There's Hope For Jackson Kowar Yet

The debut for the tall Royals righty went about as poorly as it could, but history does show there's some hope.

In 2012, the Royals started Jeff Francoeur in right field 144 times. He hit .235/.287/.378. While he was putting up that anemic line, Wil Myers hit .314/.388/.600 while playing mostly right field between AA and AAA in the Royals organization, but never got the call. Why? I don’t know if this is the exact answer, but the general consensus I’ve gotten is that they saw him as a piece to trade, not a piece to build around and didn’t want a lackluster debut to cloud the trade value. They, of course, did trade him and he brought back James Shields and Wade Davis in a deal that I, and many others, despised at the time.

Myers has had a very nice career. He won Rookie of the Year in 2013 and owns a career line of .254/.330/.446 (111 OPS+) while making a ton of money. And maybe he would have brought back a similar deal if he had debuted for the Royals like he did for the Rays, but also the Royals felt there was a risk that he wouldn’t. As it turns out, he’s been a solid but nothing special player. I’m telling you this because I thought the Royals would do the same thing with Jackson Kowar in 2021 knowing that they should likely be trading from their stable of college arms to help fill in gaps in the organization.

The problem was that the Royals needed a starter too badly and Kowar was pitching too spectacularly. He gave up three runs on 18 hits in 31.2 innings in six starts in Omaha. He struck out 41 and walked 10. The Royals were clinging to the playoff race in early June and needed someone to come up and help to stabilize the rotation. But, as you know, it was a huge disaster. He looked uncomfortable and nervous and couldn’t get out of the first inning in his big league debut. Then he couldn’t get out of the second in his next start and he pitched three innings out of the bullpen his next time out before getting sent back down.

Back in Omaha, he was sort of up and down, but he was reconfiguring his repertoire a bit, moving away from a curve that just wasn’t getting there and trying out a slider that looked like it had potential. He gave up two runs on seven hits in 11 innings in his final two starts in Omaha while striking out 16 and walking just two. So the Royals called him back up. And it looked like the reset had worked. He had a very good outing against Cleveland, giving out two runs over six innings. But that was about the only success he’d have.

Sure, the failure looked different, a little better, than his first stint in the big leagues, but it was still failure. His 11.27 ERA was the worst in the big leagues in the last 41 seasons among pitchers with at least 30 innings pitched. That’s not just bad. That’s all-time bad. It’s easy to see what made him succeed in the minors, but it’s also easy to envision a world where he never succeeds in the majors. What I’m about to take a look at are some pitchers who looked as lost as Kowar did last season (though clearly with a better ERA) and came out on the other side. Think of this as a ray of sunshine as the optimism of spring has returned to baseball.

Let’s start with current pitchers before we get a little historical with the most famous turnaround of the last 30 years or so.

Jose Berrios

Berrios was one of the Twins top prospects a few seasons ago and earned himself a mid-season callup in 2016 on the strength of allowing 74 hits in 111.1 AAA innings. But when he got to the big leagues, he was hit around like a punching bag. He was sent down and brought back up and the Royals enjoyed their games against him in 2016, something I remember quite well for no particular reason. It was ugly and many Twins fans completely wrote him off.

The sample was smaller for Kowar in 2021 than Berrios in 2016, but the numbers were similar. Kowar struck out 18 percent of batters, Berrios 17.4 percent. Kowar walked 13 percent, Berrios 12.5 percent. Kowar gave up homers on 17.1 percent of fly balls, Berrios 16.2 percent. They go about their work in different ways, but Berrios might be the easiest path for Kowar to go from being on the precipice of being a bust to being a top half of the rotation type starter. Berrios didn’t do anything fancy. He threw his fastball better and in better locations.

This isn’t the only reason he got better. Some of it was simply experience because, yes, sometimes young players just struggle, but a lot of it was that his fastball filled the zone more but not necessarily in one spot as you can see it did in 2016. The improvement of his fastball led to the improvement of other pitches and now he’s become a very good big league pitcher. I don’t think he’s ever had the true breakout that I thought he would a couple years ago, but there’s nothing wrong with 190-200 innings of a mid-3s ERA with strikeouts and solid control.

What Lessons Can Kowar Learn?

The first is that pitching is hard. Sometimes talented pitchers struggle before they figure it out. With Berrios, it was about moving the ball around the zone a little bit. Kowar’s fastball is straighter than Berrios, so he probably has to look at moving it around the edges a bit more than he did. If Berrios did that, he might actually take that next step, but he’s certainly good enough. Kowar mentioned at some point last year that his changeup suffered because his fastball wasn’t good enough, and that’s true. So he can take the lesson of location from Berrios.

Corbin Burnes

The National League Cy Young winner looked like he was going to flame out following the 2019 season. He had an 8.82 ERA, but that might have been the best of his numbers. He threw 49 innings, gave up 17 homers (not a typo) and 70 hits. He did strike a bunch of hitters out and limit walks reasonably well, but still, something was very wrong given that he gave up home runs on almost 39 percent of all fly balls hit. So what changed?

In 2019, Burnes threw primarily a four-seam fastball and a slider. Now, the slider was excellent, but in 2020, he moved away from it a bit and moved away from the four-seamer a lot. He threw a sinker and a cutter as his fastballs and used his curve considerably more. The slider usage sort of makes some sense because it and a cutter have a similar shape. You may remember me talking about that quite a bit with Jakob Junis this past year. So he was very good in a shortened 2020, but he was truly great in 2021 when he went basically all-in on the cutter.

He threw it 52.3 percent of the time and the curve 18.3 percent of the time. Everything else was less than 10 percent and he was dominant. He didn’t walk his first batter of the season until the fifth inning of his sixth start. He gave up either zero runs or one run in 18 of his 28 starts. He only gave up more than three runs in six of his 28 starts.

What Lessons Can Kowar Learn?

Burnes had a four-seam fastball that wasn’t working. And he scrapped it. He was then so confident in the pitch he scrapped it for that he kind of scrapped the pitch that actually was working because it was too similar. Kowar’s four-seamer was pretty bad and that’s always been one of the knocks on him. Kowar has a very good changeup he can build on. Why not see about adding a two-seamer that can have some similar dive to the changeup to help improve his best pitch? That can be a big boost for him. It might be too late for 2022 (though we don’t know where most of these guys are yet), but the stuff is there, so a repertoire change might do the trick.

Lucas Giolito

He may not be the White Sox true ace with Lance Lynn on the team, but Giolito felt like he went from bust to top arm in the blink of an eye. The numbers were fine in his White Sox debut in 2017, but he didn’t strike guys out and then in 2018 when he got much more of a shot, he still didn’t strike anyone out but he also walked more and got lit up. It was a disaster, though not quite to the proportions of Kowar’s 2021. But in 2019, the strikeouts jumped by a lot and the walks dropped and he became a true force in a rotation.

He scrapped his sinker, which was actually not horrible and started using his changeup a lot more. He also was able to add a decent amount of spin to his four-seamer, going from 2099 rpms to 2333 rpms in 2019. How much of that was due to sticky stuff is a fair question as he did seem to struggle some after the rules changed mid-2021. Either way, it went from a pitch that got whiffs on a subpar 15ish percent of swings to a pitch that got whiffs on 26 percent of swings. Like Kowar, Giolito’s changeup is also very good and he’s used that as quite the weapon.

He also put his curve away for the most part in 2019 and has continued to use it less and less. In 2021, he started using the slider more and more, making him a four-seamer, changeup and slider pitcher, which sounds awfully familiar to me.

What Lessons Can Kowar Learn?

This sort of depends on how Giolito added that spin to his fastball because if it was from sticky stuff, I don’t know how many lessons can be learned, but Giolito did fill up the zone more after 2018 and all that added spin made his fastball more effective. That, in turn, led to the other pitches being more effective, which is a common theme here. There are ways to add spin and spin efficiency that I’m not smart enough to know how to do, but theoretically people within the organization should know. If Kowar can get some more movement on his fastball, I’d guess you’d see some pretty quick improvements.

Tyler Glasnow

This feels like not the best example with Glasnow out for the year, or at least most of it, after having Tommy John, but he went from a 7.69 ERA in 62 innings in 2017 for the Pirates. For a guy with a fastball in the mid-90s, he simply didn’t strike out enough and walked too many. That sounds awfully familiar. In 2017, he was using his four-seamer and his sinker almost interchangeably. And the sinker was absolutely horrible.

Moving into 2018, he completely scrapped the sinker, going from using his four-seam fastball 70.5 percent of the time, up from 33.8 percent of the time in 2017. He hasn’t thrown his sinker since and has a 3.31 ERA in 317.2 innings since with a 33.4 percent strikeout rate and 9.1 percent walk rate. It’s not quite that simple, though. He altered his delivery to utilize his lower half quite a bit more and it allowed him to gain more than two miles per hour on his fastball.

Ben Brewster @TreadAthletics

Tyler Glasnow averaged less than 94 mph with the Pirates in '16. Now he's regularly touching triple digits. What mechanical differences do you see that could explain a nearly 4 mph spike in average FB velocity? Full breakdown coming your way. #Contentober

It’s very easy to see in that tweet above. And very impressive. Glasnow and Kowar aren’t exactly similar pitchers other than being tall, thin, right-handed and hard throwers.

What Lessons Can Kowar Learn?

I’m not a pitching mechanics expert or anything, but watching Kowar throw, and you can see that he could find a little additional power with a bit more follow-through.

He uses the lower half a lot more than Glasnow did, but it does seem that there’s room for improvement. Changing a delivery isn’t for everyone. Some guys can never make a change after pitching one way for so many years, but I do think there’s a little bit more in him.

And the biggest turnaround in recent memory…

Roy Halladay

Halladay was one of the best pitching prospects in baseball, climbing all the way to 12th in the Baseball America top-100 prospect list in 1999. He started his career well, making two very good starts in 1998 before pitching pretty well in 1999. But things fell apart from there. He had a Kowar-esque 10.64 ERA in 67.2 innings with nearly as many walks as strikeouts. If you’re wondering what was working for him, the answer was absolutely nothing.

So to start 2001, he was sent to the minors. But he wasn’t sent to AA. And he wasn’t sent to AA. He went all the way down to A-ball to work with Mel Queen where he reworked his entire delivery. Halladay learned new grips and dropped to a three-quarter arm slot that ultimately led to the sinker that he became known for and gave him an absolutely ridiculous ground ball rate throughout his career. He came back to the big leagues in July of that year and over his next 2,300 innings, he posted a 2.98 ERA, won a couple Cy Youngs, pitched a no-hitter and a perfect game before retiring after his age-36 season.

What Lessons Can Kowar Learn?

Short of completely rebuilding his delivery, there isn’t a lot that Kowar can learn from Halladay’s turnaround other than the mental approach. One of the things that Halladay and Queen worked on in low-A was his mental approach, which is something that clearly caused Kowar some problems. It’s sort of interesting how Queen described their interactions.

"There's no one I made that drastic a change to and verbally abused the way I did Doc. There aren’t many people that would have gone through what I put him through. I had to make him understand that he was very unintelligent about baseball. He had no idea about the game.”

While that might be a bit harsh, it obviously worked for Halladay and some combination of that and maybe a little bit less harsh wording could be good for Kowar, though the demotion to A-ball hopefully wouldn’t be necessary.

Does this mean that Kowar is the next Halladay or Berrios or any others on this list? Absolutely not. There are far more pitchers who struggle and never figure it out than who struggle and become All-Stars or more. There are others aside from the five listed above. Tom Glavine didn’t have his first above average season until 1991. John Smoltz was a disaster in 1988. Johan Santana had a 6.49 ERA in 2000. Zack Greinke had a 5.80 ERA in 2005. Cliff Lee had a 6.29 ERA in 2007. I could go on, but you get the idea. My point here is, though, that there are examples of pitchers who figured it out when it looked like they might never do that. And there are also examples of something in between complete bust and All-Star, but those are less fun to remember.

His changeup is too good for it to be hit around the way that it was last season. His fastball has too much potential for him to not figure out some way to become more effective with it. Some of Kowar’s issues are bad luck. The .375 BABIP he allowed likely isn’t sustainable, but all it would have done if he had just average luck would have made him terrible instead of all-time bad. If he could locate his fastball better and manipulate it a bit more, everything should follow. Kowar has talent, that much is clear. It might take some time to wash away the memory of his brutal 2021, but it is at least possible and history shows us that.