Former Orioles pitching coach Rick Adair talks about Jake Arrieta

Jake Arrieta takes the mound tonight and the knife turns.

Orioles fans must cringe as Arrieta gets the assignment for the Cubs in the National League wild card game in Pittsburgh. He's 22-6 with a 1.77 ERA in 33 starts, with four complete games, three shutouts and a no-hitter. He's exactly what the Orioles thought he would become after drafting him in the fifth round in 2007 out of TCU.

(Side note: The Orioles took right-hander Tim Bascom in the fourth round out of Central Florida because they didn't want to risk losing him and were confident that Arrieta would still be on the board. They gave Arrieta, who hired Scott Boras as his adviser, a $1.1 million bonus that was well above slot. Bascom had some health issues and never pitched above the Double-A level, going 2-4 with a 3.72 ERA in 24 games, including five starts, with Bowie in his final season in 2013.)

You know the story. Arrieta was 20-25 with a 5.46 ERA in 69 games (63 starts) with the Orioles over parts of four seasons. They handed him the ball on opening day in 2012 and crossed their fingers. It just didn't work out.

With Arrieta finally out of chances and the Orioles searching for a veteran to stabilize the rotation, they traded him to the Cubs along with struggling reliever Pedro Strop on July 2, 2013 for starter Scott Feldman and catcher Steve Clevenger.

Arrieta was 1-2 with a 7.23 ERA in five starts with the Orioles before the trade, then went 4-2 with a 3.66 ERA in nine starts with the Cubs. And he just keeps getting better, as evidenced by his 12-1 record and 0.75 ERA in 15 second-half starts this year. If he doesn't win the Cy Young Award, he's going to finish an incredibly close second.

Rick Adair, one of Arrieta's former pitching coaches, has shouldered much of the blame for Arrieta's failures in Baltimore. A popular story is how Adair wouldn't let Arrieta throw his cutter, though it seems to lack important details. He tinkered with the deliveries of some younger pitchers and never seemed to fully connect with them, a list that also included Chris Tillman, Brian Matusz and Zach Britton.

Adair, reached by phone today, said he's thrilled by Arrieta's emergence in Chicago. He also noted how Arrieta underwent surgery late in the 2011 season to remove a fibrous mass in his right elbow - similar to a bone spur, but softer - which led to the decision to scrap the cutter.

"When you take something out that big, and there was a lot of discussion whether to do it or not because the integrity of the elbow was in question taking out a mass that big," Adair said. "It was somewhere between like a golf ball and a walnut or whatever. When you do that kind of surgery on an elbow, the last thing that comes is a guy's feel. Jake had always worked around the ball. He didn't have flexibility in that elbow, he had pain, and he did things in his delivery to compensate so that elbow wouldn't swell up. He would be great on the side, but you'd get in game situations and it just didn't work with all the adrenaline and the emotional spikes and all that kind of stuff.

"I think the biggest thing is his delivery is better than it was. You had him getting to the point where his elbow was real good and it allowed him to improve his delivery without compensating for pain or tightness or whatever. And he's actually getting the ball to go in on right-handers and away from left-handers better now, and he didn't do that before. He'd pull/jerk a lot of balls, and again, I think a lot of it had to do with the mass that was in there and then taking it out.

"He just didn't have a feel. When the adrenaline gets going, there are things that change and he just didn't have the same feel that he should have. That's the biggest thing. Plus, you've got the different environment. There's a lot of things you could point at, but I think the biggest thing is the elbow situation."

Adair, who remains out of baseball since taking a leave of absence in August 2013 but has talked to a few teams about getting back into the game, said he doesn't know whether Arrieta would have reached his potential with the Orioles.

"Sometimes, a different voice helps," he said. "Jake had been in the organization for seven or eight years. He's one of those guys who I think everything fell into place for him in Chicago, bottom line. I told him one time, 'You've got better stuff than Felix (Hernandez).' He had as good of stuff as I've ever seen, but it just didn't translate into the games at times."

Using the cutter again certainly has benefitted Arrieta, who can dominate hitters with an assortment of pitches.

"That had to do with the elbow," Adair said. "When you're taking that kind of mass out of your elbow and you're a guy who's always worked around the ball, you're trying to get to where you can get the ball to go the other way, and the cutter wasn't ideal for that.

"I wasn't as opposed to it as some other people were. We tried to get him to use his curveball, tried to get him to use his changeup more, because he definitely needed something to go away from left-handers. Everything always seemed to work into left-handers and away from right-handers. I think the elbow was a big issue."

Asked to describe his relationship with Arrieta, Adair replied, "We kind of butted heads a little bit."

"I love him," Adair continued. "He's a little bit stubborn, which I love stubborn players, but there were times when he wouldn't show up on time and you'd have to kind of get on his (butt) a little bit, but I think the world of Jake. I'm so happy for him."

During a conference call earlier today with TBS analysts Gary Sheffield and Pedro Martinez, I asked the former major league slugger and the Hall of Fame pitcher whether Arrieta is the classic "change of scenery" guy who never would have blossomed in Baltimore.

"The bottom line is the trade happened, it woke him up," Sheffield said. "He said, 'I need to get serious, I need to do something different.' If would have stayed in the same situation, I truly believe he would have stayed being the same pitcher.

"When you're in the same environment and you're getting the same results, then all of a sudden the trade happens, it wakes you up. 'OK, I've got to do something different, I've got to show them that this is going to be a bad loss for them.' He's out to prove something. You can tell in his attitude."

Martinez spoke about how some pitchers just "find it, the right thing that clicks, the right pitching coach, the right manager." And that's how a former team can end up looking wrong.

"I don't think it was a problem for him, the scenery," Martinez said. "I think it was just a matter of how patient you wanted to be with Arrieta. He was a late bloomer. Watching him pitch, he always showed that he had the talent. And having the patience to fine-tune and finally get him to feel comfortable and understand what he wanted to do.

"Every year, I learned not during the season, I learned after the season. During the offseason I would reflect on all the things that I did. I think Arrieta had something happen to him during the offseason where his workout regiment changed, his mental approach to the game changed. He said, 'I'm not dealing any more with this mechanics things.'"

Martinez said the potential in Arrieta was "always there." The Orioles will vouch for it.

"He was able to fine-tune what he needed," Martinez said.