Last season ended on a high note for Rhett Lowder. In his first professional season he pitched at four different levels and reached the big leagues. After some initial struggles when he reached Double-A (10 starts, 6.85 ERA) he went on an absolute scorching the earth kind of run in the second half of the year. Beginning on July 9th he made six starts for Chattanooga and allowed four runs in 34.0 innings (1.06 ERA) before being promoted to Triple-A. He made just one start for the Bats, throwing 6.0 shutout innings. Then he was called up to the big leagues where he made six more starts and allowed just four earned runs. In his final 13 starts he posted a 1.02 ERA while throwing 70.2 innings.
Despite such a strong finish to 2024, Rhett Lowder looked like he was going to be heading into spring training fighting for a spot in the Cincinnati Reds rotation. The club had good depth in the rotation before the offseason got started, but they went out and added to it by trading Jonathan India to Kansas City and the Royals sent starting pitcher Brady Singer back to the Reds. With Hunter Greene, Nick Martinez, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, and now Singer to go along with Lowder there appeared to be six pitchers for five spots in the rotation. And that ignores Graham Ashcraft, who has been very good as a starter at times throughout his career (though he has also struggled at times).
All of that is to say that for Lowder, there wasn’t a guarantee for a spot and that he would have to go out and show that he deserved it more than someone else from that group. While most of us understand that deciding things like that based on a handful of innings in spring training is silly, teams do it every year whether it’s smart or not.
Cincinnati, though, finds themselves in a situation where now that spring training has started, two of those seven guys are already behind schedule. Andrew Abbott’s shoulder isn’t entirely 100% after the issue cost him the final six weeks of the 2024 season. He’s close to returning, though, and could be facing live hitters shortly (link to Mark Sheldon’s story at Reds.com talking about what’s next for the lefty).
The other starter is Lowder, who had some issues with his elbow while throwing last month to prepare for spring training. An MRI showed no structural damage, but the team is taking it slow with him as he gets back on the mound. Manager Terry Froncona noted that he didn’t want to put a date on Lowder’s return and whether or not he’d be ready for Opening Day.
That brings up the question of what happens with Rhett Lowder if he’s not ready to begin the year on time? A more established pitcher would probably get seniority, if you want to call it that, when they were healthy and be placed back into the rotation and push someone else out. Lowder, though, only has six big league starts. And while the results in terms of run prevention were outstanding in them, it was just six starts.
While it’s very rare that a team goes long periods of time without needing a starter to be called up during the season, if everyone is performing well then it’s going to usually require someone being injured to get called up from the minor leagues. For Rhett Lowder, that might be the path he’s going to have to take if he’s not ready for the start of the season.
That might not necessarily be a bad thing for his development, though. While his ERA was outstanding in the big leagues last year in his six starts, there were signs that he probably needed to make some improvements if he was going to continue finding success. His walk rate wasn’t exactly good as he handed out 14 free passes in 30.2 innings. He also didn’t miss bats as he had just 22 strikeouts while facing 128 hitters. Both of those rates likely have to improve for him to be a quality big league starter.
Of course we are talking about six starts in a rookie season for a pitcher who was literally pitching in his first season as a professional. During college and during his time in the minor leagues prior to his call up he had no issues at all when it comes to throwing plenty of strikes and while he wasn’t an elite strikeout pitcher in the minor leagues he had more strikeouts than innings pitched. With his time facing big leaguers at the end of the year he probably was able to pick up some of the adjustments he will need to make moving forward based on what he was seeing from the hitters and how they reacted to his pitches.
With an uncertain timeline, maybe this doesn’t come into play and he can be ready by the start of the season. But if he’s not, then he might be waiting a bit of time before he gets his next opportunity to pitch in the big leagues.
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