Q.  What do you make of his 2010 season?  Has he leaped a plateau?

A.  SSI, we believe, was the first to point out that Cliff Lee had improved since 2008-09.  After his 6th start of the 2010 season, we announced that Lee, despite already being a Cy Young pitcher, had leaped a plateau -- again.

Intuitively, we based this on the breezy persona that he had adopted this year.  Lee, in April and May, was out there playing a first-person shooter video game! 

We don't say that as a cliche.  We've only seen a couple of ML pitchers pitch like machines.  Randy Johnson used to just go do what he wanted, throw strike three and wave guys back to the bench.

.......................

In April and May, you could see that Lee had his system down pat.  The huge playoff victories had been a revelation to him:  batters can't deal with his game.

Sabermetrically, we noted that "the intersection of those two things -- [much higher strike %] and [much higher miss %], occurring together" was unpossible.  Lee was attacking far, far harder than in 2009, and the batters couldn't do a single thing about it.  They knew that, and Lee knew that they knew that.

Lee is a pitcher of a type that I haven't seen in 35 years of watching baseball.  He does not have Felix Hernandez stuff, and does not have Greg Maddux or even Jamie Moyer command, as such.  But he's spiralling off into a crazy Pedro Martinez universe.

.

Q.  No comps at all?

A.  The great Fangraphs article called one thing to our attention that we'd completely whiffed on.  That being the reminder that Bret Saberhagen used to pitch like Lee does now.

Bill James, of course, is a Royals fan, and savored the glorious sight of Bret Saberhagen's best performances for about a decade.  He wrote that Saberhagen was the greatest pitcher he ever saw -- he had velocity, he had awesome arm action on his change, had a deafening yellow hammer, on his good days Sabes had the best pinpoint location ever .... "he always brushed back the other team's best hitter early, and he never hits him" -- Saberhagen managed the game.

Saberhagen, when his arm was right, was just a guy who did everything at 70-75 on the 20-80 scale -- not with Pedro stuff, but just with ML stuff.

Saberhagen had 70-75 spin and movement, as does Lee.  ... to me, that's it exactly:  Lee is a left-handed, healthy, Saberhagen, plus 10%.

.

Part 3

.