The Jon Lester Reclamation Project
On Sunday, Jon Lester took the hill as a pitcher who had been beaten up over the last month. In his previous six starts, Jon Lester had an 0-5 record with a 8.73 ERA, allowing a .321/.385/.588 slash line to opposing hitters. He had given up 42 hits in these six starts and almost half of them were for extra bases. The vultures were swarming above Fenway, and many observers were simply waiting for the inevitable announcement that he was hurt. After establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the American League, Lester was having his worst season as a major league pitcher, and it was only getting uglier as the season wore on.
And then on Sunday, Lester went and struck out 12 Cleveland Indians over six innings pitched. He gave up just three hits, all singles. He likely could have gone deeper in this one, but the Red Sox were already up 14-1 at that point. After weeks of getting beaten around like a Triple-A reject, he was nearly unhittable. Did Lester do anything fundamentally different in this outing, or was this just the old adage of sun on a dogs backside?
Maybe it was little bit of both.
Back in May I observed that it appeared Lester had changed his repertoire in 2012, and this has pretty much held true all season long:
PITCHf/x classifications on cutters and sliders is rather fickle, so we should instead turn to the actual pitch clusters to see what’s acting like a Lester cutter and what’s acting like a Lester sinker in 2012 versus 2011. The first chart is 2011, the second is 2012:
Based on the behavior of the pitch, that is, the kind of movement he’s getting — it does seem to support that he’s throwing fewer cutters and more sinkers. And in fact, the cutters that he has thrown in 2012 have demonstrated less horizontal movement than they did in 2011, behaving much more like his regular fastball. He tosses in a curve and a change about 13% of the time each, but that’s pretty consistent with years past. The big change appears to be a reliance on the sinker at the expense of the cutter.
But his last start kind of turns this repertoire trend on its head. Putting his pitch selection on August 12 into the chart above reveals a stark difference:
It appears that Lester used more cut fastballs on Sunday than he had in prior starts, and relied almost exclusively on his fastball over the course of his 101-pitch outing. In fact, he only threw 11 pitches that the algorithm classified as sinkers, even using his curveball more often than that. All four of his primary pitches produced whiff rates far above what we’ve seen from him on the year.
Perhaps it was an approach tailor made for the Cleveland Indians, I don’t know — we’ll have to see what happens his next time through the rotation before we know if this was a one game adjustment or an attempt to fix what had gone terribly wrong in his prior five starts.
And before we conclude that the old Jon Lester is back, it’s worth noting that the Indians have one of the worst lineups in baseball versus left handed pitchers. As a team, they have hit .229/.308/.351, good for just a .290 wOBA. So maybe the sun shone on Lester this day, but it could be that it was just Cleveland shining on him.
If you want to look at positives, August has been far and away Lester’s best month. His K rate is just shy of 30% while his walk rate is just 5%. His ERA over his three August starts is 3.48, but the predictors all point towards the low 2’s, and if you’re an FIP fan, it suggests just 1.45. He doesn’t have much to show for it in his record, but if you’re the Boston Red Sox, you have to consider this progress.
It has been an incredibly strange year for Jon Lester. He has struggled with his mechanics, he’s been ineffective pitching out of the stretch, he’s been prone to blowup innings. He’s had moments where he looks like the great pitcher from the last three seasons only to follow it up with a stinker. But his recent stretch of success coupled with perhaps a don’t-fix-what-ain’t-broke approach to his repertoire might be righting the proverbial ship. It’s likely too late for the Boston Red Sox to sniff a playoff spot, but if they can get Lester back on track, then at least something has been salvaged in 2012.
Michael was born in Massachusetts and grew up in the Seattle area but had nothing to do with the Heathcliff Slocumb trade although Boston fans are welcome to thank him. You can find him on twitter at @michaelcbarr.
his non-cutter cluster kinda looks like australia.
/irrelevant
Came to the posts to say that.
Maybe he and Beckett had some Foster’s with their fried chicken?
My first thought was Norway, Sweden and Finland
When does season 6 of mad men start?
By advanced metrics he has been pitching almost exactly the same as last season. Why isn’t the conclusion that he had an unlucky streak, followed by a not-unlucky game? Yet another case of “we believe in advanced pitching metrics except when we don’t”?
fair point – but just as we have some pitchers that out pitch their predictors, I think it’s worthwhile to dig a little deeper instead of just saying lucky/not lucky. Yes, Lester’s had some bad luck, but he’s also been really ineffective using what is an unfamiliar repertoire. He’s had a K rate of almost 23% since mid May but an ERA of 6. Bad luck isn’t the whole answer. You can believe in advanced pitching metrics and still drill down for explanations. No?
First of all, I happen to reject the hypothesis that there are any pitchers who are proven to outpitch SIERA and xFIP. There are some who have done so for moderate stretches of several years at a time, but I see no strong evidence that they have done so due to anything beyond random variation mixed with survivor bias.
Second of all, even if YOU don’t reject that hypothesis, taking an individual pitcher and saying ‘his ERA is high; there must be something going on’ without at least considering random variation as a culprit is incomplete analysis. It may not be THE explanation, but it’s a possible explanation, and this article never even addresses it, let alone ruling it out.
To say that having an ERA of 6 with a high K-rate necessarily implies something other than bad luck assumes the conclusion. Yes, he has given up more line drives than last year. Line drive rates fluctuate from year to year. How can you say for sure that in this specific case it is due to bad pitching and not random variation, especially if you are implicitly claiming that whatever bad process is causing the high line drive rate is somehow having no effect on his strikeout, walk and swinging strike rates?
“even if YOU don’t reject that hypothesis, taking an individual pitcher and saying ‘his ERA is high; there must be something going on’ without at least considering random variation as a culprit is incomplete analysis. It may not be THE explanation, but it’s a possible explanation, and this article never even addresses it, let alone ruling it out.”
This incredibly disingenuous. Your initial comment clearly assigns luck as THE factor. It may not have been what you were thinking. But the words you typed were all the internet and Michael Barr had to work with. So, to so smugly reject Barr’s response for being incredibly irrational – ‘he only thinks one thing caused this! I’m so reasonable; I beleive in both/and’ – is a bit unfair. The quoted bit above could easily be applied to your initial comment if someone had written that pitch selection while not THE explanation, could be one.
I apologize if I sounded smug. My point is sincere – I see no evidence that this is anything other than random variation. I’m open to it, but I won’t believe without numbers.
“First of all, I happen to reject the hypothesis that there are any pitchers who are proven to outpitch SIERA and xFIP. There are some who have done so for moderate stretches of several years at a time, but I see no strong evidence that they have done so due to anything beyond random variation mixed with survivor bias.”
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=4732&position=P
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=844&position=P
etc., etc., etc.
DIPS theory captures a lot of pitchers, but some have the ability to induce weak contact on a consistent basis. There are many pitchers who, over the course of well over 1000 innings, gave up far fewer hits and homers than their peripheral stats and batted ball profiles would indicate. Watch those guys pitch and you can’t help but notice that they have a way of missing the barrel of the bat.
Finding pitchers who’d underperform their peripherals is even easier. Take some single-A scrub who throws BP fastballs and hanging sliders – he’ll probably post BABIPs north of .500 and give up a ton of homers. That’s obviously an extreme case, but it stands to reason that as your stuff degrades, you’ll give up harder contact.
RE Lester: could this year just be random variation, a few months of bad luck? Sure. But it certainly makes sense to investigate whether the quality of his stuff has degraded. If he’s using an inferior pitch more and a superior pitch less than he did in prior seasons, his overall stuff this year would be worse. That’s all the article is saying. Covering your ears and shouting DIPS is a silly response.
Cherry-picking examples is not statistical analysis – it is the opposite.
This would be a statistical analysis of ERA-estimator out-/under-performance: calculate the expected distribution of performances relative to xFIP or SIERA in a single season taking into account the large number of pitchers and MLB; use this distribution to calculate the expected multi-year distribution assuming zero correlation between years and adjusting for survivor bias; compare the expected number below some threshold over that period to the actual number; if larger than expected calculate the probability of that being due to random chance; reject my hypothesis if the probability is low.
I meant the large number of pitchers IN MLB – dang iPhone keyboard.
Jordan:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/a-random-walk-with-fip/
Noah, because he’s trying to dismantle a flawed argument, restricts his search to pitchers who outperform their peripherals in each individual season. If he’d instead looked at whether there are more pitchers with, say >.5 difference between their ERA and DIPS than you’d expect based on a normal distribution, his results would have been different. The fact that ERA eventually becomes a better predictor of ERA than DIPS pretty much confirms that. Even Dave C has said many times that bWAR is superior to fWAR when looking at a pitcher’s career stats, for exactly that reason.
You’ve also ignored the most relevant part of my argument, probably because you know I’m right. DIPS theory obviously only applies to pitchers with major league caliber stuff. Put a Single-A junkballer in the majors and he’ll get consistently rocked; his .650 BABIP against and 30% HR/FB won’t be a result of bad luck. Again, that’s obviously an extreme example, but it’s equally obvious that if your stuff is worse you’ll get hit harder.
I didn’t comment on the A-baller thing because it seemed like the least relevant portion. Of course a low-A pitcher would give up hard contact at absurd levels. So would a batting practice pitcher, or a pitching machine, or in the most extreme case, a tee. But those people and things would simultaneously post terrible K and BB rates (I’m guessing Batting Tee’s swinging strike rate is pretty well below league average, though his F-strike rate is probably excellent).
Unlike Batting Tee, Lester has posted excellent K and BB rates. So either the K and BB rates are fluky, the contact is fluky, or he is simultaneously (a) controlling the strike zone and fooling batters into whiffing at an above-average rate, while (b) not controlling the strike zone and telegraphing his pitches into hard contact at an above-average rate. The latter contradiction is possible, but (to me) not plausible. That is the point of what I am saying.
As for Noah’s article, since you say his results would have been different under an alternative analysis, is it safe to assume you have done that analysis? If so please post your results – I would welcome having my preconceptions disproven rigorously.
By the way, did anyone notice that his FIP is only 3.9? Since FIP already accounts for home runs, for his ERA-FIP to NOT just be explained by random variation we have to accept that (a) he is doing something that is causing lots of additional hard contact beyond what is expected, and (b) that increased hard contact is not showing up in a significantly greater home run rate than expected, because FIP already includes his actual home runs given up.
In other words, he is giving up hard contact, but not really hard contact, and consistently making bad pitches, but also consistently getting whiffs and not walking people.
This is why I keep coming back to bad luck/rough patch/whatever you want to call it.
Of course a tee wouldn’t strike anyone out, but its BABIP and HR/FB would also be off the charts. Those are separate issues. You’re acknowledging that there is a relationship between quality of stuff and quality of contact allowed, but you seem to be assuming that if a pitcher’s K:BB is the same, the quality of his stuff must be the same.
Getting whiffs and staying off the barrel of the bat are two different skills. Some pitches – most notably Mariano’s cutter – are designed move enough to induce weak contact but not enough to scare batters off swinging. Lester may still be throwing his swing-and-miss pitches, and he may not have lost his ability to control the zone, but he may also have traded a pitch that induced weak contact for an inferior pitch. If that’s the case, we’d expect him to get hit harder.
As far as a study backing this up, I can’t seem to pull up the one that shows that over a large enough sample (5 seasons? 7?), past ERA is a better predictor of future ERA than are defense independent metrics. But if you’re curious, it’s out there – a few minutes on google should yield some results.
Sorry for the double post, but your second post appeared as I was writing my first. To be honest I haven’t watched much of Lester, and I’m not sure I disagree with you about this being a patch of bad luck in this particular case. But you seemed to be arguing that, in principal, it makes no sense to write this sort of article, because his K:BB rates are within range of his career averages and that’s all we can say about a pitcher.
I disagree. The fact that ERA eventually becomes a better predictor of ERA than DIPS shows that the random variation inherent in BABIP and HR/FB does eventually even out, allowing each pitcher’s skills at hit and HR suppression to shine through. Yes, in Lester’s case, it’s far too early to conclude with any degree of certainty that he’s lost the ability to suppress hits and HRs. But given his extended struggles, it certainly makes sense to investigate whether the quality of his stuff has changed.
He hasn’t been pitching exactly the same. Yes, his FIP and xFIP are consistent with last year, but he’s also surrendering several more line drives, less ground balls and less infield flies. Hitters are connecting better this year, and even though that probably doesn’t totally account for his severely inflated BABIP, this article demonstrates that his pitch selection probably is a major factor.
Good read.
Batted ball rates fluctuate from year to year. As I said above, to say that changes in batted ball data are necessarily indicative of a change in skill/process despite unchanged K and BB rates assumes the conclusion.
In a 3 game stretch (cry sample size all you want) he faced 71 batters and 35 of them reached base by hit or walk. He struck out 12 (~17%). Those 3 games account for 21 of his 85 ER this season (~25%). During that time he was not pitching like he was last year and his K and BB rates were not even close. If you want to buy the ‘bad luck’ ‘batted ball fluctuates and claim that for everything then I’m glad you are not a pitching coach because I’m thinking you would just send him out there and say keep doing what you are doing and the ball will start finding gloves.
An even better reason for me not being a pitching coach is that I have no qualifications of any kind.
But this isn’t an analysis of mechanics, about which i know next to nothing – it’s an analysis of results, and i do know about numbers. In this case i believe the numbers are inconclusive. If you disagree with that statement please feel free to explain why.
BABIP doesn’t tell you how hard said “unlucky” contact is. If he’s giving up a ton of hard contact like he has been, then you can’t just look at BABIP. In fact, in my opinion throw BABIP out the window if he’s giving up a ton of extra basehit and home runs.
Just because contact was hard doesn’t mean it wasn’t unlucky. As an example: pitcher intentionally makes an offspeed pitch way out of the zone in a hitter’s count; batter just happens to guess the precise pitch and location and is sitting on it; batter makes hard contact; pitcher got unlucky IMO.
Throwing ERA predictors out the window because a pitcher’s HR/FB or line drive rate is high is precisely against the point of having ERA predictors in the first place.
Maybe the adjustments that pitchers make during a season help bring things like BABIP and HR rates back towards their mean.
Look at the charts. His stuff is clearly moving differently. Notice the hole at the origin in the 2012 chart.
Definitely true. But different doesn’t mean worse (if we want to have that discussion i’d love to see a similar chart from 2010 to compare to). Based on his peripherals in 2012 I assert that he is performing at the same level, he just hasn’t been getting the results. Again, I welcome a statistical analysis that shows that I’m wrong or missing something and that he is 25 standard deviations beyond what we should expect from random variation.
I’ve always been a big fan of Lester, but even I’ll note that the odds of his poor pitching this year being primarily luck based are slim.
Looking at pitch by pitch GIF’s, he’s been missing spots a decent bit this year. His walk rate was actually down for a while, but he was getting lit up because he was living dangerously in the zone.
In addition, if you dig into the metrics, he’s got a glaring disparity in home/road splits. Furthermore, there’s a glaring disparity in his home numbers on lefties versus righties.
Basically, on the road, he’s been pretty good. He’s been missing his spots a bit, but people haven’t killed him. At home, though, his BAbip is through the roof in one glaring situation: right handers pulling the ball. See where I’m going with this?
The biggest thing killing Lester this year is that he’s missing his spots and righties are taking it hard left. The Green Monster has always been tough on lefties, and while Lester is no exception, he’s managed to mitigate it for the most part previously.
I don’t buy that he can’t pitch at home. His splits are miserable this year, but he’s been fine at Fenway over the course of his career. 3.76 FIP vs. 3.60 FIP Home/Road. Major problem is the addition of doubles at Fenway (120 to 81 home/road in comparable innings), which probably has something to do with the monster.
I’m not saying he can’t pitch at Fenway. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again. I’m saying Fenway is the most obvious, discernible issue this year.
He’s getting pulled by righties and it’s killing him at home because of the Monster. A lot of the reasoning for this seems to be due to missed location/command issues; it all seems mechanical and fixable to me. I wouldn’t call it luck based, by any means, though.
I posted about this last night; it’s not just Jon Lester whose numbers are being skewed this year by Fenway.
The Red Sox offense is averaging 5.4 runs/game at home vs. only 4.2 on the road, and Red Sox pitchers have an ERA almost a run higher at home than on the road. I checked out ESPN’s park factors and sure enough the numbers for Fenway are significantly higher than usual: there are 17% more hits, 18% more HR’s, 27% more runs, 30% more triples and an astounding 50% more doubles in a game at Fenway than in an average game.
The Red Sox three left handed starters, Lester, Morales and Doubrant, have particularly pronounced platoon splits. Without being sure what’s really going on, there would appear to be a strong case that the ball is carrying especially well to LF this year — which would lead to more doubles and triples especially against lefties. It may also be why Lester feels less comfortable throwing his cutter — a pitch that moves inside toward RH hitters.
This is highly speculative, but there would appear to be a strong case that (a) Lester’s struggles are in large part a product of pronounced park effects and his response to it, and that (b) the Red Sox maybe ought to be more worried about their pedestrian hitting than their wind-blown pitching.
@Patrick: That “pedestrian” road split is still better than the overall figure for the Orioles, Rays and A’s.
well he’s been bending me over the barrel and showing me the 50 states all year up until recently, and this is when I need him most, so keep it up Lester!
How do you find team splits such as Cleveland’s batting line against LHP?
Appelman keeps three “precogs” under Salt River Fields in Phoenix, AZ and derives most data from them telepathically. And then puts it here: http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=0&type=1&season=2012&month=13&season1=2012&ind=0&team=0,ts&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0
I also just rewatched minority report recently.
The Jon Lester Reclamation Project is the name of my Toad the Wet Sprocket cover band.
Humble suggestion: drop the ‘The’.
I would pay covers upwards of $5 to see this band.
You definitely need to get a gig opening up for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
It’s the other guys in the ‘Alan Parsons Project’ with a new frontman. One with issues on the mound, and a Fender Telecaster.
Actually what’s killing Jon Lester is the same thing that is killing all the Red Sox pitchers: Fenway Park. He has an ERA of about 3.10 and about 8.5 k/9 on the road
I might dismiss this as a statistical fluke except that ALL the Red Sox starters are exhibiting huge home–road splits as are all their hitters except Pedroia and Middlebrooks. (Note: Buchholz has a lower ERA at home, but is averaging an extra k/9 on the road). The Red Sox have a lower road ERA than Tampa, as they did last year.
The Red Sox home/road splits are extreme; in the case of some pitchers (Lester, Morales) freakishly so. It would be interesting to see if Fenway has over the last year or so, become more hitter friendly for some reason (weather?), and to try to figure out what it’s doing to the Red Sox pitching. At a minimum, it has to be driving up pitch counts, which in turn could be leading to fatigue and more innings for the last guy in the bullpen.
The tone of the beginning of the article suggested that until Sunday, Lester had been terrible recently: “In his previous six starts…” Near the end of the piece, though, you point out that he actually hadn’t been terrible in the three previous starts. In particular, his start on August 2 wasn’t bad at all: 8 IP, 7 K, 0 BB, 3 ER.
Just weird to set the tone that he had been awful recently when he clearly hadn’t been.
I thought there was an article recently on FG about him losing a bunch of velocity this year? That would explain the overall badness this year and the possible injury scenario.
Good point bro
there’s no drop in velocity, at least between this year and 2011 and 2010. He had more zip on the fastball in 2009, but he was obviously every bit as effective the past two seasons. If there has been anything written on this site relative to velocity, it’s that there’s been less separation between his fastball and cutter vs. his change — which still holds true. Paul Swydan had a great piece about that a couple months ago.
With all the lefties in the Indians lineup it makes sense for him to throw more cutters then sinkers. I would like to know how many sinkers / cutters he threw to left handed hitters this season, and only then how much he threw to the Indians to see if he’s getting fastball-heavy again.
Solves this all!
Velocity.
/Thatisall
Does fangraphs have a quota for Red Sox posts? I’ve never seen such obsession with with a franchise that’s been the best or second best in baseball for a decade. Where are the Blue Jays posts? Isn’t a perennially mediocre team’s quest to sneak into the playoffs at least once in this generation far more fascinating?
I just crunched the numbers, my adorable troll, and I’ve got GREAT news…..with this last troll post you have finally turned the red sox into the powerhouse team that you said they were, and have exposed me as being completely wrong about them from the start!
CONGRATS!
The Indians are the most lefthanded team in the AL. That is the reason for Lester’s success against them.