Jon Lester is not one to reflect. He typically greets mention of the milestones he reaches with something between a grimace and a shrug.
Monday was no different. In the Red Sox’ 5-1 victory over the Mariners (recap), Lester was dazzling en route to rarefied air in Red Sox franchise history.
The left-hander overpowered the team he grew up rooting for, allowing just three singles and one run in eight innings of work. He punched out a dozen batters, not only giving him four straight outings with at least 10 punchouts and seven total this year (both most in the majors for 2010), but also pushing him past 200 strikeouts for the second straight year.
Lester became the first left-handed pitcher in Red Sox franchise history – all 110 years of it – to reach 200 strikeouts in consecutive seasons. He joined Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, Cy Young and Smokey Joe Wood as the only pitchers in Sox franchise history to record the feat.
(Martinez struck out 200 or more batters in two separate three-year streaks (1998-2000 and 2002-04), while Clemens did it in seven straight years from 1986-1992.)
Perhaps most striking about the left-hander’s dominant performance was the fact that he did not have what is arguably his most devastating pitch in his arsenal. The left-hander rarely employed the cut fastball that has become such a devastating pitch, both as a swing-and-miss offering and as a bat-shattering chainsaw.
Against the Mariners, he would not need it. Lester had plenty: an explosive mid-90s fastball, a changeup that would fade to the arm side of the plate and a hard breaking curveball that would look like it was headed down the middle before making a late charge at the feet of right-handed hitters.
This is what Lester has become: a pitcher who can work up or down, to both sides of the plate, against right-handed or left-handed hitters. He features four above-average major league pitches.
When they are all working, he is on a short list of the most dominating pitchers in the majors. Even when he does not have a good feel for one of them, he is still capable of overpowering his opponents.
“He’s got a pretty good mix going,” manager Terry Francona told reporters. “He’s got both sides of the plate, he can change speeds, he can attack lefties, righties. There’s a lot of times, when he’s throwing the ball like he wants to, hitters got to cheat a little bit and the ball can go [in other directions]. That cutter has really become an effective weapon. Sometimes you see guys fall in love with a cutter and they lose something off their fastball. He’s still got some explosion on his fastball.”
The pitcher, however, reacted with typical understatement to his performance. Despite being amidst one of the dominating strikeout runs in franchise history – he is the first Sox left-hander ever to strike out 10 or more in four straight games, and first pitcher of any handedness since Pedro Martinez did the deed in 2001 – he offered little more than a stoic shrug.
“It’s something I’ll look back on when I’m done playing,” Lester told reporters in Seattle. “It’s nice, but it doesn’t make or break my season. We’re trying to make the playoffs and that’s where we evaluate our season, if we’re in the postseason or not.”
By that measure, Lester’s season will almost surely not be a fulfilling one. By any other measure, it will be a wild success, and both over the duration of the 2010 season and in years to come, Lester will be left to shrug off quite a few more accomplishments.
Lester (17-8) set a career high with his 17th victory of the year. With three starts remaining, he has a shot at 20 victories, and his 3.17 ERA this year could well end up being the lowest of his career (he had a 3.21 mark in 2008).
He leads the American League in most starts (18) in which he’s allowed two or fewer runs, and he is second in most starts (13) in which he’s allowed just one or fewer runs. He is as consistently unhittable as virtually any pitcher in the game, as he leads the AL with 14 starts in which he’s permitted four or fewer hits.
Lester is the fifth left-hander in franchise history, and first since Bill Lee (1973-75), to win at least 15 games in three straight seasons. The other pitchers to do so were Mel Parnell (who did it four straight times from 1948-51), Lefty Grove (1935-37) and Babe Ruth (1915-17).
Since the start of the 2008 season, he is tied for the third most victories in the majors (48). No one has won more games while pitching in the American League. He is now 59-24 in his young career, with a .711 winning percentage that ranks as the second best of all time (behind only Spud Chandler) by a pitcher with at least 50 career decisions.
As for the strikeouts, he set a franchise record for lefties in 2009 by striking out 225 hitters. With 208 strikeouts this year, he could surpass that mark. He ranks third in the majors with 585 strikeouts over the past three years, and seventh with 8.7 strikeouts per nine innings. In the last two years, he is second in the majors and first in the American League with 9.9 strikeouts per nine innings.
He has now thrown 190 innings, and in all likelihood, he will become just the fifth Red Sox pitcher since 1980 to throw 200 or more innings in three straight seasons, joining a list that includes Roger Clemens (7 straight years), Tim Wakefield (3), Bruce Hurst (3) and Pedro Martinez (3).
At the age of 26, Lester has already become one of the most accomplished pitchers in the game. There might be a couple of pitchers (Felix Hernandez, Tim Lincecum, perhaps David Price) around whom a team would prefer to build a pitching staff … but not many.
Lester is young, he is dominant, and he is ambitious. The left-hander has noted on more than one occasion that he strives for perfection, a quest that allows him to describe a night like Monday as being “kind of normal.” That the left-hander can describe such a dominating performance in those terms helps to explain why his young career has become anything but normal.