Lowe hopes his sinker proves uplifting in Atlanta

For those awaiting Derek Lowe’s first start at Turner Field, you’re about 6 1/2 years too late.

June 16, 2002: Boston 6, Atlanta 1. Lowe, in his first year in the Red Sox rotation, struck out 10 with such a devastating sinkerball that he would yield just one fly ball all day. In the Atlanta dugout, John Burkett watched just one inning before betting Greg Maddux that Lowe would throw only 10 curveballs all day.

Enlarge this image

Brant Sanderlin/bsanderlin@ajc.com

Derek Lowe’s uneven career has brought him to Atlanta, where he hopes to stabilize the staff.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

• Photos: Lowe's time in majors
• Stats: Lowe's career



RELATED BRAVES LINKS

• Spring schedule • Beat blog • Stats

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Burkett was wrong. Lowe threw perhaps just five, relying all afternoon on one navel-to-shoetop sinker after another in one of the most dominant performances ever by a visiting pitcher at The Ted.

Marveled manager Bobby Cox, “He could literally get by with one pitch.”

That is the performer local historians recalled when the Braves hired Lowe earlier this month to redeem their starting pitching. General manager Frank Wren, welcoming his newest free agent to town, termed his signing a “culmination.” Pitching coach Roger McDowell said, “He legitimizes the staff.”

Long and winding road

At $60 million over the next four seasons, Lowe’s salary is more than Maddux or John Smoltz or Tom Glavine ever earned here. At $60 million, he is making more than the 1991 and 1992 Braves payrolls combined.

But he is a big-game pitcher. He is a clubhouse live wire. He works fast. He is a 200-inning lock every year. He has never been on the disabled list. Last fall, he won Los Angeles’ first playoff game in 20 years. When Boston broke the curse in 2004, Lowe was the winning pitcher in all three postseason clinch games.

But it’s a wonder that he ever got this far. Lowe’s career hasn’t been a slow rising arc; it’s been a cobblestone ride.

In Los Angeles, where he was also supposed to stabilize the staff, he had losing records in two of his past four seasons. Before he worked his October magic in Boston in 2004, he had been yanked from the postseason rotation, falling all the way to the 11th man on an 11-man staff.

“You learn to become a better pitcher by failing,” Lowe said. “And believe me, I have done plenty of that. … Dealing with success is easy How do you deal with failure?”

By his count, baseball was his fourth or fifth favorite sport as Lowe matriculated through Edsel Ford High School in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. A gifted athlete, he was an all-league performer in golf, soccer and baseball. But it was basketball that consumed him, especially after a junior year growth spurt left him at 6 feet, 6 inches.

“I didn’t ever consider myself a baseball prospect,” he said. “I didn’t have one single scholarship offer, from the junior college to the biggest schools in the United States or around the world.”

Nor did he pitch much. His father, Don Lowe, presciently forbid his son to throw breaking balls before he turned 15. In three years of varsity play at Edsel Ford, Lowe won just two games. An all-state forward, he signed a scholarship in 1991 to play basketball at Eastern Michigan.

Or at least he intended to, until the Seattle Mariners drafted him in the eighth round that summer, making Lowe the first player chosen in the state. The club explained that, even though he was raw, Lowe’s natural competitiveness would make him a pitcher, if he just would just commit to it. Lowe decided to give himself three years and then, hopefully, return to basketball. He weighed just 170 pounds, and he had no idea how to pitch.

“Go to rookie ball and everyone is throwing 95, 96, 97, and I’m firing 84 mile-an-hour four-seamers,” he said. “I had no breaking ball, no nothing. Baggy pants, the hair over your eyes. You know, great!”

The journey would take him not three years, but seven. And it might not have happened at all had he not been paired with pitching coach Jeff Andrews at Class AA Jacksonville in 1994. Observing how Lowe’s four-seam fastball was being swatted all over the league, Andrews suggested concentrating on the two-seam fastball, with its natural sink.

“To his credit — and I don’t know any reason why — he just kind of said ‘OK, I believe it.’ And we did it,” said Andrews, currently coaching in the Texas Rangers system. “That isn’t to say he didn’t have problems with it when we started. This guy will listen to the janitor if he has some suggestion.”

The sinker is a touch pitch, and that touch did not come easily, testing Lowe’s considerable sense of humor. One night, after his pupil opened the game with three walks and a hit batter, bouncing pitch after pitch short of the plate and into catcher Chris Widger, Andrews went to the mound.

“And he says, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” Andrews recalled. “I just told him, ‘Just throw it farther. Just throw the ball farther, and let Widge catch it. Can’t you see you’re killing him? Why don’t you just slug him? It’d be easier. Just hit him instead of beating him to death. Throw it farther!’ ”

Path to Atlanta

But he stuck with the pitch. In 1997, Lowe’s sinker finally got him to Seattle, where he lasted precisely 12 games before he was traded. Then-manager Lou Piniella was adamant about acquiring a new closer, and Boston agreed to send him Heathcliff Slocumb for Lowe and a minor league catcher named Jason Varitek. Though this is considered to be the worst trade the Mariners ever made, Lowe is convinced the Sox had no idea what they were getting.

“I meet [Boston general manager] Dan Duquette, and he’s talking about me being left-handed with this big curve,” said Lowe, who is right-handed and has never thrown a big curveball. “And I’m thinking, when do I correct him?”

The Red Sox tried using Lowe everywhere from starting to closing, but what he excelled at was enraging Fenway Park with his inconsistency. He accumulated 66 saves between 2000 and 2001, but fans seated near the Boston bullpen would try to shout him down whenever he stood to warm up. On Derek Lowe poster night, he blew a save against the Mariners, and the game had to be stopped while the grounds crew picked up the thousands of posters fan threw on the field.

“Honest to God, if [I] went out on the town, I would literally bring police officers out with me,” Lowe said. “And people still would want to fight you.”

But he was also learning to handle critical situations in one of the game’s harshest environments. When new manager Grady Little decided in 2002 to put him in the rotation, Lowe took off. He won 21 games (including the gem in Atlanta), finished third in the Cy Young voting and joined Smoltz and Dennis Eckersley as the only two pitchers with 20-win and 40-save seasons.

And true to form, two years later, he had somehow pitched himself back out of Boston’s postseason plans (career-high 5.42 ERA in ‘04) as they began their October run. Sent to the far end of the bullpen, he came back to go 3-0 in that historic postseason, winning Game 3 in relief when Boston swept Anaheim in the ALDS, winning ALCS Game 7 as a starter to eliminate New York and winning Game 4 as a starter in the World Series sweep of St. Louis.

“They pretty much put me on [the postseason roster] because they needed someone to carry the gum,” he said. “It kind of worked out. It worked out quite well.”

Lowe’s past four years with the Dodgers (54-48, 3.59) proved his sinker would work in the National League but also convinced him to return to the East. A very public divorce, which played out in the L.A. newspapers, may or may not have discouraged the Dodgers from keeping him, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered.

Lowe made a short list of five teams — Mets, Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox and Braves — and was swayed to come here after one meeting with Wren. His four-season deal means Lowe’s original three-year commitment from 1991 will reach 22 years by 2012.

“Clearly, Atlanta was the wild-card team that I didn’t know that much about,” he said. “But when you sit down and talk to them and see where they’re going, understand the change that they wanted to make, it’s a place you feel happy to be a part of, to try to be part of getting back to where they want to be.”