Sweet Spot

You want to know why Derrek Lee is having a honey of a season? Focus on the little things

The seekers approach the tall man with reverence. They touch him, hoping for a tactile transmission of his success. They pry him for details of his sleeping habits, conditioning secrets, diet tips. The tall man's numbers are obscene, otherworldly, so it follows that his answers must be equally mystical.

What are you eating these days? His answer is a laugh. But there's got to be some hidden reason why Cubs first baseman Derrek Lee is leading the National League in just about every category that matters. What are your superstitions? Your routines? Your eccentricities? The seekers need to know. He laughs again. There are no easy answers, nothing ethereal or transcendent. To be truthful, he's a little uneasy about the whole thing.

What can he say? Should he tell them he plays cards before every game with either Neifi Perez, Todd Hollandsworth or Henry Blanco (casino is his preference)? How's that going to help another hitter have more patience at the plate?

Should he tell them that his personal chef whips up the same breakfast before every home game? Should he tell them the meal-three eggs with ham and cheese, a side of bacon-sounds like the fever dream of an underworked cardiologist?

Should someone construe that as the official menu of the Triple Crown?

Should he tell them he combats potential slumps by altering his routes to the ballpark? If he goes hitless in a game, he makes sure to approach the park from a different direction the next day. Will that knowledge keep anybody else from getting jammed on an inside fastball?

Sure, the seekers could emulate Lee's method.

They could get themselves a deck of cards. They could eat a big breakfast and consult a GPS. And if it were that easy, every batter would hit .380 and every pitcher would quit the game on the spot.

Perhaps Kevin Millar had the best approach. When he saw his former Marlins teammate for the first time this season (at Wrigley Field on June 10), Millar ran over to Lee and started rubbing up against him. A lot of players have reached first base and run a hand across one of Lee's broad shoulders, working on the osmosis theory, but Millar looked like a cat with psoriasis. "I've got to get some of what you've got," Millar said.

The ballplayers aren't alone. Through the first three months of the season, Derrek Lee has turned us all into seekers. We're all attempting to understand how this very good player became a great one before any of us had the chance to predict it.

Through the Cubs' first 64 games, Lee was leading the NL in batting average (.385) and homers (18) and was tied for first in RBIs (56), fueling speculation that he could seriously challenge for a Triple Crown, something no one has achieved since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. He was first in runs (51), on-base percentage (.466) and slugging percentage (.711), too. And if you ask Dusty Baker, he'll tell you the traditional early-season conditions at Wrigley-cold, more cold and a cold wind blowing from Lake Michigan straight into the batter's face-cost Lee four or five additional homers. Before this year, Lee was a career .230 hitter in April and May, making the eye-scalding numbers even more impressive.

And we, like the truth-seeking ballplayers, look at these numbers, ask the appropriate questions and learn the same thing. Aside from his stats, there's nothing otherworldly about Lee. Rub up against him all you want (figuratively, of course) and you'll find a 29-year-old whose feet are as squarely on the ground as anybody's in his profession. He has not had a revelatory moment that transformed his career. He has not overcome any monstrous adversity in his life. He has experienced no career-altering epiphany. He even refuses to call his tame idiosyncrasies what they are. "Some people might consider them superstitions," he says. "I prefer to call them routines."

Cubs reliever Ryan Dempster, a teammate of Lee's for seven of the past eight seasons, says, "You want stories about Derrek? I'd have to make 'em up, and that wouldn't do anybody any good."

Derrek's father, former Japanese league All-Star Leon Lee, says, "As much as you search, you can't find any weird stories about Derrek. Here's the best way I can describe him: he says he's going to be home at 11, he's home at 11."

Calm and polite, with an anchorman's voice and a little kid's laugh, Derrek Lee is one of the few who's underwhelmed by his accomplishments. Two of the others are his wife, Christina, and their 2-year-old daughter, Jada. Derrek says he's not sure Christina knew there was such a thing as major league baseball when they met in 1996, and now, he says, "she knows the difference between .380 and .280, but she's not all caught up in it."

A year ago, Lee was able to walk around town and occasionally avoid detection. This year, it's different. With Sammy Sosa and Moises Alou gone, Lee is the newest adopted hero in Chicago. His at-bats are serenaded with chants of "M-V-P! M-V-P!" He appreciates the attention but says, "I have a hard time understanding the ego thing over what you do. I play baseball, but who cares if I do that better than other people? They can do other things better than I can, so what's the big deal?"

Leon and Pam Lee attended a game at Dodger Stadium on June 1 and watched their son go 5-for-5 with a homer and 4 RBIs. After the game, Derrek walked into his parents' hotel room, said hello and flopped his 6'5", 245-pound body onto the bed to watch TV.

After a few moments, Leon Lee said, "Nice game, son."

Without looking up, Derrek said, "Thanks, Pop." That was the end of the discussion. The Lees were planning to catch that one game and then return to their home outside Sacramento, but they decided to drive to San Diego for one more after their son's perfect night. Call it an old ballplayer's intuition or a family-wide insistence on "routine," but Leon and Pam watched their son go 3-for-3 with two walks on June 2. They have yet to see him make an out in person this season.

"There are times this year he's been swinging so well that he could go up to the plate, close his eyes, swing three times and still have a pretty good chance of getting a hit," Dempster says. "I'm not sure I'm joking about that, either."

"With all the problems we've had," Baker says, "he's kept us afloat." Having lost Nomar Garciaparra, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood at various times, Baker is enjoying the certainty of Lee's presence. The manager understands the value of the occasional day off, but how do you rest a guy this hot, especially when your team is fighting to stay in the playoff hunt? Lee's played every game this season and missed only one last year. It's important to note that he appeared to wear out at the end, hitting just .217 after Sept. 1. Baker thought he'd found his rationale for rest after Lee went 0-for-5 in the first game of that Dodger series, on May 30, but then he let Lee talk him out of it. The next day Lee went 3-for-5 and started a remarkable threegame stretch of 11 hits in 13 at-bats.

Lee's even-keeled personality fooled some baseball people into thinking he might not have the fire necessary to stoke his limitless talent. At El Camino High in Sacramento, he made the game look so easy it was hard to tell whether he loved it or simply played it because it was in his genes. Derrek grew up playing Wiffle ball in the backyard with his dad and his uncle, Leron, an outfielder for four major league teams in the 1970s. Derrek could run (still can), hit the ball a mile and throw a fastball in the 88-90 mph range.

The Padres, who drafted him in 1993 with the 14th pick of the first round, weren't sure if Lee's inner calm would help or hurt his career. Just when he was on the cusp of major league success, they reluctantly sent him to the Marlins as part of a deal for Kevin Brown, who helped San Diego win the pennant in 1998. Lee went on to become a productive yet underappreciated member of Florida's 2003 World Series champions. The Marlins decided they couldn't afford him, so they traded him for Hee-Seop Choi, whom Leon Lee had signed as Pacific Rim coordinator for the Cubs.

Derrek's ascendance has hardly come out of nowhere. He's made significant improvements every season at the plate and has a Gold Glove to show for his defense. His steady home run and RBI numbers climbed to career highs of 32 and
98 last season. He never relinquished the regal bearing, and baseball people, so big on passion, still wondered how good he could be if he'd just cuss an umpire or throw a helmet every once in a while.

"I don't think I've ever just lost it," Derrek says, without a hint of apology. "The few times that I've gotten a little upset, I've always looked at the tape and said, `Man, you look really stupid.' "

Leon Lee says, "He's always had a nonchalant way about him. I'm a little more old-school, fire and brimstone, but I eventually came to see that he has his own intensity and his own way of showing it."

Derrek works out with Sacramento Kings strength coach Al Biancani in the off-season, along with most of the professional and top amateur baseball players in the city. If one of the young guys is goofing off in the weight room, or if he decides to treat someone in the gym with less respect than Lee deems sufficient, he'll suggest the two take a walk. Biancani will smile a little inside and get on with his work while Lee and the offending party take a lap or two around the building. Derrek does all the talking-calmly, of course-and before long they're back in the gym, and the young kid is so full of yes-sirs and no-sirs, you'd swear he was in boot camp.

All this maturity and self-confidence are thanks in part to the three years he spent in Japan. He attended an international elementary school with students from all over the world. "That took the blinders off," he says. "I learned young how to get along with different types of people, and how to communicate with them."

When he was 11, Derrek boarded a plane in Japan without his parents and flew to Sacramento, where he was met by relatives. He played in a Little League all-star tournament before boarding a plane back to Japan. "He's just always known how to handle himself," Leon says.

Growing up, Derrek thrived on competition with his father. Significantly, he was never angrier than when Leon allowed him to win in one-on-one basketball. The first time Derrek beat his dad on the up-and-up, he ran around the neighborhood in jubilation. Then, as he grew into the kind of high school basketball player who answered the phone one night to discover Dean Smith on the other end, he stopped wanting to play his father. Consistent with his personality, he felt no need to beat Leon just because he could.

The competition with Leon, who hit 268 homers in 10 seasons and is something of a legend in Japan, rekindled when Derrek entered pro ball. After he hit eight homers in Class-A, he asked his dad how many he had in his first full minor league season. "You've still got a ways to go," said Leon, who hit 14. Two years later, Derrek hit 34 homers, drove in 104 runs and was named MVP in Double-A. "That's it," Leon told him. "The competition's over. You're on your way."

It's curious to see what a few months of hovering around .380 will do for a guy's reputation. Now, of course, Lee's apparent Zenlike serenity, his ability to stave off the inevitable spikes and drops of a 162-game season, is seen as the most admirable trait a ballplayer can possess. As Cubs outfielder Jeromy Burnitz says: "Dude, it's all about the numbers."

So back to the question: just how does a ballplayer go from good to great? In the case of Derrek Lee, it turns out there are only rational reasons. He's worked to patch the holes in his swing, especially the inside fastball, the bane of most long-armed hitters. He has built up so much patience at the plate that his father sometimes thinks he's taking too many serviceable pitches while awaiting the perfect one.

"The good guys are the ones who take the most balls, swing at the most strikes and square up the balls they hit," Burnitz says. "It's really that simple. There's nothing more to say. What? You're going home and breathing through your eyelids?"

Take the story of one at-bat, from the first game of the overhyped series against the Red Sox the second week of June. With one out and nobody on base in the third against Bronson Arroyo, Lee took two balls, swung and missed, then took a strike on a pitch he thought was outside. He showed his displeasure only briefly, and he says he would have been more demonstrative, but "I like Eddie Montague, and I think he's a good umpire." So, with the count 2-2, Arroyo threw a sharp slider across the outside corner. Lee followed it like he knew it was coming and hit it expertly over the second baseman's head for a line-drive single. It might not have looked like much at the time, but it was the catalyst for a four-run inning that split the game open at the seams. Compounded over a six-month season, it's the type of at-bat that makes a good player great.

What if Lee had struck out, or taken it for a called third, or rolled over on it and grounded out to third? Two outs, nobody on, and the Cubs probably don't score. One fewer hit, one more out, a couple of percentage points off the average. "I took what he gave me," Lee says. "It's something I might not have done in the past."

Burnitz is far more demonstrative. Standing in front of his locker, he holds his right hand in front of him, thumb and forefinger barely apart. He starts his hand at his waist and says, "Here's the difference between terrible and mediocre." He lifts his hand a fraction and says, "Here's the difference between mediocre and good." Another fraction. "Here's good and really good." Another fraction. "Here's really good and great."

Burnitz drops his hand. "That's your answer right there," he says. "That's why you're not going to get that big story of why D-Lee's gone from good to great. It's an eighth of an inch. If you take a ball four instead of swinging at a dirt ball on a full count, that's a huge difference. That's one ball a week, but that walk can make a huge difference in giving your team one more win. He's figured it out, and that's why D-Lee is the most important player in the game for his team this year."

What we seek isn't always what we find, and that goes for ballplayers, as well. Derrek Lee is here to inform us that what looks like magic isn't.

If he keeps going, though, we might have to start making stuff up.

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