It appears I have a growing unhealthy obsession with the pitching of Jon Lester. Ever since my last article where I looked at the young lefthander’s struggles with throwing strike one and the impact that has on his ability to get outs, I wanted — no, needed — to know more.
Since that article, Lester has pitched twice; once against the Texas Rangers and then again on three days rest against the Los Angeles Angels while filling in for an injured Josh Beckett.
Lester met both appearances with no decisions while pitching fairly, going 6 1/3 innings in his first outing while giving up ten hits and three runs. In his second outing with only three days rest he still managed to hang in for five innings, but he was once again hit pretty hard — nine hits and four runs.
Neither of these starts did anything to change my perceptions of Jon Lester’s struggles. Yet neither of these starts provided any further detailed understanding of what Lester should be focusing on correcting.
Fire Brand commenter Gerry pretty well sums up my current feelings towards Jon Lester:
“Jon Lester is a riddle wrapped in enigma.”
Why does someone with such obvious talent have such difficulty getting ahead of batters when he knows that his ultimate success is wrapped up in doing just that?
One of the great things about being a baseball fan these days is that there are no shortage of tools with and lenses through which we can attempt to answer these questions if we are so motivated. In this case, given my pure frustration with Jon Lester’s inability to stay ahead of hitters (don’t even get me started on my next case study – Daisuke Matsuzaka), I am so motivated.
One of the newer tools available to amateur analysts is a pitch by pitch account of pitch type (i.e. fastball, change up, etc), velocity, movement, and end result (i.e. ball, swinging strike, hit, foul, etc). This tool is called PITCHf/x and it has a wealth of hard core data about what pitches a pitcher uses, in what situations, and what comes as a result.
As is the case with most reams of baseball data, once they are released to the public enterprising analysts with a modicum of database and programming ability look to make this data useful. That is exactly what Josh Kalk did.
“PITCHf/x by sportvision is a system of tracking the ball as it travels to home plate with two cameras. The cameras take a bunch of pictures of the ball in flight and then sends the data to MLB who puts it online for users to see. The data is in a messy form and needs corrections and pitch classifications before the data can really be used. That is why I made the web based tool for anyone to use.” – Josh Kalk, Bornbybits.com
The tool can be found here and the moment I saw it, I had one thought; Jon Lester.
Finally I had a history (at least for 2008) of pitch data by count and situation to dig further into in an attempt to isolate the cause of young Jon’s struggles early in counts.
I dutifully plugged in a bunch of parameters to the PITCHf/x tool and exported the tables to Excel so I could look at things on a percentage basis whenever possible. I always find comparative data much easier to spot trends and anomalies through percents and ratios than in absolute number terms.
First I wanted to get an understanding of what types of pitches Jon Lester throws in specific counts early in at bats and how that compares to the full distribution of his arsenal across pitches.
This table represents how Lester varies his pitch type early in counts vs. at large. The cells shaded green represent counts where Lester leans on that pitch type and red where he shies away from that pitch in that situation.
Lester has a tendency to throw fastballs to start batters off. Nearly 60% of his first pitches to batters are fastballs. It would appear that he stays away from his slider to start batters off which makes sense as it is a pitch that usually needs some set up to give it context in an at bat. I did not expect to see his slider show as a “go to” pitch when behind in counts. Also interesting to note that Lester is more likely to throw a curveball early or when ahead in counts.
Where this really gets interesting however is when you start to layer in the result of these pitches in different situations.
For example, Lester throws his fastball for strikes (swinging, looking, or foul) 41% of the time, for a ball 42%, in play for an out 11%, and 7% of all fastballs result in a hit.
Well, now we are starting to see something interesting. Lester’s command of his fastball isn’t consistent by situation. It appears that Lester, whether it be by trying to be too fine or overthrowing, has much less control of his fastball to start a count or when behind.
If we know that he starts 60% of his batters out with a fastball and on 0-0 counts he is much more inconsistent with his fastball than other situations, it would appear that therein lies the culprit to Jon Lester’s inability to get ahead and to stay ahead of batters.
So do we have any data that tells us “what” Lester might be doing differently from fastball to fastball across these different counts?
The good news is that we actually do! PITCHf/x data also captures velocity and movement on pitches as well. In this case “break x” is telling us that Lester’s fastball moves away from right handed batters about 5.59 inches and rises 10.65 inches. His average fastball is 92.28 mph. It looks like in counts when he is more likely to throw balls, his fastball has a little more upward movement on it but on the whole, there isn’t a material amount of difference in trajectory or speed.
When we chart the location of the fastballs that he misses on 0-0 counts, you can see that he is nibbling on the lower left and upper right corners.
However, on a 0-1 count where he is more prone to throw his fastball for strikes/induce foul balls, you can see Lester is much less likely to nibble on the corners.
In my opinion, and I fully plan on digging into this further as the sample sizes grow and as I get more comfortable with PITCHf/x data, it looks like Jon Lester is primarily a victim of “trying” to throw strikes that are on the boundaries of the zone. If he were to trust his natural movement and velocity a little more and get a little more of the plate early in counts I think he would be able to start to pitch ahead of batters more often, eliminating long at-bats and getting a higher percentage of outs.
For Jon Lester to be an effective #3 starter for the Boston Red Sox this season, solving this “riddle wrapped in an enigma” is going to be paramount to the team’s overall success.
If you haven’t yet, please grab a coffee, sit down and dig into this week’s episode of the Fireside Chats Podcast where Frank is down in the dumps about the Yankees and Paul confesses his man-love for Jacoby Ellsbury. Take a listen here!
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