John Lackey Gets Game One Because He Is the Cardinals

The St. Louis Cardinals won 100 regular season games this year and there’s no way to keep that from sounding impressive. They had a fantastic season. No matter how much their record benefited from good timing, the underlying performance was still great. Looking at their runs scored and allowed, they played like a team that would typically win 96 games. Looking at their expected runs scored and allowed, they played like an 89-win team. Depending on your preferred method for evaluating baseball teams, they were somewhere between very good and incredible.

It’s worth remembering that their best starting pitcher, and one of their best two or three players, didn’t making a single start for them after April 25. Adam Wainwright tore his Achilles and missed virtually the entire regular season and the team still won 100 games.

The Cardinals have depth, it’s one of their strengths. Wainwright went down and they were able to rely on Carlos Martinez, John Lackey, Michael Wacha, Lance Lynn, and Jaime Garcia for most of the 158 starts Wainwright was unable to provide. Those are interesting names. Martinez and Wacha were good prospects with high ceilings and Lynn has slowly caught on as an under-the-radar workhorse. The oft-injured Garcia has always been a quality arm during stretches in which he was able to use it. And of course, Lackey was the stalwart who’s been reliable since recovering from Tommy John three years ago.

In other words, while the Cardinals lost their only legitimate top-of-the-rotation arm before Memorial Day, it isn’t surprising that they had enough pitching to remain a contender wire to wire. Perhaps it is surprising that they prevented runs as well as they did (3.24 RA/G), but it’s not surprising that they were a good run prevention unit even without their ace.

Yet there is something odd about the league’s best regular season team kicking off the NLDS with John Lackey on the mound. In terms of raw performance, he was their team leader in WAR and had the second best ERA among the regular starters, but on a team with compelling arms and historic run prevention, they will call on Lackey — a grizzled veteran who is a decade removed from his heyday — for the most important start of the year. And doing so is an indication of exactly who the Cardinals were in 2015.

If Wainwright had time to build back up to full strength, he’d have been the guy, but with Wainwright in the pen and Martinez injuring his shoulder down the stretch, Mike Matheny picked Lackey as his “obvious” choice. The Cardinals’ skipper cited Lackey’s consistency and his familiarity with postseason baseball as justification for Lackey over Wacha, Garcia, and Lynn for the first game of the NLDS. Whether those reasons are perfectly sound, choosing Lackey certainly isn’t a outrageous choice by any stretch of the imagination. Lackey has pitched well this year and in the two years prior.

It is also interesting that Lackey will get the ball because his season has been the perfect embodiment of the path the Cardinals took to the best record in baseball.

From an objective, context-neutral standpoint, Lackey was a perfectly good pitcher in 2015, just like the Cardinals staff as a whole. The club’s staff finished 7th in baseball with a 91 FIP-, but had an otherworldly 77 ERA- to boot. Pretty much any time that happens, you are trained to look at a team’s BABIP. You assume they either got lucky on balls in play or they had an exceptional defense. The Cardinals ran a .297 BABIP in 2015, which is far from extraordinary.

Compare that to Lackey’s 93 FIP- and 72 ERA- with a .295 BABIP allowed. Mostly when we argue about pitcher quality, we argue about a pitcher’s ability to limit hits on balls in play, but that isn’t the story here. If the Cardinals and Lackey were getting weak contact, we might have a philosophical debate about it, but it would make sense. That’s not what’s happening. If you believe our defensive metrics, the Cardinals were a good defensive team, but they weren’t dramatically better than average as a unit. The story of the Cardinals and their Game One starter is a story of when things happened.

Ben Lindbergh provided a thorough accounting at the team level, but the story for Lackey is particularly interesting. There are two ways to look at his season, starting with his performance with the bases empty, men on base, and men in scoring position.

It’s common for pitchers to do worse with men on base, in part because the defense is often forced to play sub-optimally, but also because men may be on base more often when the pitcher is tired, facing better hitters, or facing lineups for the third and fourth time. It’s a pretty well accepted assumption. In 2015, the league produced a .308 wOBA with the bases empty, .320 wOBA with men on base, and .315 wOBA with men in scoring position. The story for Lackey was quite different.

You can also observe the same if you split his stats by leverage.

The pattern against the league is a little less clear because worse pitchers aren’t allowed to pitch in as many high-leverage spots, but at the very least, you wouldn’t expect pitchers to be universally better as the pressure dials up. The league wOBA split runs .314 for low leverage, .315 for medium leverage, and .303 for high leverage.

Lackey has been clearly better with men on base and in tight spots this year. Generally, we don’t think of this as a skill pitchers can deploy. Certainly guys who control the running game or have exceptional command might be able to mitigate some of the decline, but there really is no such thing as a skill set that should perform better when the going gets tough. And if you look at Lackey’s career, there’s no pattern when it comes to performing well with runners in scoring position. Some years he’s good, some years he’s bad, like we’d expect.

But there’s a question worth considering as he leads the team into the NLDS. Given that the Cardinals as a team did so well in these situations and have done so in some previous seasons as well, could Lackey’s season be the result having picked up any tricks in his first full season with the Cards?

Going forward, we’ll be comparing Lackey’s 2013 to 2015 numbers split between his Red Sox and Cardinals days. With men on base, did he behave differently? The numbers below are from Baseball Savant, so keep in mind that any misclassifications coming out of PITCHf/x have not been corrected or adjusted.

I found no noticeable difference in pitch location. Lackey has gone to the breaking ball a little less with men on base in St. Louis in favor of both fastballs and offspeed, but it’s not a huge augmentation. One thing of note is the relative change in the type of fastballs he used with men on base. Keep in mind that these are raw PITCHf/x classifications, so it’s possible that this is more noise than signal.

There are two things worth noting. First, adding two-seamers at the expense of four-seamers is something he’s done in all situations since the trade. The cutter usage has been steadier overall, however. Second, while I’m not terribly confident these numbers reflect the precise changes he’s made, more two-seamers/sinkers would mesh well with the results he’s been getting with men on base since the deal. Lackey’s general success with men on base has been the result of lower BABIP and less power, and you could make the connection between arm-side run and ground balls which are harder to drive. It’s not a perfect story, but it’s not obviously false on its face.

The theory of the Cardinals influencing this sequencing has to rest on the idea that they know something about what helps pitchers succeed with men on base that they wouldn’t be able to deploy with no one on. Presumably you could spin a narrative about effort, in that they have taught their guys to exert more energy with men on base because of the cost of mistakes, but that’s not a particularly satisfying explanation.

Another explanation might be that the Cardinals know something about pitch sequencing that provides a competitive advantage that only shows up with men on base because of the way batters behave. I’m not sure how it would play out, but it’s the kind of thing that could explain why the Cardinals were good in normal situations and amazing with men on base. Maybe the Cardinals always pitch one way but batters change their approach and play into the Cardinals’ hands. This would also give some credibility to Yadier Molina’s pitcher-whisperer reputation.

The Cardinals, and Lackey specifically, have pitched well overall, but they have allowed many fewer runs than their overall performance indicates because they have pitched exceptionally well in high-leverage spots and with men on base, relative to their overall performance. It’s hard to find a skill in there, but it’s not impossible that one exists.

Playoff baseball is exciting because of the stakes, but it can also be a little strange because caring a lot about individual games is kind of foreign to most baseball fans. For those with no rooting interest this afternoon, one of the interesting things to look for is if you can pick up any changes in the way the Cardinals behave when Cubs start filling the bases. Watch the catcher, follow the pitch sequencing, and notice location.

Just because we haven’t found an explanation doesn’t mean it’s random variation. The most likely explanation is randomness of some sort, but it’s still worth pondering. You would expect to see a season like the one the Cardinals just had if you observed enough good teams. The same is true for Lackey. If you observe enough pitcher seasons, you would expect to see something like this occur. But if a team had discovered a secret, you would also expect to observe these results.

It’s not likely that John Lackey and the Cardinals are sequencing wizards, but if they are sequencing wizards, it would stand to reason that they will put that talent on full display in the season’s most important games. Given that Lackey is the team’s 2015 poster child, this afternoon’s contest might be a good time to watch for anything supernatural.