Feeling Healthy Biggest Thing For Rays’ Brandon Lowe Heading Into 2023 Season

It was only March 13 and his 21^st plate appearance of this Grapefruit League season. Yet, the sweet swing, the way the ball jumped off Brandon Lowe’s bat and traveled 369 feet before disappearing in the blue seats beyond the right field wall at Tropicana Field was a wonderful sight for all concerned with the Tampa Bay Rays.

It was a wonderful sight because Rays fans saw far too little of it last season when a lower back injury limited Lowe to 65 games. The lefthanded hitter batted all of .221 with a .629 OPS in 235 at-bats. A year earlier, Lowe hit 39 homers, drove in 99 runs and had an .863 OPS while earning a trip to Denver for the all-star game.

Any momentum from a very productive 2021 came to a screeching halt all of five weeks into 2022 when Lowe’s back began to bark at him. What ensued was a two-month stint on the injured list, which is where he also spent most of the season’s final month thanks to recurring back discomfort, not to mention a triceps injury.

Exercise and conditioning routines have Lowe feeling like a new man, something underscored by his performance at the plate (.333, 2 HRs through Tuesday) as the spring training schedule ticks away and the March 30 opener against the visiting Tigers nears.

“Making sure that I’m in the weight room, working out, probably around five days a week just to stay on top of some sort of program, some sort of regimen and make sure my body is staying strong,” Lowe said on Monday, of how he is preparing for 2023. “Hopefully, that was just, I think, just a freak injury last year and hopefully there are no aftereffects or anything.”

There have been no signs of aftereffects. Certainly not Monday in St. Pete when he took Detroit lefty Tyler Holton deep on an afternoon when Lowe also singled and had a sacrifice fly while driving in four runs in the span of three innings before hitting the shower.

Of course, because it is spring training and still two weeks removed from the curtain rising on a new season, the focus is on Lowe’s back and how the rest of his body feels and not his Grapefruit League stat line.

“I am more just happy with where my health is,” said the 28-year-old, who along with wife Madison welcomed son Emmett into their life in January.

While health is the primary concern, everything else seems to be following suit for Lowe.

“I feel good at the plate swinging,” he said. “I feel great in the field, running and everything like that. As we get closer to opening day, hopefully everything stays the way it has been.”

It cannot be understated how critical the health of Lowe and Wander Franco, who is playing for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, are to the Rays’ fortunes in 2023. While the pitching should be superb once again, the offense needs a boost and the biggest boost could come from the bats of a healthy Lowe and a healthy Franco. The latter battled the injury bug (quad, hamstring, hand) for much of 2022 while hitting .277 in 83 games.

Having Lowe and Franco in the lineup on a consistent basis should greatly help a team that hit .239 a season ago and had the fewest home runs (17) of any MLB club in September. The bats then froze (.115) in a two-game, wild-card sweep in Cleveland.

While it might have been expected the Rays would add a left-handed bat in the off-season, something they could still do before the season opener, getting Lowe back in the lineup on a regular basis would go a long way toward boosting the offensive production.

“We were not going to find a better left-handed bat than Brandon Lowe, a healthy Brandon Lowe, in the reality of it,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said while his was training in Lake Buena Vista. “Certainly, there were good guys out there, but we know Brandon well and what he’s done in his first couple of years in the big leagues.”