Pittsburgh Pirates Deep Dive: Jon Niese

Niese’s best start for 2015 had to be his June 6th start against the Giants. Needing only 81 pitches to get through eight innings, Niese was dominant without having much strikeout ability. Punching out just four batters on the day, Niese relied on the ground-ball to limit his opposition to just three hits with no free passes.

His final line that day resulted in a game score of 78, his best of the season.

Below we will see a table of his pitch usage in that start coupled with whiff and ground-ball percentage rates for each pitch.

The data here shows us that in this particular start, Niese did not have blow-away strikeout stuff. In fact, out of 57 strikes, only seven were of the swing-and-miss variety. This is nothing new with Niese, as he averaged just 4.9 swinging strikes over his 33 appearances in 2015.

Let’s now take a look at Niese’s second-best start of the year. With a game score of 70, Niese’s outing on August 4th against the Marlins found the left-hander slightly less efficient than his June 6th outing, but still good. His line of 7IP/4H/1BB/1ER/6K is notable in that those six strikeouts were a season-high in a year that saw him post just 113 punch-outs.

Here now is the pitch data from this start:

Nearly jumping off of the page is the lack of sliders in Niese’s best starts. Judging by opponent’s .440 slugging percentage against the pitch in 2015, that might not be much of a surprise. Also seen among Niese’s best starts is an effective-if-not-overpowering four-seam fastball. Niese did not have heat in 2015, as the fastball averaged just 90.04 mph in 2015, and has never topped 91 at any point in his career.

Not pictured here but equally as curious is Niese’s tendency to use the fastball when he has batters in any count with two strikes. In an X-2 count, Niese throws the fastball 27.01 percent of the time, nearly a full seven percent more than the runner-up cut fastball at 20.94 percent.

For Niese to put batters away with two strikes, he relies on the four-seam fastball, which may account for the high groundball rates seen in his best starts. Surely, he needs to exercise a greater deal of precision than most.

Now, let’s look at the not-so-good outings from 2015.

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