Examining Jon Lester

I recently posed a poll question to the Fire Brand readers. The question had to do with what the Red Sox should do with Jon Lester if healthy. The results are:

If Jon Lester is fully healthy, which he says he is, what should the Red Sox do?

* Find a place for him in the majors as a starter.

9% of all votes

* Hey, what about making him a reliever? Maybe even the closer!?

11% of all votes

* He needs to go to AAA and prove himself and act as the first starter up.

65% of all votes

* We have the depth, let him spend most of the season in AAA.

15% of all votes

It seems clear here that that many people feel that he needs to start in Triple-A, but be the first option to come up and fill in for an injured pitcher.

If fully healthy, this sounds like the best option. As for that healthy part? It looks like he is.

“I think I’ve more or less surprised people,” Lester said. “They expect to see a cancer patient instead of me.” Lester’s weight is back on, he’s in shape, and he’s demanded to be on the same schedule and regimen as the rest of the Sox starting pitchers. So far, Lester has kept up his end of the bargain by coming down to Fort Myers early (along with Josh Beckett, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Jonathan Papelbon and others) to prove that he is truly back in the groove. (For Kiss fans, that’s back in the Boston groove, not New York groove.)

So far, so good. Lester is throwing, running and lifting without any problems. While it’s still only mid-February and Lester may very well start to tire or have his progress ramped back by the conservative Red Sox staff, it looks as if the cancer never happened (minus the shaved head).

How do the Red Sox progress from here? If Jon Lester is fully healthy and goes through Spring Training without any problems, how should the Red Sox approach their quandary of seven starters (I include Kyle Snyder in the equation)?

First, a look back on Lester’s 2006:

In Pawtucket, he went 3-4 in 46.2 IP of a 2.70 ERA with a WHIP of 1.46.

In Boston, he went 7-2 in 81.1 IP of a 4.76 ERA with a WHIP of 1.65.

The ERA is fine at both levels. What is not fine is that WHIP. I fully believe that WHIP is a valued indicator of a pitcher’s success (perhaps even more so than ERA). It stands to reason that a good indicator of a pitcher’s success is how many batters reach base in an inning. WHIP answers that question. For the uninitiated, it’s Walks plus Hits per Inning Pitched. A 1.65 WHIP means that Lester allowed 1.65 batters to reach base (discounting errors) each inning.

This is not good. The leader in WHIP for the majors last year was Johan Santana at 1.00 with a 2.77 ERA. Second was Chris Carpenter at 1.07 with a 3.09 ERA. We have now established the baseline for excellence in WHIP. The following eight after Santana and Carpenter starts with Roy Halladay (1.10) and goes to Mike Mussina, Brandon Webb, Chris Young, Dave Bush, Roy Oswalt, C.C. Sabathia and Bronson Arroyo (1.19). WHIP is also a good indicator of if a pitcher had a lucky or unlucky season in my opinion, which is why fantasy leaguers should pay attention to Dave Bush and his undervalued 4.41 ERA.

Dave Bush had a 4.41 ERA despite allowing only 1.14 batters to reach base an inning, while Jon Lester rests at 4.76 with a 1.65 WHIP.

Now that we’ve established the baseline of good WHIPs and ERA correlation, lets look at Jon Lester’s mates in terms of WHIP. He belongs in the class of Rodrigo Lopez (1.55), Mark Redman, Paul Maholm and Joel Pineiro (yes, that one. The one with an identical 1.65 WHIP, dead last among pitching qualifiers).

See why I’m worried now? It’s not often a great pitcher can sustain such a high WHIP, and not often a pitcher with a low WHIP can sustain a high ERA.

Let’s look at the high and low WHIPs of pitchers in 2005, and their ERA/WHIP the following year:

LOW:

• Pedro Martinez’s 0.95 WHIP sent him to a 2.82 ERA. He finished at a 4.48 ERA with a 1.11 WHIP this past year. Even that small increase in WHIP sent his ERA soaring, which also had a lot to do with his shoulder breaking down and losing tremendous velocity.
• Johan Santana’s 0.97 WHIP sent him to a 2.87 ERA. He finished 2006 with a 1.00 WHIP and a 2.77 ERA.
• Roger Clemens’ 1.01 WHIP sent him to a shockingly low 1.87 ERA. In 2006, his WHIP ticked slightly to 1.04 and he had a 2.30 ERA. No big surprises here.
• Andy Pettitte had a 1.03 WHIP and finished with a sparkling 2.39 ERA. Due to injury problems, he went up to a 4.20 ERA and a 1.44 WHIP, perfect WHIP correlations.
• Jake Peavy rounds out 2005’s top five, checking in at a 1.04 WHIP and 2.88 ERA. In 2006, his ERA shot up to 4.09 with a corresponding WHIP jump to 1.23.

HIGH:

• Jose Lima “led” the majors in high WHIP with 1.66 in 2005 and had a vomit-inducing 6.99 ERA. In 2006 was not much better, as he posted a 2.02 WHIP in a cup of coffee with a 9.87 ERA.
• Jamey Wright checked in at a 1.65 WHIP in 2005, posting a 5.46 ERA. In 2006, his ERA went down to 5.19, with a WHIP of 1.48.
• Jeff Francis had a 1.62 WHIP as a young lefty with occasional control problems (like our own Lester). He finished 2005 with a 5.68 ERA, but busted through in 2006 with a 4.16 ERA and 1.29 WHIP.
• Kip Wells was fourth-worst at a 1.57 WHIP, 5.09 ERA. In 2006, his WHIP was 1.85 and his ERA 6.50.
• Zack Grienke is our last look. A 1.56 WHIP in 2005 sent him to a 5.80. He only pitched 6.1 IP this year, but had a 1.58 WHIP of a 4.26 ERA and won’t do anything in my opinion until that WHIP goes down.

Do we all see the WHIP correlations now and why Jon Lester’s 1.65 WHIP frightens me?

Let’s return to Jon Lester’s statistics, this time packaged in a nice table to see if we can learn anything else about this 1.65 WHIP. Maybe we’ll see that he can improve, or that this 1.65 WHIP is really concerning.

What do we see here? His hits per nine innings skyrocketed from about eight hits per complete game to ten, not too surprising for a young left-hander who made his major league debut. His strikeouts per nine innings also dipped from about eight in a complete game to a rounded seven. The surprising thing here is that his walks actually ticked downward slightly from 4.82 to 4.76 per nine innings. This may be due to major league batters jumping at the ball a bit, a rookie without completely utterly electric stuff will cause batters to try to swing their way on base. The more the league learns Lester and learns just how good he can be, the more they will get patient and make Lester get them out instead of vice-versa.

Lastly, his WHIP. As you can see, I posted his 2005 AA numbers with Portland as a comparison, because he had a 1.15 WHIP. he shaved his walks a full point in 2005, his strikeouts were as high as a rounded off 10 per nine innings, his hits per nine sank to 6.92, and his ERA was 2.61, reasonable for a 1.15 ERA. His ERA for Pawtucket was 2.70 for a 1.46 WHIP .

What needs to change? Well, Lester doesn’t exactly need to rediscover his 2005 K abilities, as they show a pretty reasonable adjustment as he progresses to each level. The same goes for hits per nine innings, although they jump a bit higher than I’d like, but as he learns the league, he may be able to temper those hits. He’s never going to be known as a control artist, but Lester can’t keep walking four or five batters a game and expect to be a front of the rotation guy. Right now he would be a #4 or a #5 in any other rotation, and for Boston he’s #6 (or even #7, if Snyder is ahead of him).

Let’s compare Lester’s 2006 in Boston with Curt Schilling’s 2006. There’s something interesting about Schilling, as he gave up 220 hits in 204 IP:

Looking at the comparison, Curt Schilling blows Lester away in terms of strikeouts to walks ratio. Schilling gives up close to a negligible amount of hits (prorated, Lester would have given up roughly 225 hits, or five more than Schilling) but his saving grace is not the ability to strike out eight batters a game as compared to Lester’s 6.64. No, it’s the amount of walks per nine innings. Lester coughs up 4.76, Schilling keeps it down at 1.24. No surprise then, that his WHIP is a nice and clean 1.22. It’s the walks that hold that WHIP down, even as Schilling’s H/9 rise: It was 7.71 H/9 in 2003 for Arizona. In Boston’s 2004 campaign, it was 8.18. In his injury-marred 2005 season, it was 11.67, and he “recovered” to 9.71.

It’s fine if Lester maintains the current H/9 and K/9 rates that he does. It’s the walks that are hindering his development into a star pitcher. Lester is either going to have to learn how to control the ball and keep it over the plate while also avoiding his hits allowed spiking. If Lester wants to get away with giving up 4.76 walks per nine innings, he’s going to have to start striking out a lot more batters and giving up a lot less hits than he is.

Can it be done? Sure, Jeff Francis did it. He took his H/9 from 11.17 to 8.46, his BB/9 from 3.43 to 3.12 and his K/9 from 6.27 to 5.29 (the bad part). His WHIP, however, sank from 1.62 to 1.29.

Send Jon Lester to Triple-A, let him hone his control in Triple-A, and then bring him back for his triumphant return to Fenway Park where he steps on the mound at Fenway Park for the first time since August 18 (lost 14-11 to the Yankees) and starts a streak of stepping on Fenway Park’s mound as a member of the Red Sox for at least the next 15 years.