Cliff Lee of the Phillies is having one weird season. As of this writing, Lee is sporting a 2-6 W-L record after 19 starts, with rate stats comparable to his career averages.

So, what’s so unusual? I’ll take a look after the jump.

As you can see, Lee is in his 11th season and is in a group of pitchers to win 100+ games with a 115 or better ERA+ through their first 10 seasons. So, how did those pitchers fare in their 11th season (min. 162 IP)? Let’s see.

I guess being on a list liberally sprinkled with HOFers can’t be all bad, but Lee has some work to do to avoid taking the top spot here with the fewest wins.

Changing it up slightly to use the same criteria up to age 32 instead of in the first ten seasons, we get these age 33 seasons.

Lee seems very likely to be heading this list (again with many notable names) after this season.

What about decisions? Lee has just 8 in 19 starts. How low is that rate?

These are pitchers with seasons (min. 162 IP) with decisions numbering fewer than 50% of starts. A really short list. Note that, unsurprisingly, only two seasons here occurred more than 20 years ago, and none prior to 1979.

Other curious marks from Lee’s season: allowing 1 ER or less, Lee is 1-0, but with 4 no decisions; allowing 2 ER, 1-2 with one ND; more than 2 ER, 0-4 with 5 NDs. Among 28 pitchers this season with 5 games allowing 1 ER or less, only Cole DeVries and Drew Smyly also have 1-0 records. Juan Nicasio has 4 such games and is still in search of a decision.

Finally, how much will a season like this affect Lee’s final career marks. Let’s look at pitchers with comparable SO and Win totals after age 32 and age 33, and see how different those lists look. First, age 32 pitchers with 115 to 125 wins, and 1200 or more strikeouts. There are 18 retired pitchers matching these criteria, the better ones including Tommy John, Kevin Brown, Ron Guidry, Jon Matlack and Luis Tiant. Discouragingly for Lee, this group was mostly done by age 32 – the median career wins was 132 as 13 of the 18 finished with 136 or less (but the other 5 were all at 170 or more), and only 3 finished north of 2000 strikeouts.

Now let’s look at a group of age 33 pitchers with 120 to 130 wins, and 1300 or more strikeouts. Again, this yields a group of 18 retired pitchers. Several of the same pitchers are holdovers from the first group (not surprisingly since the first group included so many “almost done” guys), but new names include Randy Johnson, Floyd Bannister, Dean Chance, Kevin Gross and Jerry Koosman. For this group, the median career wins was again 132, but only 3 finished above 145 wins though all of these were at 200 or more. Strikeout totals were a bit more promising with 3 finishing over 2500 and Bobby Witt fourth at 1955.

So, somewhat surprisingly, having a weird year with almost nothing registering in the Wins column doesn’t seem to have done much to hurt Lee’s prospects for where his final career totals might end up. At the beginning of this season, Bill James’ career projection tool gave Lee a 35% chance at 200 wins and a 92% chance at 2000 strikeouts. Just for fun, if we were to assume that Lee isn’t almost done, then career totals of 200-225 wins with 2000 strikeouts and a .600 winning percentage (Lee is currently at .617) would put him in the same class as just one player, another former Phillies pitcher and a likely first ballot HOFer. I’m sure you know the guy I’m talking about.