Posted by Craig Brown on Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 3:36 pm

Currently hitting .200/.266/.300 in the young season, Cubs first baseman Derrek Lee is struggling. Struggling may be understating his current condition – in 79 plate appearances, he’s managed just five extra base hits. What in Wrigleyville is going on?

For starters, Lee’s line drive rate is obscenely low. At 8.3%, Lee is hitting fewer line drives (as a percentage of all balls put in play) than any other big league regular. And it’s not even close. Only Florida’s Cameron Maybin and Lee’s teammate Mike Fontenot have line drive rates lower than 10%.

Historically, Lee rakes the liners. For his career, he’s hitting a line drive 21.3% of the time and last season his rate was at 21.5%. As we all know, line drives are the gold standard for batters. Since roughly three-fourths of all line drives fall for hits, the more line drives, the better the offensive production. Lee’s abysmal line drive rate is reflected in his batting average on balls in play. Currently, he’s carrying a .228 BABIP, well below his career mark of .325.

Meanwhile, Lee is putting more balls in play than at any other time in his career. He’s walking just 9.1% of the time (versus a career rate of 11.2%) and striking out just 17.1% of the time (verses a career rate of 23.2%.) If he continues making this kind of contact, Lee will set a career best for his strikeout rate.

So Lee is making more contact than ever, yet his line drive rate is at an all time low. Why? Since it’s not a lack of contact issue, it must be a type of contact issue.

Lee has slowly been expanding his strike zone ever since joining the Cubs prior to the 2004 season. According to FanGraphs, Lee’s O-Swing% (the percent of pitches he sees outside of his strike zone which he swings at) has been steadily increasing.

2004: 14.7%
2005: 16.9%
2006: 17.7%
2007: 18.7%
2008: 20.8%
2009: 22.2%

While Lee’s has been slowly expanding his zone, that in and of itself shouldn’t be cause for concern. When a batter goes fishing out of his strike zone, he’s really swinging at a pitcher’s pitch – it’s a pitch where if the hitter actually manages to get his bat on the ball, he’s usually not going to make quality contact. Again from FanGraphs, check out Lee’s contact percentages for when he swings at a pitch outside of the strike zone:

2004: 53.1%
2005: 43.6%
2006: 50.7%
2007: 52.5%
2008: 57.4%
2009: 68.8%

Making contact on pitches out of the zone doesn’t necessarily mean a bad thing. Players like Vladimir Guerrero and Albert Pujols routinely go out of the strike zone and make solid contact. However, for a player like Lee to see such an extreme jump in his percentage from one year to the next… that will set off a few alarm bells. Making such a high rate of contact on balls out of the zone is not his game and his batting average, on base percentage and power are all suffering because of that.

So if Lee is going out of the zone more often and isn’t hitting line drives anymore, what type of contact is he making? For his career, Lee usually hits a similar number of balls on the ground and in the air. His career FB rate is 38%, but this season, 55% of all of his batted balls are going in the air.

Lee is still taking that power swing but now instead of driving the ball, he’s just getting under the ball. And when he goes fishing outside of the zone, the result is a harmless fly ball. This season, many of those fly balls aren’t even leaving the infield. His infield fly ball rate is a whopping 21.2%. Almost a quarter of all his fly balls are barely traveling 120 feet.

We’re a month into the season, and with Lee hitting .190/.227/.238 over his last six games, it’s time to be concerned. He missed a couple of games after experiencing back spasms over the weekend and returned to the lineup on Wednesday where he went 0-3, with three fly ball outs. Apparently, he didn’t use his time off to reevaluate his methods.

As it stands, Lee needs to overhaul everything about his approach at the plate. For starters, he needs to lay off all pitches outside the strike zone and focus only on those pitches that are over the plate – the pitches where he can actually accomplish something productive. Then, he needs to concentrate on making solid contact. The extra base hits will take care of themselves, but for now Lee just needs simply to connect on a few line drives. It’s the first step in his recovery.