In his first season with the Cubbies, Derrek Lee hit 39 doubles, 32 home runs, and drew 68 walks en route to a great season.  Then something amazing happened in 2005.  Lee, a career .270s hitter, hit .335 with 45 home runs, 50 doubles and 85 walks.  He finished 3rd in MVP voting and won the Silver Slugger and another Gold Glove.  He made his first all-star game as well.  Was this crazy 2005 season the start of something special?  Or just a fluke season and he would return to the norm?

Cubs fans never got to find out the answer to that question, because in 2006, only 2 weeks after signing a huge contract extension, Derrek Lee broke his wrist and missed most of the season.  Would he ever be the same?  He was 30 years old, and most ballplayers never come back quite the same after a serious hand injury like that.  In general it takes at least a full season to rebuild hand strength and get your bat speed back up to normal.

In 2007-2008, he continued to see the ball well, hitting an average of .304 with 71 walks per season.  This would seem to indicate that 2005 Derrek Lee, the one who had hit the ball more than 60 points higher than his career average, may have been the Derrek Lee that Cubs fans were going to get going forward.  The wrist injury clearly showed its impact, however.  In 2007-2008, he hit only 22 and 20 home runs respectively.  He also blasted a huge 43 and 41 doubles in those two seasons.  This would seem to point to the fact that the tiny loss in his power resulting from the injury was enough to turn many of what were previously home run blasts into hard hit doubles.

And maybe that’s where the story would have ended.  Most Cubs fans (myself included), were resigned to the fact that maybe D-Lee was going to be a Gold Glove first basemen that hit about .300, got on base well, and hit a lot of doubles.  With the power gone, it wasn’t like D-Lee had been rendered useless, his contributions were just going to be lower than we had all hoped.

Bumbling through another rough Cubs start this year, most of us didn’t think twice about Derrek Lee.  No worries about his slow start, we thought.  He is a consistent guy.  He’ll hit about .300 and get us a lot of doubles.  No one expected he would find his power stroke though.  It’s not like he wasn’t hitting the ball hard the last couple years, its just that it wasn’t quite getting over the fence.  Well all that seems to have changed.  A wrist injury is a serious thing and usually takes about a year to fully recover from, so we all just assumed that he never would completely recover after two years of lacking 30 home run power.  Looks like we were wrong.  Maybe at 31, it took him 2 years to regain that power.  To date, Derrek Lee is hitting .288 with 16 home runs and his slugging percentage is .519, the highest of his career outside the 2005 season.  Those doubles that used to be home runs?  Yeah they are home runs again.  He is on pace to hit well over 30 dingers and is carrying an anemic Cubs offense to a 41-40 record at the midway point.

Is this just a hot streak?  Or is Derrek Lee back, the way it was supposed to be before the tragic wrist injury?  There’s no way to know for sure, but there’s no reason to think he won’t keep stroking the ball like he did before 2006.