{"id":1622,"date":"2010-10-28T21:36:54","date_gmt":"2010-10-29T02:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/?p=1622"},"modified":"2010-10-28T21:37:22","modified_gmt":"2010-10-29T02:37:22","slug":"was-cliff-lee-all-that-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1622","title":{"rendered":"Was Cliff Lee All That Bad?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Naturally when I went to school this morning, the members of the Dallas faithful I share the lecture hall and lab with were a little quiet and obviously disappointed.\u00a0 They know I spent a little time between the lines and in the dugout and that I write for this site, and so they come to me with their baseball-related queries.\u00a0 I must have answered, \u201cWhat the hell happened to Cliff last night, dude,\u201d around 15 times.\u00a0 My responses always started with something along the lines of, \u201cDude, he wasn\u2019t all that bad.\u201d\u00a0 How could a start in which Cliff Lee, probably the premier pitcher in the game today, gives up six earned and retires only 14 batters not be regarded as disastrous?<\/p>\n

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After my initial response, I followed it up with my methods for evaluating a start.\u00a0 They begin and virtually hinder on the ratio.\u00a0 By that I mean the K\/BB.\u00a0 If this falls below 2, I regard the start as average at best unless the arm reaches double-digit K\u2019s or only walks a guy through six.\u00a0 Cliff struck out 7 guys through 14 outs and only walked one dude.\u00a0 Did he pass the first test?\u00a0 He destroyed it.<\/p>\n

My immediate next criterion when evaluating a start is the fastball pace.\u00a0 Cliff Lee can work up to 94 mph and still keep a delivery and a release point.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t seen him much above that while maintaining those abilities.\u00a0 Last night he worked around 93 mph for the straight one.\u00a0 His cutter was around 89, and that is a good pace for that pitch and really demonstrates that he is staying on top of it.\u00a0 Cliff has to stay on top of his pitches because his size will not allow him to pitch at the pace he does if he sacrifices slot height.\u00a0 Did he pass the second test?\u00a0 Definitely.<\/p>\n

The third test is the evaluation of secondary stuff.\u00a0 Cliff utilizes about 4 pitches, all of which he commands as well as anyone in the game.\u00a0 Of offerings other than the heater, his cutter grades out as the best one, and his change and curve grade at 60 at least most nights.\u00a0 He stands the breaking ball up occasionally, and that would force most guys to release early, but Cliff hardly ever releases anything early and didn\u2019t really last night except for a plunk to Anres Torres.\u00a0 His change had the typical lefty fade, his bender had 12 to 6 action and massive speed change, and the cutter was nasty as always.\u00a0 Did he pass the third test?\u00a0 Duh.<\/p>\n

The fourth test is location.\u00a0 He only walked one guy.\u00a0 That\u2019s pretty damn good.\u00a0 ESPN would have us believe that he caught too much of the plate with a handful of pitches.\u00a0 I don\u2019t agree, and in fact I would argue against the importance of hitting spots in general if I felt like writing this all game.\u00a0 Changing speeds and maintaining release points throughout a sequence can make any spot deadly.\u00a0 Pitchers simply need to be in the zone with everything and throw under bats.\u00a0 Cliff Lee accomplished that with every hitter except Freddy San, and he is somehow a former batting champ and hardly an easy out.<\/p>\n

The next test is the sequence.\u00a0 As much as pitchers would like to believe that nailing their spot with their pitch is good enough for the out every time, that simply is absurd.\u00a0 Occasionally that pitch will go exactly where the hitter expects it, and he will demolish it accordingly.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t stand the sequences that Lee was throwing to the righties last night.\u00a0 He threw entirely too many cutters and not nearly enough heaters and changeups.\u00a0 The singular advantage that lefties have on the bump is that their shit goes away from the right-handed hitters naturally.\u00a0 Cliff\u2019s fastball and change both have nice arm-side action that play very well in a pitcher\u2019s yard.\u00a0 That advantage is naturally forfeited when sequences are built off cutters and benders that do the exact opposite.\u00a0 What\u2019s more is that Lee\u2019s cutter cannot be an above-the-belt pitch to righties because it lacks the requisite pace.\u00a0 He failed the sequence test miserably in my opinion.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s not like he was torched.\u00a0 He kept everything in the yard and got a lot of balls on or near the ground.\u00a0 With that number of K\u2019s and that many balls topped, Cliff Lee should have made it at least 5 more outs than he did, but sometimes hit percentage is a bitch, and that is essentially why the playoffs are a crapshoot.\u00a0 The Cardinals won it all in 2006 with basically a .500 regular season record.\u00a0 Baseball is a great game for a lot of reasons.\u00a0 Among those are the facts that sometimes Freddy Sanchez wins batting titles, sometimes .500 teams win The Series, and sometimes the best pitcher on the planet exits after 14 outs with a 7:1 K\/BB.<\/p>\n

GO RANGERS!
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Naturally when I went to school this morning, the members of the Dallas faithful I share the lecture hall and lab with were a little quiet and obviously disappointed.\u00a0 They know I spent a little time between the lines and in the dugout and that I write for this site, and so they come to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,6,11,13,14],"tags":[579,969,584,549,61,617],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1622"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1628,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions\/1628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}