Walbert Urena is set to follow in Jered Weaver's footsteps and make Angels rookie history

The Los Angeles Angels' homegrown pitching drought has been well documented. The club has struggled to identify and develop young starters over the past two decades, leading to some brutal results. The tide may be turning now, with a guy like Reid Detmers finally overcoming the odds to realize his potential.

Detmers is an encouraging development, but it sure took him a long way to reach this point. Even more rare for Los Angeles has been a young starter arriving in the majors and hitting the ground running. The same has not been the case for Walbert Urena.

The jury was out when Urena first debuted as a starter earlier this year, with his stuff being noted as plus, but his command coming into question. And while we'd certainly love fewer walks from the 22-year-old who currently owns a 12.3% walk rate, he has certainly proved that his overall performance is for real and his upside is much greater than originally thought.

In fact, Urena is on a historic pace. He's the first rookie starter with a shot at meeting at least 100 strikeouts and an ERA under 2.90 since Jered Weaver 20 years ago back in 2006.

Regardless of whether Walbert Urena matches Jered Weaver's rookie brilliance, the Angels have found a key piece

Weaver awed us during his rookie campaign and finished the year with 105 strikeouts and a 2.56 ERA over his 19 MLB starts in 2006. He'd end up anchoring the rotation for the better part of the next decade. The lanky right-hander certainly got the job done in a different way than Urena, whose arsenal is all about power over the finesse that Weaver made a career out of. With that said, Weaver is the gold standard for Angels' homegrown starters this century.

It's really been two decades since the Halos developed an arm that performed this well out of the gate, and Urena has a real shot at joining Weaver's exclusive club. He's already got the strikeouts down with 109 on the season. At 2.80, his current ERA would qualify, though he's had rough outings in two of his last three starts, posting a 4.73 ERA in that span. He won't be able to run out of gas and still meet the mark, basically.

There's almost a psychological element for an organization to finally be able to accomplish something after so much futility in the past, and that's where we are with Urena. Regardless of how the season ends, it's clear that he has front-of-the-rotation potential and the ability to perform against MLB competition immediately. The Angels haven't had that for ages. Now, with him and Detmers sharing a rotation, Los Angeles finally has two high-end starters that they grew in-house. If they don't trade Detmers in the offseason, suddenly there's a foundation for a good starting rotation.

With George Klassen posting a 1.59 ERA over his last three starts, Ryan Johnson coming off a seven-shutout-inning performance against the Texas Rangers, and a host of talented arms like Tyler Bremner waiting in the wings in the minor leagues, we might be seeing the tide turn. In fact, this time next year, we might be hearing about the Angels having the best young starting rotation in the game.

It's funny how fortunes can still change in the blink of an eye, even when things have been so bad for so long. That's where we are today, on the verge of putting the starting pitching ineptitude behind us, finally, after all these years. That good feeling starts with, and is in no small part due to, the performance of Urena being the best from an Angels rookie since Weaver.

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