Jon Lester sat in the Wrigley Field interview room with his hands tucked into the pouch of his Cubs hooded sweatshirt and shrugged.
During these postgame press conferences, Lester gets about as close to the truth as a professional athlete can get without sounding totally narcissistic, completely insecure or coming across as a miserable human being. By this point, a pitcher with three World Series rings certainly doesn’t have to be candid or thoughtful or sincere in front of the cameras.
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Here’s Lester’s philosophy: Ask a direct question, get a direct answer. Part of it is his natural personality. Part of it is a learned behavior after coming up with the Boston Red Sox and dealing with an obsessive fan base and the relentless media coverage at Fenway Park.
Maybe this won’t be reassuring or satisfying or believable for Cubs fans, but Lester sat there for five minutes after Saturday’s 9-4 loss to the Washington Nationals and didn’t really have any answers for his performance.
“I’m not worried about it,” Lester said. “I shouldn’t say that. I mean, I don’t want to take away from today. Today was pretty bad as far as the results. But this is the ebbs and flows of the season. Unfortunately, I’m pretty down right now as far as where I’ve been pitching and giving innings. I need to pick that part up. But I’ve been through it before. I’ve come out the other end just fine. I got to keep working.
“In this game, it’s results-driven. And when you’re not getting results, you want to immediately run to something. You want to run to you’re tipping, you want to run to mechanical, you want to run to whatever. And sometimes it’s really nothing. It’s just about a little bit of luck, a little bit of something here and there to give you that break.
“I don’t want to take anything away from today, but I’m not worried. I feel great physically. It’s not like I’m battling anything to try to execute pitches. It’s just – for whatever reason – I’m not executing when I need to and getting those outs. That’s all on me.”
You would have taken this when Lester signed his $155 million contract. In Year 4, the Cubs have already won the World Series and Lester is having an All-Star season (12-5, 3.89 ERA) and a team with Kris Bryant, Yu Darvish and Brandon Morrow on the disabled list has the National League’s best record (67-49).
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But the nerds who did a deeper dive on Lester’s numbers correctly predicted a crash. Lester has an 8.65 ERA in his past seven outings after putting up a 2.25 ERA in his first 17 starts this season. The Cubs are also 12-11 since the All-Star break and trying to fend off the Milwaukee Brewers in a competitive year when the wild-card spot might not be a safety net.
Cubs manager Joe Maddon finally pulled Lester from a 9-1 game with two outs in the fourth inning. Ryan Zimmerman had just blasted a three-run homer into the left-center field bleachers. The Nationals just kept jumping Lester’s fastball and putting on a laser show for a crowd of 41,320 that included Bill Murray.
For more than a month, it’s been Groundhog Day for Lester, and he doesn’t look like he’s ready to wake up to a new day just yet.
Zimmerman had already lifted a two-run homer over the left-center field basket in the first inning, giving the underachieving Nationals some breathing room as they scramble to make up ground in the NL East. Daniel Murphy — Mr. October when the New York Mets dominated the Cubs during the 2015 NLCS — also launched a two-run homer in that fourth inning. (Murphy came into the game with a regular season slash line of .406/.436/.688 at Wrigley Field, not including his 7-for-19 performance with two homers in four career playoff games at the park.)
“There’s been times where I haven’t thrown the ball well and I’ve been pretty open about that,” Lester said. “I gave up 10 hits today and nine were on my fastball. I don’t want to cop out on anything, but I guess I’m just in this rut right now. I don’t know. I probably felt like that was some of the better stuff I’ve had over the last couple starts — and that was the outcome.
“Unfortunately, the rotation has been throwing the ball well and now I’m the guy that’s not. That’s a bad feeling, just letting the team down, letting the bullpen down, all of the above. I’ll continue to work and I’ll continue to try to figure it out and make an adjustment.”
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Around this time last year, Lester went on the disabled list with left shoulder fatigue/lat muscle tightness. By late September, his season ERA had crept up to 4.56. The cynical view was that all those postseason innings had piled up on Lester and he was finally feeling all that wear and tear in his mid-30s.
Lester regrouped in October and neutralized this Washington lineup, showing the guts and stuff that’s made him one of the best big-game pitchers of his generation. The Cubs actually lost both games Lester pitched in during that epic five-game playoff series, but he allowed only two runs in 9 2/3 innings as a starter and a reliever.
“From the naked eye on the sidelines, I don’t see a whole lot different,” Maddon said. “He seems to be fine. I’m not really worried about him right now. Again, if he was injured, I’d be more concerned. If something looked dramatically different, I’d be concerned. But I don’t see that.
“Sometimes, it’s like a hitter. You go through a little bit of a slump and you come back out of it. But I don’t see anything dramatically different in the way he’s winding up, throwing the baseball and the numbers on the board look the same. It’s got to be an execution situation.”
The Cubs now have to face Max Scherzer on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” and hope that Cole Hamels is out of the funk that made him a relatively easy pitcher to acquire from the Texas Rangers before the July 31 trade deadline. Because Lester knows the bottom line, what a manager is supposed to say to the media and how there are limits to all the capital he built up during the glory years.
“At the end of the day, the results aren’t there,” Lester said. “This is a result-driven industry, and I’m not doing my job.”
(Top photo: Dennis Wierzbicki/USA TODAY Sports)
