While the offseason technically starts right after the World Series, the real kick-off party is the Winter Meetings, being held this year in San Diego. Easily the most common topic of conversation here has been Jon Lester—everyone was speculating on where the big-ticket free agent would sign. Now that he's agreed to a 6 year, 155 million-dollar deal with the Cubs, there's an obvious and important question: is he worth it?
Lester has spent almost his entire career with the Boston Red Sox. He debuted in 2006, but his season was unfortunately cut short when he was diagnosed with cancer in August. After a successful treatment, Lester pitched well in the second half of the 2007 season and won the deciding Game 4 of the World Series, in his first postseason start. From 2008 onwards he was an elite workhorse, providing 200+ innings in every season but 2011 (when he threw 191.2). Though he was popular in Boston, the underperforming Red Sox dealt him to A's halfway through the season as a rent-an-ace on the last year of a team-friendly 6-year, $44 million deal (5/30 with a $14 million team option for 2014). Now almost 31, Lester wanted to get one big free-agent payday, a goal he certainly achieved with his new contract.
The biggest question for the Cubs is whether 2014 was the new normal or an aberration. After pitching at an ace level from 2008-2010, the 2011-2013 seasons were rougher for Lester, and he dropped from being a 5-6 win player down to the 3-win level. However, 2014 saw a return to form, with more strikeouts, less walks, and the lowest ERA and FIP of his career. If that same performance can be expected going forward, Chicago just acquired a top-level ace. But if it was a fluke, this deal represents a dramatic overpay. What did Lester do differently in 2014, and can it be repeated?
A quick check of the usual indicators points in the right direction. Lester's 2014 BABIP of .299 and LD% of 20.6% are both perfectly in line with career norms. He stranded 76% of baserunners, all the more impressive considering that he literally never threw over to hold them on . His HR/FB% of 7.2 % might be unsustainably low, but he had success in 2009 (6.2 fWAR) while running a 10.6% HR/FB%, so he could regress to league average and be fine. His ERA outperformed his FIP, but not by much: 2.46 to 2.80. Even when regressing his home runs to league average, his xFIP is still only 3.10.
In 2014, Lester upped his K/9 to 9.01 while lowering his BB/9 to 1.97. He got slightly more swings at balls and slightly fewer swings at strikes, while improving his contact rates against both balls and strikes. The result was a whiff rate of 9.9%, a small but meaningful improvement over 2013's 8.4%. All of this indicates that Lester didn't overly benefit from good luck in 2014.
Oftentimes performance spikes (and dips) are due to pitch selection. Lester has a fairly standard 5-pitch mix. He throws low-90's fastballs and sinkers, a high-80's cutter, a mid-70's curveball, and a mid-80's changeup. As can be seen in the chart below, most of these pitches have less spin than those thrown by other major-league left-handers. The exception is his changeup, which actually has about 100 more RPMs than the left-handed average. Surprisingly, Lester's changeup is commonly considered his worst pitch.
This leads to a line of inquiry. In 2014, Lester almost entirely scrapped his changeup, relying more heavily on his cutter and curveball. Was this the reason for his success?
To answer, we need to go back to 2013. While Lester pitched poorly in the first half of that year, in the second half he improved. The first chart below shows that he used fewer changeups as the season went on. The pattern continued into 2014.
To compare with performance, I pulled the chart below, a compilation of splits data, from the ariball servers. Every month in which Lester's OPS was >.650 is highlighted in red, as an arbitrary cutoff for “good” or “bad” months. Lester's poor 2012 is almost entirely red, as is the first half of 2013, but from August 2013 on he's mostly in the black. Compare the changeup usage chart with the monthly splits—as he throws fewer changeups, his results get better.
But digging deeper, there might be a problem. Below is the same chart with different colors applied to the righty splits: now red means that he was worse against righties than against lefties, while green means he was better (October 2012 and April 2014 remain black because of small sample size).
While his 2014 season was predicated on being better against righties, his resurgence in the last months of 2013 was apparently powered by dominating lefties. This could be—and I think is—just noise. Lefty splits always have small samples, and I can't find anything to indicate that Lester changed his approach facing them. In 2014 Lester went right back to career norms against them. But to do our due diligence, let's go back to those pitch usage charts, and this time include cutters and curveballs. Note that more cutters and curveballs are thrown in 2014 as opposed to 2013—a usage pattern that starts appearing in the first game of August 2013.
While Lester went back to career norms against lefties in 2014, he was a different pitcher against righties. This is specifically due to his curveball and cutter—this last year, both pitches had a great deal more success than they had previously. The cutter generated 15.79 whiffs/swing against righties in 2013; in 2014 that number improved to 22.56. And the curveball's whiffs/swing shot up from 23.33 against righties in 2013 to a whopping 44.09 in 2014. It seems that Lester improved not so much because he stopped throwing changeups, but because he threw more curveballs and cutters.
But that leads to a new question. The 2013 and 2014 versions of the curveball and cutter are essentially identical in terms of release speed, vertical movement, and horizontal movement. So how did they register such dramatic improvements? Two pieces of interrelated information pertaining to control provide the answer.
The first factor is release point. Lester's curveball has always had a higher release point than the rest of his pitches. This was still true in 2014, but the difference was less than before. Here are release point charts from 2013 and 2014.
For those of you who don't see anything, monthly charts are even more dramatic.
This had positive results for his control. These charts show the amount of movement on every cutter and curveball in 2013 and then 2014. The cluster of curveballs get appreciably smaller year-to-year, meaning their break became more consistent. A more consistent pitch is more controllable—knowing how far an offering will break allows a pitcher to place it more precisely in or near the zone. It's hard to tell, but I believe that the cutter cluster also got more precise. The cluster appears more solid, indicating that each individual pitch was very similar to each other one.
The second factor explaining the new success of the cutter and curveball is pitch location. Here are Lester's zone charts against righties from 2013 and 2014. For the 2014 season, he made a dramatic shift toward pitching righties more inside and lower than he had previously. This could also explain why the changeup was ditched—a pitch with arm-side run is effective on the outer half of the plate, but throwing one inside is going to result in grooved pitches right down the middle. Cutters and curveballs, however, get glove-side run, and are therefore more effective on the inner half of the plate.
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Putting those two together, we find a pitcher who is aggressively throwing inside and hitting his spots more precisely. I believe that Lester worked on and found consistency in his release point and overall delivery, giving him more pinpoint control of his cutter and his curveball. With this extra accuracy, Lester was able to pitch inside more freely, without worrying about hitting the batter or grooving pitches. By putting the curveball and cutter inside, he put them in a better position to succeed. On the flip side, his changeup was now mostly an ineffective weapon, because throwing it inside would make it end up over the heart of the plate. Thus, Lester abandoned his changeup and made up the difference with extra curveballs and cutters.
That's a very long way of saying that Lester's 2014 was no fluke. He made concrete, identifiable changes in his approach and his command, and reaped the rewards in the form of better statistics. Now that he's signed his 155 million dollar deal with the Cubs, he's reaping his rewards in dollar form as well. But there's enough rewards to go around for everyone. The Cubs already looked good because of their hitting prospects—with an ace like Lester on the mound, they've just made themselves that much better.
NOTE: All statistics accurate as of 12/09/14
By Sam Whitefield
AriBall.com
