Pitching Jewels from Mexico: Alex Delgado’s Changeup and Josh Lowey’s Curveball

Attempting to discover pitching jewels — guys who may have some value in MLB — in international leagues is a relaxing hobby I recommend you try in your free time.

First, you will be doing something that forces you to watch (non-American) baseball all year long. The TV memberships you will need to start watching are really cheap. And there is something appealing about imagining yourself as the one who “discovered” a 2-WAR, 32-year-old pitcher for a major league team.

Of course, finding complete treasures shouldn’t be the main goal of this exercise unless you want to live in a constant state of frustration. Instead, as someone who has played this little game for years now, I have to advise that instead of searching for a potential major league pitcher, you keep an eye out for a particular pitch that could do some damage in the best baseball league in the world. It’s still a hard task, but at least your odds will look less like winning the lottery and more like being struck by lighting in an open field.

Take what I found in Efren Alexander Delgado’s changeup for example. This guy is a 24-year-old lefty starting pitcher for Guerreros de Oaxaca with no outstanding numbers in Mexico. Then again, if you look closely, you will see that he went full “Bumgarner Mode” on the 2018 Mexican League postseason: a 2.25 ERA, with 39 strikeouts and nine walks in 32 innings against tough teams such as Diablos Rojos Del México, Leones de Yucatan, and Sultanes de Monterrey.

He sporadically touches 90 mph with his fastball and has an average curveball, but he does have a magic changeup. Just watch this at-bat and try to identify who Delgado is striking out:

Yes, what you are seeing is rare footage of the only strikeout folk hero Willians Astudillo suffered in the Venezuelan Winter League last postseason while he was playing with Caribes de Anzoategui. This part of the game wasn’t broadcast (Nicolas Maduro was speaking and every Venezuelan network was forced to broadcast him), but thanks to my little birds in Venezuela, we manage to salvage this piece of baseball history.

Sadly, we don’t have TrackMan data in Venezuela or Mexico to check how this Astudillo killer changeup matches up with, for example, a Cole Hamels’ changeup. Still, that pitch has to have had something very spicy on it if even La Tortuga couldn’t stay with it in a very high-stakes game. Just watch it in action in Mexico, and you can be the judge of its beauty:

If Delgado has Astudillo as a measurement tool, this other guy I’m about to present has a bit more by way of numbers and science on his side.

I’d like to introduce to you Josh Lowey and his hammering curveball:

First, some context. Lowey has been a monster in Mexico since he arrived in 2015. Truly a perfect outlier. Here are some facts so you can get a little bit of perspective. Since 2015, he has 572 strikeouts in the regular season. The pitcher with the second most strikeouts in the league in this period is Manuel Flores with 361. Lowey has a 3.16 FIP since 2015, the best in the league among pitchers with at least 300 innings pitched; he also leads the league in innings pitched (536.2), xFIP (3.24), and K%-BB% (19.6%).

That type of dominance had to garner some interest in bigger leagues, right? Indeed, Lowey went to Korea in 2016, where he failed to throw strikes, averaging 5.9 BB/9 in 60 innings while posting a painful 6.30 ERA. After that he stayed in Mexico. No winter ball action, no change of teams. He remained an absolute strikeout machine committed to destroying hitters in this summer league that unfortunately doesn’t have the tech to study his arsenal in-depth.

Luckily, Lowey went to the Dominican Republic with Leones del Escogido this winter, and things are different there. His repertoire was measured, detailed, and observed under the microscope that we all have grown accustomed to in MLB these days, and the results were promising. Lowey’s hammering curveball was measured at 2,900 rpm, which is similar to Rich Hill’s dominant curve.

Why hasn’t he received more big league attention? The most obvious answer is that major league teams are skittish about his age; Lowey is 34. Maybe it is the control, maybe it is the age, or maybe is the fact that he got destroyed in Korea.

Whatever the reason may be, one thing is for sure in my book: pitches like Delgado’s changeup and Lowey’s curveball deserve to be known by the pitching enthusiasts around the baseball world despite the fact they are not causing mayhem in the major leagues. These offerings are treasures over here, and just imagining what would happen if they were unleashed on the best baseball league on the planet brings me instant joy.

But maybe the best part of all is the fact that those treasures aren’t the only ones. You just have to have the time and the patience to look for them a little farther from home.