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This analysis was done by taking a specific game from Jon Lester’s 2014 season and scraping PITCHf/x data to perform outputs using R. In particular, I used a game on 6/28 against the NY Yankees in which Lester pitched 8 innings on 5 hits and 6 strikeouts.

Below is an animation of Jon Lester's pitches from the catcher's point of view. Each pitch starts from the top left corner where Lester releases the ball and the animation shows the pitches coming into the strike zone at the actual angle the pitch took. Click here to see full analysis with code.

Throughout the whole 2014 season, Lester threw his fastball 41% of pitches, cutter 25%, curveball 16% and changeup 3% of all pitches. After looking at the breakdown of just the game on 6/28, we can see that his pitch patterns matched up very closely to that of the whole season.

By breaking the data down even further, we can easily see how many pitches were thrown to lefties vs. righties, by inning, outcome, player, etc. This is an example of his pitch count by batters stance and by inning.

When looking at the count of pitches that were swinging strikes, called strikes, or balls, it can be argued that Lester’s four-seam fastball was his best pitch in this particular game with 22% of four-seam fastballs being called for a strike. However, many of his four-seam fastball were thrown for a ball and this type of graph does not give us an idea of what types of pitches led to each outcome. This graph is only for called strikes, swinging strikes and balls, not for every one of Lester's pitches in this game.

To try to get into the head of Lester and his catcher, I looked at the types of pitches thrown to each particular batter in the Yankees lineup. It appears that Lester threw 11 of his 53 total four-seam fastballs to Derek Jeter, but it would be more useful to see which pitches to Jeter were effective and which were not. In order to do that, I looked at pitches only thrown to Derek Jeter.

The first graph to the left below shows the last pitch of each at-bat that led to the specific event. For example, a sinker high and away led to a ground out into a double play, and a fastball in led to a single. The graph on the right shows all pitches to Derek Jeter that led to the particular description.

Finally, the last image shows the density of Lester’s pitches to all Yankee batters. The lighter the color means that the area is denser, or that more pitches were thrown in that location. Against left-handed batters, Lester tended to keep the ball low and away, where as he pitched mostly low and in to right handed batters. We can see from the above chart to all batters that he threw low and in very often to Soriano, Jeter, Teixeira, and low and away to Ellsbury.

NOTE: All statistics accurate as of 12/25/14

By Danny Malter
AriBall.com

Follow @AriBall Follow @DanMalter