An intriguing ground ball rate and three years of control were enough for the Pittsburgh Pirates to obtain Jon Niese. What comprises the left-hander’s makeup as a starting pitcher?
Several weeks have passed since Neil Walker was traded to the New York Mets for starting pitcher Jon Niese.
The move still resonates strongly with many Pittsburgh Pirates observers, often serving for many as the fulcrum of a questionable off-season.
We’ve analyzed the move previously, and from all angles. For the latest in our “Pittsburgh Pirates Deep Dive” series, we are going to look at the trends that are seen when analyzing Niese purely by past performance.
For this breakdown, I took a look at Niese’s game logs for the entire 2015 season. This includes all of his regular season appearances – 29 starts and three relief outings. By looking at the entire snapshot of a full season, I expect to be able to easily identify any developing trends. When he was acquired, the book on Niese was that he had good groundball-producing ability and a varied pitch mix. Two of those pitches – a sinking fastball and a cutting version – saw groundball rates above 60 percent in 2015.
Despite those promising figures, Niese is also known as an up-and-down pitcher. Indeed, one can easily point to his SO/W (strikeout-to-walk ratio) over the past four seasons as evidence of his uneven nature. In 2012, Niese posted a 3.16 strikeout-to-walk ratio, the high-water mark for his career. Considering that Niese is not a pitcher known for his strikeout ability, this figured showed excellent control. In 2013, it fell to 2.19. It swelled back to 3.07 in ’14 only to see it drop to 2.05 last season.
Although his stikreout ability and control might have fluctuated, his ERA remained somewhat steady, with figures below 3.75 for three straight years (2012-2014) before spiking to 4.13 in 2015. What caused such a jump? More pointedly for the Pirates, is the causation of that spike in ERA something that could become a trend?
For that answer, I decided to look at the game scores for every Niese appearance last year. If you’re not familiar with Game Score, it is a metric system devised by Bill James – specific to pitchers – that aims to measure the strength of a pitcher’s performance. As per the Wikipedia explanation:
I specifically decided to use Game Score as my main criterion because it encapsulates many characteristics that the Pirates, or any team, value in their starting pitching. Going deep into games and keeping runners off base no matter the method are rewarded, giving us a great indicator for a pitcher’s effectiveness.
Let’s start this deep dive by looking at the trends that are seen during several of Niese’s better 2015 starts.
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