Cliff Lee: Weird Stuff Happens in April

The first month of baseball usually provides us with lots of discussion. Typically this discussion revolves around players who are slumping (hello, David Ortiz) and less known players who are doing well, whether that production is legit (2006 Fransisco Liriano, pre-injury) or something that dies down in June, never to reappear (so many examples).As Charlie mentioned in the comment thread two posts down, the Indians' Cliff Lee is currently sporting an ERA of 0.28 in over 31 innings of work. Last year, Cliff Lee's ERA was over 6. Cliff Lee is age 29, which is way past the normal improvement period for a pitcher. So why is he pitching like a first ballot HOFer? Is it steroids?

Maybe, but what I can say is that Cliff Lee is definitely an odd case, which I will try to dissect. Most of the time, pitchers who pitch above their career levels are doing so because of three things. The first is the improvement that comes with a young player maturing. We can count that out for Cliff Lee. The second is an improvement or modification of stuff. according to his Fangraphs page, Cliff Lee's stuff is almost exactly the same as it was last year: fastball around 90, with average off speed stuff. This leads us to the third reason: he's just really, really lucky.

You can tell is a pitcher is lucky in a few ways. The first and most common is with BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play). The theory is that pitchers don't have hardly any control over where a ball is hit after the batter has hit it. When the ball has been put in play, it generally has a 30% chance of becoming a hit, so the average BABIP for pitchers is .300. If a pitcher has a BABIP significantly lower than .300, than he is getting lucky, and more batted balls are becoming outs than they should. This can also be swayed by an excellent defense, but not too significantly. If a pitcher's BABIP is significantly over .300, than he is getting unlucky, and balls that should be outs are dropping for hits (this too can be swayed by defense). Cliff Lee's BABIP is .154, which puts him in the insanely lucky category. Last year's luckiest pitcher was Chris Young with a BABIP of .252. Half of what should be hits against Cliff Lee are turning into outs. This is one reason for his success.

Cliff Lee is also getting more strikeouts than last year, with the same stuff. This is usually less susceptible to luck. So what gives? If one looks at Cliff Lee's starts, they will find he pitched against Oakland twice, and KC and Minnesota once each. Oakland's OPS ranks 19th in MLB, and Minnesota and KC place 27th and 28th, respectively.

There you go. Cliff Lee is having such a great year because he is getting very lucky against poor competition, both of which are bound to regress to average. At the same time, I love it when things like this happen, because although it may be frustrating to see somebody look amazing when he isn't or suck when they shouldn't, if we knew exactly how players would do, I wouldn't watch baseball.