Double trouble

Tom Verducci, SI.com

 

Tom Verducci

SI.com

 

Mike Lowell is 32 and coming off a season in which he was outslugged and outhomered by Neifi Perez and inspired scouts from around baseball to whisper the word no player ever wants to hear: "done.'' Lowell's bat lacked any significant pop, and his body appeared to lose quickness and explosiveness.

 

In the offseason, the Marlins essentially told the Red Sox that if they wanted Josh Beckett they would have to take Lowell (and his $9 million salary) and a broken-down Guillermo Mota off their hands, too -- the baseball equivalent of cleaning out your garage.

 

One quarter of the way through this season, though, Lowell may be on his way to winning the Comeback Player of the Year Award, if not a place in the history books as he chips away at one of baseball's longest-standing hitting records. Lowell is on the absurd pace to hit 83 doubles (he had 21 through 43 games), giving him a shot at breaking the record of 67 doubles set by Earl Webb of the Red Sox in 1931. No one has hit even 60 doubles since 1936. Lowell's career high is 44, twice. (Then again, Webb never hit more than 30 doubles in any of his other six major league seasons.)

 

What's more, Lowell is hitting .331 with a .388 on-base percentage and a .597 slugging percentage, all career-high rates that blow away his awful production of last season (.236/.298/.360).

 

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Understand this about Lowell: His superb defense never wavered, he was healthy, and he is one of the classier gentlemen in baseball. As Boston manager Terry Francona said, "He's such a nice, nice man that it almost hurts wanting him to do well.'' Those attributes gave hope to the Red Sox that he would bounce back. Still, Lowell was clearly perturbed by the talk in the media that he had lost his skills. He declined, for instance, to detail the changes in his swing mechanics this year, saying sharply, "No, I'll keep it in my vault of secrecy.''

 

And when asked about the satisfaction he has felt with this bounce-back season, he said with more than a hint of sarcasm, "The Red Sox and [owner] John Henry thought it was a good, quote unquote, gamble. So I'm glad that it's working out in that sense.''

 

Lowell did drop some hints about how he turned himself around. Last year his swing became long and loopy, causing him to foul off pitches he normally would hit well. When he went home after the season, he knew what he had to do: rework his swing so that he took a more direct path to the ball. After months of work, he arrived at spring training with newly found confidence. And though he may no longer be the 32-home-run hitter he was in 2003, Lowell is a dangerous gap hitter who, like Webb, can exploit Fenway Park for doubles. (Fourteen of his doubles have come at home.)

 

Lowell, a cancer survivor, blanched when somebody asked him if last year was "a character builder" for him.

 

"Character builder? No, it was more like a character breaker,'' he said. "I felt like I had cost our team the playoffs with the way I played. I don't need a character builder. After [surviving] cancer, that's pretty trivial to think one bad season is going to build character.''

 

Lowell's story is just another reminder of how sometimes baseball laughs at convention and predictability. Sometimes players do change, reversing what we think are obvious trends. Tom Glavine works the inside corner. Bobby Jenks matures. Mariano Rivera adds seven miles per hour to his fastball. Derrek Lee learns to pull his hands through on the inside pitch. Luis Gonzalez changes his stance. Now here is Lowell, with his retooled swing, playing the best baseball in his career the season after playing at his worst.

 

Can he keep it up? When asked about the doubles record, Lowell said, "It's pretty safe. That's 12 doubles a month. I don't know. The day people start showing up at the park to follow the doubles record is when I should ask John Henry for a cut of the gate. I don't think that's going to happen.''

 

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=AqIs...cnnsi&type=lgns

We'll see how the Dog Days treat him. He always broke down in the second half of the season. But good to see Mikey turn it around, I knew he would rebound.

Amen

Mike Lowell is the exact same player he was last year, except now all those flyball outs are doubles off the Monster.

Mike Lowell is the exact same player he was last year, except now all those flyball outs are doubles off the Monster.

 

 

Is that why he has a higher slugging percentage and all six of his home runs on the road? He may have 14 doubles at home but he has 7 on the road. Mikey's back.