Cliff Lee with the head of a champion
by Scott Butler 10/7/09
Had you asked most baseball experts how Cliff Lee would perform in his first postseason appearance as the number 1 starter for the World Champions, they would have predicted a similar outcome. Yes, Cliff Lee has pitched poorly for nearly a month. But you just get the impression that Lee is not fazed by the pressure and he prepared himself for just such a situation.
When asked if he was worried about hurting his arm by pitching so many innings, he said that he works hard in the offseason to prepare his body for a heavy workload and expects nothing else than to pitch nine innings each game. At a time where pitchers are babied from day 1, that is a refreshing thing to hear.
In his game following his second consecutive poor outing in a loss to the Houston Astros that began with quite a few lucky bounces and weak hits that found holes, Lee was asked what happened. The typical answer would be that there a few bad breaks and that you need to fight through it. That would not be an excuse and would be a good way to look at it. But Lee didn't even mention the bad breaks. He simply said that he was throwing too many fastballs and he fell into a pattern that hitters picked up on. He said he needed to work in more of his other pitches to keep the batters unbalanced.
Those two small examples show the type of player Cliff Lee is: a determined, hard working, focused individual with an insightful look at himself. Cliff Lee prepares hard for every single outing in exactly the same manner, knowing that "it is still 60 fee, 6 inches to the plate" and an outing in March is no different that one in October. It is that consistency that allowed Lee to come up big and I hope it continues until a parade down Broad Street.
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