Jon Lester Is Really Good

This might be something fantasy baseball players accept. Jon Lester posted a 2.46 ERA, a 1.10 WHIP, and 220 strikeouts in 2014. He finished as the sixth-best starting pitcher, per Zach Sanders’ end-of-season rankings at the position.

But maybe some rotisserie and head-to-head managers don’t. After all, Lester was the preseason consensus No. 44 SP at RotoGraphs. He outdid his FIP, xFIP, and SIERA by more than half of a run. This past season was awesome. Its awesomeness is distinctly different from the results in his past couple of seasons. He hadn’t been about this awesome since 2009 and 2010 – coupling 220-plus strikeouts with an ERA that was at least 25% better than league average. His numbers have never looked as good as they did this year. His average velocities dropped a tad this past season. There’s room for doubt.

Much has been made of Lester’s path to this point, though, and it helps to follow the journey. He was good in 2008 through 2011. If you check out the second half of that 2011 campaign, however, you’ll notice some skidding, especially the outcomes in September, perhaps forecasting what was to come. He was awful in 2012, despite an improved walk rate. He was missing the strike zone more frequently for this bad stretch. Location – inside and outside the zone – was a big problem.

Why Lester was so bad in 2012 isn’t readily obvious. There’s nothing overwhelmingly strange in most of the statistics. Part of the problem is, surely, that he used cutter – basically, his best pitch – less frequently and his sinker – essentially, his worst – more frequently. You can see how good one versus the other is in his PITCHf/x material, for starters. Their usage percentages were basically flipped. That doesn’t seem smart.

Even less noticeable, and much more so, were Lester’s mechanical problems. This is the kind of thing really smart baseball observers like Doug Thorburn can tell us. The effects of them turn up in his heat maps versus left-handed and right-handed batters, by year, for example. The issues weren’t so much Lester’s motion as his timing and length. Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell was a central figure in his ace’s rediscovery of good form. Farrell was Beantown’s pitching coach from 2007 through 2010; he left the club to manage the Toronto Blue Jays in 2011 and 2012 before he returned to captain the BoSox.

Farrell and Co.’s guidance began to right Lester’s ship in 2013, but there was an adjustment period. That was basically the first half of 2013. In the second half of 2013, the left-hander was on point. He recorded a 2.57 ERA and walked only 6.0% of the batters he faced in that period. His strikeout rate swelled, but barely. He was reintroducing more habitual cutter usage by the end. Just as 2011’s second half foretold problems in 2012, so did 2013’s second half, and 2014, as they say, is history. Wish I’d been willing to see it coming. Kudos to those who did.

There are a lot more details to it, of course, but for those who aren’t familiar, they should get the picture. Lester has been doing this for the past nine regular-season months. In that time, he has a 2.60 ERA, a 1.15 WHIP, a 23.2% strikeout rate, a 5.7% walk rate, a 0.61 HR/9, and a .303 BABIP against. Although this year’s didn’t go well – and it lasted for only one start – we can tack on two postseasons.

Lester has reached greater heights, mostly under Farrell’s direction, this time than he did early in his career, clearly. Is it likely that he’ll remain this good? He’s no longer with Farrell, and it’s far from certain that he’ll return to Boston. His control has been almost impeccable recently. That’ll be difficult to continue as he gets into his 30s. Apparently, he hasn’t been holding runners very well in recent times, either.

In addition, in that nine-month stretch, Lester generated a pop-up percentage of greater than 5%, one that’s nearly two percentage points above league average and one of the best rates among qualifiers. He actually began to induce pop-ups more often in 2011, reflecting either some wildness, his greater willingness to attack up in the zone with his fastball, or a combination of the two. Since, it’s surely become principally the latter. It’s not difficult to imagine some things going wrong a little more often, resulting in more big flies allowed, as occurred in the latter half of 2011 as well as the entire 2012 season.

Lester, soon to be 31, has been down the road and veered off it already, however. Presumably, he now understands his mechanics and the importance of things like a longer stride to his success more so than he used to understand them. In the future, these kinds of things should take less time to fix, should they need fixing. Plus, he has the kind of repertoire – a big bag of tricks, multiple ways to retire batters of both handedness – that plays anywhere. And, check his lifetime health record: no remotely significant injuries!

Yes, Lester may not be a good bet to reproduce a line like his 2014 one. Let’s give Steamer most of the 22.2% strikeout rate, 6.4% walk rate, and 0.87 HR/9. Still, you’ll see: There is no BABIP regression to project. There is no crazy LOB%. There is just a hell of a lot of good pitching. He should still post a FIP, xFIP, and SIERA of not much greater than 3.00. We can even give Steamer most of the 3.42 ERA. That’s kind of a bad-case scenario, though. The Lester before us these days probably isn’t subject to much else other than slow, age-related decline. And he could end up in the National League!

It doesn’t matter where Lester signs. He’s really good. He won’t be discounted in 2015 like he was this past season, naturally. Once the top few ace-like pitchers are off the board, he should be about as reliable as you can get, one on whom you can confidently spend your dollars.