Sometimes a pitcher will make adjustments and one game will result in a large jump in one pitch or perhaps they can’t control it so they just get rid of the pitch. That doesn’t seem to be the case as John Lackey made a huge change to his pitch breakdown last night. Lackey has largely been a four seam fastball pitcher throwing more than 50% for three straight years. In 2008 and 2007 it was 59%.
Last night though he broke from the mold and became more unpredictable in his approach. He largely stuck to three pitches through the game using his four-seam fastball, curveball and cutter. When I say he stuck to those pitches, he threw 100 pitches of which 30 were four-seamers, 29 were curveballs and 29 were cutters.
To put those 29 cutters in perspective we can see in 2009 he threw 81 cutters all year long for a 2.6 percent of total pitches. Before we go to far though, we should see if there is any possibility that these are just misclassified fastballs. First we can see that from his 2009 chart his cutters(FC) are similar to the four seamer with less horizontal movement but similar vertical break.
John Lackey 2009 Movement
Both move at 91mph meaning that only a slight change in spin rotation leads to the pitch changing movement by three inches. This movement is right on with his 29 cutters tonight leading me to believe his change was actual, but what does that mean?
The first thing is his cutter is not the same as a Mariano Rivera cutter, which is what everyone thinks of immediately. His cutter has more “rise” at 9 inches to Rivera’s 6.31 and he has negative horizontal movement while Rivera has a positive movement. This means Lackey will go away from righties in break, but Rivera breaks in on righties. The truth is Lackey’s pitch is a somewhat straighter fastball on the horizontal plane, but that gives an interesting switch after the “moving” four-seamer.
Even though he has the positive horizontal movement he tried to use this all night on hitters to pound the right half of the plate. Looking at his strike zone plot from last night you see he threw seven pitches on the far left side of the plate (Graph is from the catchers view)
Lackey 4/7/2010 Strike Zone Plot
This all worked for him last night, but it’s interesting to note there was not much evidence before tonight that this would be a good thing for Lackey. His pitch run values per hundred pitches for the cutter was -0.43. That is a small sample size and should be noted that according to Fangraphs it was positive value in 2005 and 2006 when he threw it 3.1 and 8.1 percents respectively. Both seasons were before his arm troubles started and could have been something he used more when healthy.
Another reason to bring back the cutter was something that I had mentioned to Sky Kalkman at Beyond the Boxscore. I felt Rivera’s use of the cutter and low BABIP maybe a sign that the cutter could fool hitters into making consistently poor contact due to location of contact with the bat. Regardless if that is the reason it seems his study proved me somewhat right, but also that the cutter may even have more benefits when used in the right spot.
His 3/2 K/BB numbers will need some work, but against the best offense in baseball I don’t think we should get to deep into that. His K/BB will be around 2.75 when all is done, a 45 percent groundball rate, a great defense pushing his BABIP down and now a possible addition to BABIP suppression for him from the cutter.