Chris Lee - Who Knows Best?

Joe Reisel's Archives

Chris Lee - Baseball America's #10 Orioles prospect. Photo courtesy Norfolk Tides / Scott Sears.

If we thought about baseball before the 2017 season the way we did in 1985, most Orioles fans would have regarded Chris Lee as a top pitching prospect. He was left-handed, 6'3" tall (well, he is left-handed and 6'3"right now, too), weighed 180 lbs, and had an above-average sinking fastball and an occasionally-plus slider. More importantly, he had made 14 starts (between 2015 and 2016) at AA Bowie, pitching 89 innings with a 3.02 ERA. He had missed the last three months of the 2016 season with a strained shoulder, but he was considered recovered.

However, baseball fans have become more sophisticated. Beneath the superficially attractive AA statistics were a truly terrible pair of numbers - a 33-45 walk-strikeout ratio and a strikeout rate of 4.53 strikeouts per nine innings. These numbers are well below average, and I - like many other more statistically-oriented fans and analysts - questioned the thinking of prospect raters such as Baseball America, who ranked Lee as one of the top ten prospects in the Orioles system.

So, when an apparently-healthy Chris Lee was assigned to the Norfolk Tides for the 2017 season and put in their starting rotation, I was hoping to see him. To be honest, I was hoping his performance would reflect his strikeout and walk numbers as opposed to his ERA. I admit that I dream of knowing more about baseball than some of the professionals. So I hoped that Chris Lee's 2017 performance would justify my thinking that he wasn't much of a prospect. I emphasize that I had and have nothing against Chris Lee either personally or professionally; the negative effects on his career would just be collateral damage in a clash between my opinion and expert opinion. And, his overall performance in 2017 was almost everything I was hoping for - a 5.17 ERA; 54 walks and 144 hits allowed in 116 innings; only 6.42 strikeouts per nine innings.

(All data relating to Chris Lee's performance come from either baseballamerica.com, milb.com, or from my own calculations from my own scoresheets.)

But there was something peculiar. I saw six of Chris Lee's 2017 games - four (the first four below) starts and 2 relief appearances. And the Chris Lee I saw was a lot better than the overall Chris Lee:

Date	Opponent	IP	H	R	ER	BB	K
April 26 (G1)	Buffalo	6	5	0	0	1	4
May 19	Charlotte	6	4	1	1	3	6
June 3	Rochester	5	8	5	4	1	5
June 30	Durham	6	2	0	0	3	1
July 27	SWB	4	1	1	0	3	2
August 22	Charlotte	2 2/3	4	2	2	2	1

SWB: Scranton/Wilkes-Barre

That's 29 2/3 innings with a 2.12 ERA. His 13/19 strikeout--walk ratio isn't good, nor is his 5.76 strikeouts per nine innings. On the other hand, instead of allowing 11.14 hits per nine innings, in these games he allowed 7.28. It's not a huge sample size - but it does represent over 25% of his season's innings. The games were played at Harbor Park, well-known as a pitcher's park. He did face two of the less-potent offenses in the International League (Buffalo and Rochester), as well as Charlotte (a middle-of-the-pack offense boosted by its hitter-friendly home park) - but also faced the best and third-best offenses in the league. On the whole, other than Harbor Park, there's no obvious reason why Chris Lee was so much better in the games I saw than overall.

Basically, there are three logical explanations - either the four very good games I saw Chris Lee pitch are extreme outliers and in every other game he was poor; or he had a few really terrible starts that inflated his statistics; or some combination of the two.

Looking at his game log for the 2107 season, there are five really terrible performances that skew the rest of his season:

Date	Opponent	IP	H	R	ER	BB	K
April 8	At Charlotte	3 1/3	9	8	8	2	1
May 24	At Toledo	2	7	6	4	1	1
May 29	At Columbus	2 2/3	6	8	8	2	2
June 25	At Gwinnett	3 1/3	9	8	7	2	2
July 5	At Gwinnett	4 1/3	9	7	7	4	1

Those five games - in which he posted a 19.53 ERA - obviously had a major impact on his overall performance. If we throw out the four outstanding games I saw personally (April 26, May 19, June 30, and July 27) and these five terrible games, his performance was 71 innings with a 3.17 ERA. I have to conclude that the Chris Lee I saw is representative of what he's capable of - his 2017 season was overly influenced by five terrible games.

When evaluating Chris Lee, we shouldn't throw those five games out - that's part of what he did. Nor should we ignore his other negatives; his relatively poor control and strikeout rates. But, in 2017, I was watching Chris Lee, expecting a train wreck. If Chris Lee will return to Norfolk for 2018, I'll be interested in seeing him again - but this time expecting someone who, even if not a major-league pitcher, a pitcher who will help my AAA team win a few games.