Derek Lowe is a groundball pitcher. He plays half his games in a pitcher’s park, he has a pretty good defense behind him, and he did well in the second half of last year. What can we extrapolate from that?

 

Not much, except that it surely doesn’t point to him losing 17 games as Asher predicted. But when you look at Lowe’s history and his stats a little closer, he seems to exhibit a strange pattern that is much stronger and more probable than the ideal situation that Keith envisions. This should leave Lowe what he has been for quite some time: a slightly better than average pitcher.

 

 

(Un)earning His Keep

 

It appears as though Asher has made the bulk of the relevant comments concerning Lowe to counter Keith’s emphatic love and surreal expectations of the guy. (And before you ask, Keith did disappear one day last week, but I have absolutely no evidence that Paul DePodesta took him out for drinks.)

Lowe gave up an uncommonly worrisome 28 home runs last year, but what Asher did not note is the uncanny number of unearned runs Lowe gave up over the last two seasons: 28 in 182.7 innings in 2004 and 24 in 222 innings last year.

 

To put this in perspective, over the same span, fellow groundball pitcher Jake Westbrook threw 416.3 innings and only yielded 30 unearned runs. Brandon Webb? In 2004 when he walked 119 men (yikes!) he also gave up 28 unearned runs, which helped contribute to his smoke-and-mirrors ERA of 3.59. But in 2005 when he dropped his walk total to 59 (more Lowe and Westbrook type numbers for a GB pitcher, thus theoretically keeping his fielders more alert) he only yielded 8 unearned runs in 229 innings, and his ERA of 3.54 looked much more impressive.

 

The point here is that Derek Lowe’s ERA over the past two years has been misleading. Unearned runs are technically credited as such because of fielding errors, but the pitcher usually has a strong say as to whether uncredited runners actually score. And despite all the UER, his ERA+ was 90 in 2004, and 113 in 2005. Neither terribly impressive. Has the Dodger defense improved so much over the winter that Derek Lowe could approach something as remarkable as the 2.69 ERA that Keith envisions for him? Is his departure from a career-long stinginess in giving up home runs so concerning that he will approach the 17 losses that Asher envisions?

 

I think it is unlikely that either scenario will pan out because Derek Lowe is one of the streakiest pitchers the game has seen in recent memory. Pitchers can fade fast, or suddenly figure out how do succeed, but rarely do you find a player with such radical oscillations over the course of one season that tend to average out to mediocrity.

 

 

Splitsville is Not Enough

 

In order to get a feel for the streakiness that is Lowe, let’s go to some stat tables. We’ll start with Lowe’s best year, 2002. Did you know that he gave up no home runs until June?

 

	GS	W	L	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	ERA
Start – June 9, 2002	12	9	2	84.3	47	17	17	0	23	50	1.81
June 10, 2002 – End	20	12	6	135.3	119	48	46	12	25	77	3.06

 

The last row of this table also contains sub-streaks where Lowe gave up 16 runs in 26.7 innings, immediately followed by 2 runs in his next 35 innings.

 

Keith goes to great lengths to point out the run values for strikeouts, outfield flys, and grounders. But the correlation in Lowe’s 2^nd half improvement last year to his 2^nd half decline in 2002 just isn’t evident. And if you still think that Lowe’s 2^nd half success last year was the result of him inducing more ground balls, does it make sense that the Dodgers loss of Gold Glove shortstop Cesar Izturis to injury coincided almost perfectly with the most productive outings of Lowe’s season?

 

And no, Izturis’ replacement, Oscar Robles, didn’t field (or hit) very well in his stead.

 

“But Scott, every pitcher has his ups and downs.” Sure, but Lowe has roller coasters. At this point, it really helps to look at Lowe’s series of hills and valleys since 2003:

 

 

Derek Lowe 2003	GS	W	L	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	ERA
Start – May 15, 2003	8	3	3	40	52	34	29	5	19	27	6.53
May 16 – June 27, 2003	8	5	0	56.6	52	19	17	2	18	24	2.70
June 28 – August 12, 2003	8	3	3	49	64	38	36	7	13	30	6.61
August 13, 2003 - End	9	6	1	57.7	48	22	19	3	22	29	2.97
Total	33	17	7	203.3	216	113	101	17	72	110	4.47

 

 

In 2003 Lowe went from very bad to very good to very bad to very good. And he finished the season somewhere in-between. So now let’s take a look at 2004. While looking at these, remember that at the end of July, the Red Sox made defensive upgrades at SS and 1B in the forms of Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz. Lowe pitched well in August, but very poorly in September:

 

 

Derek Lowe 2004	GS	W	L	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	ERA
Start – June 6, 2004	11	5	5	56.3	77	52	41	4	26	25	6.55
June 7 – June 18, 2004	2	1	0	14	9	0	0	0	8	7	0.00
June 18 – July 24, 2004	6	2	4	33	46	35	25	5	12	20	6.82
July 25 – August 31, 2004	7	4	1	48.3	51	27	22	4	12	33	4.10
September 1, 2004 - End	7	2	2	31	41	24	22	2	13	20	6.39
Total (regular season)	33	14	12	182.7	224	138	110	15	71	105	5.42
Postseason	4*	3	0	19.3	11	4	4	0	3	10	1.86

* Three games started, one in relief.

 

He essentially stunk in 2004, except for two shutouts in June and a modest month of August. But he regained his effectiveness during the playoffs, which everybody remembered. It’s amazing how many people forgot about September when assessing Lowe’s value in the winter of 2004. Enter Paul DePodesta and the Dodgers. Lest you squint really hard and start running these stats through the wringer to search for an obscure pattern, observe the wild splay of 2005 Lowe:

 

 

Derek Lowe 2005	GS	W	L	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	ERA
Start – May 31, 2005	11	4	4	72.3	71	32	25	6	15	51	3.11
June 1 – August 22, 2005	16	4	8	94.7	113	68	53	19	24	59	5.04
August 23, 2005 - End	8	4	3	55	39	13	11	3	16	36	1.80
Total	35	12	15	222	223	113	89	28	55	146	3.61

 

Izturis played his last game on August 22^nd.

 

Analyze This? Analyze What!

 

So what have we learned from these tables? For one, when Derek Lowe is ineffective, he is giving up gobs of hits. The converse does not appear to be true, however, as he has given up his fair share of hits during his good periods. There is no reliable pattern in his walk or strikeout ratios that correlates with his effectiveness. He is usually a worse pitcher when he is giving up home runs, but then again, who isn’t?

It may be possible that someone has GB/FB ratio data over these time periods (Retrosheet or Baseball Info Solutions?) which might suggest a pattern. But even if this were so, I wonder how meaningful it would be. His success does not seem to be dependent on the quality of the fielders behind him, although instinctively you’d think groundball pitchers plus slick fielders equals success. Perhaps there is something in the action of his pitches that we can’t quite quantify. I leave that to the hitters, physicists, and statisticians out there who are more talented than I.

 

In a game with events that occur as discreetly as in baseball, one is tempted to believe that even a mystery like this is capable of being unraveled. But until such a day, I can work under only one conclusion: We are seeing something rare and chaotic here that operates in spans of half-a-season or less. Because of this, any view of Lowe as likely to succeed or fail spectacularly over the course of a whole season seems pretty far fetched.

 

Just because Keith offered some numbers, I offer mine: 14-11, 3.73, 140 K, 1.29 WHIP

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Disagree with something? Got something to add? Wanna bring up something totally new? Scott Glab resides in Chicago, Illinois, and can be reached at scott@baseballevolution.com.