The Rotation by Jim Salisbury Page A

Thome when he’d arrived as a free agent before the 2003 season. They might have liked him more. He was talented. He was cool. He was theirs. In a column on the eve of the 2011 regular season, the Philadelphia Inquirer ’s Maria Panaritis, described the city’s love affair with Lee this way:
    â€œCliff Lee love isn’t about box scores, ERAs, or innings pitched. You won’t
understand it by dissecting interview transcripts, psychoanalyzing his heart. . . . It is about animal instinct. It is about being a Marlboro Man in a Metrosexual World. And it begins and ends with Game 1 of the 2009 World Series, when in one of those rare moments of superhero shine, a less-is-more ace incinerated the almighty Yankees the way Indiana Jones crushed the Germans with little more than a whip, a sneer, and a few good Hollywood one-liners.”
    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.
    Whatever.
    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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œNothing 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.
    â€œWeren’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.
    â€œThat 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