Cliff Lee's Phillies legacy: He wanted to pitch here

Cliff Lee will not pitch in the major leagues anymore.

You are excused if you had forgotten that it was (technically) possible he might. After Lee had missed the entire 2015 season with a torn tendon in his left elbow, the Phillies had declined, in November, to pick up his option for 2016, paying $12.5 million to buy out his contract's final year. No other team signed him. He is 37 and has an unreliable arm, and 37-year-olds with unreliable arms don't often sign with major-league teams, even if they are left-handed and were once among the best pitchers in baseball.

His agent, Darek Braunecker, told Fox Sports on Tuesday, "We don't anticipate him playing at this point."

There will be no farewell news conference, no highlight montage on the Citizens Bank Park scoreboard. Just this final dissolve in a long, slow fade from view.

Lee's exit from baseball could hardly offer a greater contrast to his joining the Phillies in 2009, his departure in December 2009 when they traded him to the Seattle Mariners, and his return in 2010 when, as the most sought-after free agent of the offseason, he signed with the Phillies for five years and $120 million. Each transaction was a thunderbolt, in its reverberations and its effect.

The Phillies' decision to acquire Lee from the Cleveland Indians at the '09 trade deadline gave them an ace when it did not go too far to say that they didn't have one. Cole Hamels was in the midst of his season-long hangover from the previous October, and Lee's arrival stabilized the rotation. He was very good in the regular season and dominant throughout the postseason, though the moment that turned him into a folk hero here only tangentially involved his throwing a pitch. It was his gloving a sickly pop-up by the Yankees' Johnny Damon in Game 1 of that year's World Series, a catch Lee made so casually that he might as well have been taking a can of soup off a supermarket shelf.

That play came to define Lee in Philadelphia - or, at least, many fans allowed that play to define how they saw him. Cliff Lee was as cool and confident as Sean Connery, and on the biggest stage in baseball. The World Series! Yankee Stadium! And then, after general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. panicked over the dearth of talent in the Phillies' farm system and traded Lee to Seattle for a pile of suspect prospects, after the Mariners traded him again, to the Texas Rangers, and after he became a free agent, Lee had his pick of teams to sign with, and he didn't choose the Yankees or the Rangers. He picked the Phillies.

He picked us!

This decision was everything for Lee here. It elevated him in people's eyes, even above Hamels. Such is the insecurity, the solicitousness for appreciation from our athletes, inherent in the collective psyche of Philadelphia's sports culture. It didn't matter that Hamels had done more to deliver the city a championship, in 2008, than anyone else, or that - apart from a 2014 postgame media session during which he loudly passed gas and snickered in the aftermath - Lee displayed no discernible personality at all.

In 2009 and 2011, that single-mindedness lent him a kind of aura. On the mound, and even off it, he seemed a beautifully designed machine that had been programmed to pour pitch after pitch into the strike zone. For instance, Joe Jordan, the Phillies' director of player development, had scouted Lee for the Montreal Expos in the late 1990s during Lee's college career at the University of Arkansas.

In 2007, Lee had struggled so badly that the Indians demoted him to the minors. Jordan caught up with him at Camden Yards in Baltimore one day in September 2008, when Jordan was the Orioles' scouting director and Lee was on his way to winning the American League Cy Young Award.

"I was like, 'What's the deal? What's the difference?' " Jordan said in a 2010 interview. "I'll never forget his answer. He said, 'Three pitches for strikes every night. That's the key.' I remember that he didn't think about it: 'Three pitches for strikes every night.' "

But "three pitches for strikes every night" is an answer that merely raises the question. How did he develop those pitches - his fastball, his cutter, his slider? Lee didn't care to share the secret, then or thereafter. He didn't care to reveal much of anything, about himself or his pitching, and as long as the Phillies were contenders, his unwillingness or inability to do so only enhanced his mystique.

Once the Phillies' inevitable decline began, though, Lee's persona was less that of a machine than of a mercenary. He pitched every five days, collected his paycheck, and that was that. He was still terrific until his arm failed him, but there was a soullessness to his excellence. He was just one of the several veteran players on the roster who needed to move on so the Phillies could start fresh. That moving-on is all but official now, for him and them. It was time. No one picked him.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski