The Rotation (12 page)

The iconic Lee moment for many Phillies fans came in the sixth inning in Game 1 against the Yankees, when Johnny Damon hit a broken-bat pop-up to the mound. Lee did not move as the ball fell toward him. Just before it reached him, he nonchalantly stuck out his glove to the side, opened it, and caught it.

Lee gets asked about that catch occasionally. He said he actually was thinking about dropping the ball and throwing to first to get the runner on first in a rundown. But then he realized Damon was running to first too fast and he wouldn't have time to pick up the ball and make the play. So at the last second, he just decided to catch it.

“I wouldn't make a catch like that just totally nonchalant without somewhat of a reason,” he said. “That's definitely why I did that. It didn't come across looking good for me.”

It looked like Lee, in the biggest game of his life, was playing catch in the backyard with his son, Jaxon.

“Nothing ruffles his feathers,” Kristen Lee said. “He's just kind of the same, even keel, no matter what. When he comes home, if I didn't know if we won or lost, I wouldn't be able to tell by the way he was acting. He doesn't bring anything home. That's a blessing for me.”

Lee had been a bit of a wild man in high school. Some might have called him immature.

“Weren't we all?” Kristen said, laughing.

But Lee's outlook on life changed profoundly when Kristen and Jaxon, who was four months old at the time, visited him during the final weekend of his 2001 season when he was a minor-leaguer with Class A Jupiter in Florida. Jaxon developed a fever and started vomiting and had to be taken to the emergency room. After extensive testing, doctors gave Cliff and Kristen the terrible news their son might have leukemia. Further testing confirmed he had acute myelogenous leukemia and he had a 30 percent chance to live.

Jaxon received chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The treatments
started to work, but he suffered a relapse. He received a stem-cell blood transplant, which turned around his recovery. A year later, Jaxon had beaten leukemia.

“That definitely affected Cliff in a huge way,” Kristen said. “That's pretty much one of the most traumatic things that you can go through as a parent, and it puts everything in perspective. It changes everything about you. It definitely has affected him on the mound.”

The effect has been positive. Because when you have gone through what the Lees went through, there's no such thing as a bad game, no such thing as a bad season. Jaxon responded well to treatments a decade ago and has been healthy since.

Lee had three pretty good seasons with the Cleveland Indians from 2004 to 2006, winning 46 games, but he had an awful 2007. He suffered an abdominal injury in spring training and never recovered. He was 5-8 with a 6.38 ERA when the Indians demoted him to Triple-A Buffalo in July.They brought him back when rosters expanded on September 1, but he did not make the postseason roster. His struggles motivated him. He worked hard in the off-season, learned the importance of living in the moment, and started to take Adderall to treat attention deficit disorder. He improved the command of his pitches and had a career-year in 2008, starting the All-Star Game for the American League and finishing 22-3 with a 2.54 ERA to win the AL Cy Young Award.

“I started focusing more on controlling what I could control, focusing on my routine and my preparation,” he said. “Don't leave anything to chance with that. And if I do that, there's no reason to be anything other than confident and expect to win. I've really been more conscious of that since then.”

Lee had his mojo back, and he was on his way to becoming one of the most coveted pitchers in baseball.

Nobody imagined the Phillies would trade their Marlboro Man to the Seattle Mariners the same day they acquired Roy Halladay from the Toronto Blue Jays on December 16, 2009. He would make only $9 million in 2010, which was a steal for a pitcher of his caliber. And who wouldn't want
Halladay and Lee in the same rotation? But the relationship between the Phillies and Lee, who could become a free agent following the 2010 season, became strained as the two sides talked about a contract extension.

As a player traded in the middle of a multiyear deal, Lee had the right to demand a trade within 15 days of the last game of the World Series. If he made that request and the Phillies did not trade him by March 15, he would become a free agent. Of course, that right came with a significant catch. Major League Baseball's Basic Agreement said if Lee requested a trade, the team that acquired him would retain his rights for three seasons. So instead of Lee becoming a free agent following the 2010 season when he was 32, he would became a free agent following the 2012 season when he was 34. Postponing free agency two more years would cost Lee millions, so the possibility of exercising his rights seemed remote. But Darek Braunecker used the clause to leverage the Phillies to pay Lee for not invoking it.

“Let's have a discussion about what value that has to the organization,” Braunecker told team officials.

This was not unprecedented. Harold Baines used his trade rights in 1989 to add an additional year to his contract with the Texas Rangers. He wasn't the only one. Although Braunecker never threatened to demand a trade, he pressured the Phillies into adding $1 million of incentives to Lee's 2010 deal. The Phillies took the request as an aggressive act, threatening them without threatening them.

It indicated to the Phillies that negotiations could prove difficult in the future.

Less than a month later on December 3, Amaro and Scott Proefrock visited Braunecker at his hotel at the winter meetings in Indianapolis. There the Phillies offered Lee a three-year contract extension worth $18 million per season. The offer included a fourth-year option. The dollars were well received, but the Phillies fell short on the years. Braunecker told them he believed he could find a six- or seven-year contract if Lee became a free agent the following off-season. There had been speculation Lee would settle for nothing less than a monster payday, which was a concern for the Phillies. Lee told the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
in spring training of 2009 that signing a contract extension less than one year from free agency made no sense “when I just watched what CC did.” He was referring to former Indians teammate CC Sabathia, who had just received a seven-year, $161 million contract from the New York Yankees.

“I never indicated to them that he was intent on testing free agency,” Braunecker said in 2011. “But I was clear on the length of a deal I thought we could get in free agency. I felt like there was going to be a six-to-seven-year market. Their policy was three years. What I needed a commitment from them on was would they be willing to deviate from their policy? We couldn't sacrifice four years of guaranteed income.That was it. Ruben said,‘That is our policy, but it's not a hard-and-fast policy.That's our comfort zone.There is an exception to every rule and this guy is probably worthy of the exception.' OK, well, good enough. Let's keep the dialogue going. Let's stay in touch.You guys let me know.When we left that meeting, I'll take it to my grave, I was under the assumption, based on our conversations and what they communicated to me, that they were open.”

In fact, Amaro and Proefrock left the meeting in Indianapolis believing they could re-sign Lee. But an interesting thing happened when they returned to their hotel suite to tell the rest of the front-office brain trust what they had offered. Everybody else in the room believed they had offered way too much for Lee, who just two years before had been toiling in the minor leagues. That got Amaro thinking maybe he could spend his money better elsewhere. Even after failing to get Halladay in July 2009, Amaro never really stopped talking with the Blue Jays. So in this high-stakes quest for an ace, he circled back and intensified his discussions with Toronto. Amaro might have fallen short in his pursuit of Halladay in July, but the right-hander remained his obsession and the Blue Jays remained under pressure to deal him. The framework for a trade between the Phillies and Blue Jays for Halladay was coming together by the end of the winter meetings. That weekend FOX Sports' Ken Rosenthal floated a story that seemed so out-of-the-blue it had to be true, so detailed that it read like a trial balloon floated by the Phillies front office. Rosenthal speculated the Phillies might trade Lee on their way to acquiring Halladay, even mentioning the Mariners as a potential destination for Lee. Braunecker was alarmed by Rosenthal's story. He called both Amaro and Proefrock the next morning, but neither picked up the phone, which he considered suspicious. He fired off text messages to Amaro and Proefrock.

Proefrock stared at the text message from Braunecker. The Phillies' assistant GM was in an impossibly difficult position. He could not confirm anything to Braunecker because nothing with Halladay had been finalized. He couldn't say, “Yes, it's true. If we agree to an extension with Roy, we're trading Cliff.” He couldn't say that because if the Halladay deal fell apart they would still have Lee, except Lee would know the Phillies were trying to trade him. That could have catastrophic consequences in their negotiations.

Finally, Proefrock hit the reply button.

“Don't believe everything you read,” he told Braunecker in a text.

Proefrock's non-denial denial to Braunecker proved prescient Monday, December 14, when the trade with Halladay fell apart. And at that moment, Proefrock suggested Amaro call Braunecker and ask for a counteroffer. It had been 11 days since the Phillies made their three-year offer in Indianapolis and Braunecker had never formally responded. The Phillies hoped Braunecker's concerns about Halladay's arrival might lower his request for more years. But Braunecker could not panic and lowball his client. He countered with a six-year request, which in his mind was nothing more than the first counteroffer in standard contract negotiations. Amaro took the counteroffer as confirmation Lee would be difficult to keep, although it would not be wrong to suggest Amaro used it as motivation to get the man he had wanted all along.

Halladay saved the day. He personally called Amaro later that Monday night and the two agreed on an extension.

News quickly spread. Lee was thrilled to learn Halladay was joining the team, but his excitement wouldn't last.

The Phillies had been talking with Seattle about Lee at the same time they were talking with Toronto about Halladay. The moment Halladay passed his physical on December 16, Amaro called Lee, who was leaving for a deer-hunting trip, and told him he had been traded to Seattle for three prospects: right-handers Phillippe Aumont and J. C. Ramirez, and outfielder Tyson Gillies.

Lee was crushed.

“I thought we were working out an extension with the Phillies,” Lee said. “I thought I would spend the rest of my career there.”

Critics of the deal said the Phillies traded Lee because they had to shed Lee's $9 million salary. Amaro was adamant he made the trade to restock a depleted farm system, but critics killed him for that, too.

Amaro wanted to keep Lee, but David Montgomery insisted he replenish the farm system if he planned to send more prospects to Toronto. Losing seven prospects in less than five months—four for Lee in July and three for Halladay in December—was a substantial drain on the organization. And while the Phillies wanted to win a World Series, they didn't want to find themselves with an aging roster and nobody left to replace them. They needed some talent coming through the pipeline.

Amaro was never told he needed to trade Lee, but he had no other option. Lee easily was the most attractive player on his roster. He also was the only player that could bring back comparable talent to satisfy his boss.

Amaro took a beating for it. First, the Phillies sacrificed a popular, known quantity in Lee, who was making just $9 million, for three prospects who had never played above Double-A. Second, even the people who understood the Phillies' predicament thought Amaro rushed into the deal.

“If I made a mistake in that process, it was that I didn't take the time to really maximize,” said Amaro, looking back.

The Mariners wanted Lee because they already had Felix Hernandez and Erik Bedard in the rotation and had just signed Chone Figgins as a free agent. They expected to be contenders in the American League West and believed Lee could push them over the top. The Phillies felt Seattle was the perfect trade partner. They had intimate knowledge of the Mariners' farm system; Phillies Assistant General Manager Benny Looper spent 22 years with the Mariners before joining the Phillies in November 2008. Former Phillies General Manager Pat Gillick worked in Seattle before joining the Phillies in November 2005, and Special Assistant to the General Manager Charley Kerfeld lived just outside of Seattle and knew Seattle's organization well.