D Lee, Steroids

[George_Foreman]

check out the other d. lee thread and you'll jump strait off.

he's a quality hitter, but it's not like there have been nagging injuries or poor plate discipline that have been holding lee back (like they were for beltre). this is just a crazy, nutzo hot streak and no one is sure how long it will last. lee's good and some improvement is to be expected, but raising that BA by .100? na.

whenever players do stuff like he's doing, i just remind myself that brady anderson hit 50 homers one year.

[beltrans_boy]

God, I can't wait until Derrek Lee goes first round of almost every draft next year...

[George_Foreman]

call him "next year's beltran", shall we?

[WittyC]

check out the other d. lee thread and you'll jump strait off.

he's a quality hitter, but it's not like there have been nagging injuries or poor plate discipline that have been holding lee back (like they were for beltre). this is just a crazy, nutzo hot streak and no one is sure how long it will last. lee's good and some improvement is to be expected, but raising that BA by .100? na.

whenever players do stuff like he's doing, i just remind myself that brady anderson hit 50 homers one year.

It may be a crazy, nutzo hot streak, but he's done it before. Not for this kind of extended period of time, but he hit .385 last June then blasted 10 jacks in July.

My final projo's for Lee aren't outlandish... I admit I sort of blew my wad saying he'll hit .360-.370 earlier in this post.

.355, 42 HR, 120 RBI, 18 SB

Obviously a decent decline from his current numbers... that's why I've been on the sell high side for him for the 2H. But I'd bet the farm that he's going to be a .330 hitter with 30-40 jacks for the next three years. A solid late-second, early third round pick, IMO.

[gabenterprises]

I agree that the guy is a solid second or third round pick for the foreseeable future. I got him in the seventh and I'm ecstatic.
As far as projecting him to just up and bust, seems unpredctable to me. Furthermore, if he goes .270 from here on out with 15 HRs and 7 SBs, which would be his career average, I'll say thank you very much for one fantastic year. No reason to expect any less than that.

[longshotwi]

call him "next year's beltran", shall we?

I really would not be surprised if that happened

[JTWood]

Great observation, Mr. Pibb.

[Jagfan21]

Fantasy baseball is a lot more fun if you actually watch a baseball game or two during the season.

amen

[Registered_Guest]

Wouldn't even think about steroids with Lee.

The guy is the same size he's been the past 3-4 years. It'd be like thinking John Olerud was on roids (when he was a good hitter several years ago).

[The Loveable Losers]

Just an interesting couple of statistics on Lee...one points to a high level of skill, the other to a high level of luck and the combination of the two pointing to what we're seeing D. Lee do out there.

LD%
Line Drive Percentage. Baseball Info Solutions tracks the trajectory of each batted ball and categorizes it as a groundball, fly ball or line drive. LD% is the percent of batted balls that are line drives. Line drives are not necessarily the hardest hit balls, but they do fall for a hit around 75% of the time.
OBP

(my emphasis)

At 26.4% this season, Lee is 3rd in the league in this statistic. Hitting a line drive is nothing to do with luck or a fluke. It indicates that the person is seeing and hitting the ball very well. He trails only Brian Roberts and David Wright in this statistic.

BABIP
Batting Average on Balls in Play. This is a measure of the number of batted balls that safely fall in for a hit (not including home runs). The exact formula we use is (H-HR)/(AB-K-HR) This is similar to DER, but from the batter's perspective.

This is the luck part. While having a very high line drive % would obviously help this number to be higher than the average (thought to be around .300) Lee's number of .430 at this point is flat out ridiculous. He hasn't gotten significantly faster to beat out more IF hits so unless he's gotten SO good at hitting that he's able to choose to hit his fly balls and ground balls in such a way that they can't be played for an out then there's been quite a bit of luck involved here as well.

I think Lee is for real though. Look at his career statistics that aren't team/batting order dependant and compare them to Scott Rolen. Career-wise I think I'd have to give the nod to Lee. And he's spent most of his career in a terrible hitters park. This guy's the real deal...he sprays line drives all over the park, runs well, has some serious power (0.25 HR/Fly ball versus an average of 0.11-0.12) and plays half of his games now in a park that lets those fly balls get out of the yard. He may not be *this* good, but he's hitting one quarter of his fly balls out of the yard (meaning that if EVERY other fly ball he hit was caught (which it's obviously not) he'd STILL be hitting .250 on fly balls, over 1/4 of hit contact is line drives (which we've seen falls on AVERAGE for a hit 75% of the time)...the only knock I can see on him is that he K's 19% of the time. But for a guy making the kind of contact he's making that's liveable.[/quote]