Having largely dominated the Yankees at home, the Rangers head to the Bronx and start their ace, Cliff Lee, in Game 3. Mid-way through his second postseason, Lee has established himself as one of the great postseason pitchers in baseball history. Lee’s teams have won all seven of his postseason starts, and he has been dominant in all of them, lasting a minimum of seven innings in each and allowing no more than one earned run in six of the seven. In his young postseason career, Lee has a 1.44 ERA and 0.78 WHIP, and has struck out nine times as many men as he has walked (54:6) while his opponents have hit just .185/.209/.249 against him. Among pitchers with 50 or more postseason innings, only closer Mariano Rivera , and dead-ball-era Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson and Eddie Plank have lower ERAs, and only Rivera has a lower WHIP.
Lee has also recorded 10 or more strikeouts four times in his seven postseason starts. Only Bob Gibson and Randy Johnson have five 10-strikeout games in the postseason, a record Lee could tie tonight, and only Gibson did it four times in his first seven postseason starts. Lee also hasn’t allowed a single walk in any of those 10 strikeout games. No other pitcher has pitched more than one 10-strikeout, zero-walk game in the postseason. In fact, there have been just eight such games in postseason history, four of them pitched by Lee. One of those came in Game 1 of last year’s World Series at Yankee Stadium, when Lee, then a member of the Phillies, completely dominated a lineup featuring many of the same hitters he will see tonight.