Stand Out Above the Crowd, Even if You Gotta Shout Out Lowe

For half of Thursday’s game against Boston, it seemed like the good times had finally stopped rolling for the Tampa Bay Rays. The hitherto unhittable Jeffrey Springs left the game with ulnar neuritis—nerve irritation in his elbow, but it’s scarier when you say it like the name of the chancellor of a minor Star Trek world. Corey Kluber had held Tampa Bay’s vaunted offense to just one run through four innings.

Then the Rays burst out for seven runs as if out of nowhere. The highlight of the inning was probably Manuel Margot’s pinch-hit RBI bunt. Bunting for a hit with two outs and the bases loaded is the kind of thing you do when a mystical hooded figure grants you the power of telekinesis and you want to see if it’s real or you’re being pranked. That’s just how things are going for Tampa Bay right now.

But the biggest hit of the inning, according to WPA, was Brandon Lowe’s seeing-eye single three batters prior, which tied the game with two outs. If the Rays are actually going to continue on as the best team in baseball, Lowe is one of their most important players.

The funny thing about Lowe’s fifth-inning single is that it’s about the most un-Lowe hit you’ll ever see. The Red Sox had just replaced the right-handed Kluber — who ironically had struck Lowe out twice — with the left-handed Richard Bleier. And to be honest, Lowe should’ve done more with that pitch, which was right over the heart of the plate at 87.5 mph. Nevertheless, he just about finessed it through the infield for an inning-extending RBI hit.

What happened his next time up was more in character: Another first-pitch swing, this time on about the fattest hanging breaking ball you’ll ever see. Lowe dropped the head of his 7-iron on the ball and knocked it into the right field seats, easy as can be.

Lowe fits two well-known baseball archetypes. The first is the efficient second baseman. A player, usually a college draftee, who takes walks, hits for power, and makes smart plays on both sides of the ball. A scrappy guy who might not jump off the field at you but who fills up the box score. Jackie Robinson and Joe Morgan might be too good to be exemplars of this type of player, but baseball history has blessed us with no shortage of examples: Chase Utley, Ian Kinsler, Dustin Pedroia, Jason Kipnis. Lowe’s defense and basestealing are maybe a tick or two short of being a model of the type, but he’s in there.

The second archetype is the swing plane guy. Lowe doesn’t look like an ideal power hitter; at 5-foot-10, 185 pounds you could more or less pick him up and carry him around in your pocket. But he has a great eye, and when he gets his pitch, he kills it.

Since 2020, the season in which Lowe established himself as a full-time impact hitter, he has a GB/FB ratio of 0.80, which is 26th out of 166 qualified hitters. His HR/FB%, 21.4, is 14th. The two guys in front of him on the list, Luke Voit and Tyler O’Neill, probably consume Lowe’s weight in protein powder every day.

In many respects, Lowe is the hitter Yandy Díaz looks like he should be. In 2021, his last full healthy season, Lowe hit 39 home runs. The year before, he hit 14 in 56 games, which prorates to about 38 over a 162-game season. In 2022, Lowe had the worst power numbers of his career and his highest GB/FB ratio since his rookie season, which probably had something to do with the back injury that limited him to 65 games. Now that he’s fully healthy, Lowe is gripping it and ripping it with abandon.

When the Rays have been good the past few years, they’ve done it with pitching and defense. Last season, the Rays were 22nd in isolated power, 25th in home runs and were in the top 10 in the league in groundball rate. This season, things are different; through Wednesday, the Rays led the majors in home runs, ISO, and fly ball rate. Some of that is Lowe’s doing, as he has now hit five home runs from 12 fly balls. And some of it is probably small-sample noise and the results of an enormous team-wide hot streak.

But while the Rays have plenty of guys who hit the ball hard, most of them hit the ball hard on the ground, which has been a surprisingly profitable strategy for Tampa Bay. Díaz, Randy Arozarena, even Wander Franco has a moderate groundball bias in his minor and major league numbers through 2022, even if he’s hitting the ball in the air more now.

Lowe, despite his diminutive packaging, is the kind of home run hitter the Rays have struggled to acquire or develop for the past decade. His 39-homer season in 2021 marked just the third time a Rays hitter had ever had that many; only Carlos Peña had ever hit more. (Did anyone else forget that Logan Morrison had a 38-dinger season for the Rays in 2017? If you’d asked, “Who ranks fourth on the Rays’ single-season home run leaderboard?” I probably would’ve needed 50 guesses before landing on LoMo.)

And just like a big, hulking home run hitter, there’s reason to expect Lowe to benefit from the new shift rules over the course of the season. In his last full season, 2021, he wasn’t a dead-pull hitter, but he ranked 42nd out of 132 qualified hitters in pull rate and faced some form of a shift in more than 300 plate appearances. A quick search shows nine pulled batted balls from Lowe this year that resulted in a field out or a non-home run base hit. Of those, two singles — one against the A’s, another against the Nationals — might have been outs against a shift that had the second baseman playing in short right field.

Right now, Lowe is hitting .333/.463/.818 and is on pace for 62 home runs. If that lasts, maybe the Rays really will go 162-0. It won’t, but could he hit .300/.400/.600 with 45 home runs? I think he could, if everything broke right for him. Now is a good time to write about outliers, to maximize the wow factor of their early-season numbers. (I’m sorry, I think you mean the Lowe factor.) But this is one with a chance to keep going.