Kansas City Royals pitcher Kowar frustrated, tired but also encouraged by rookie year
Jackson Kowar has just gotten plain tired of the struggles. The Kansas City Royals rookie right-hander hasn’t given up on anything. In fact, he said he’s encouraged about the organization’s plan to get him on track. He’s just tired of his own inconsistency.
The talent remains evident and clear. There’s no denying his ability. That just makes it all the more maddening when he has starts like Monday against the Indians in Cleveland. Kowar gave up five runs on seven hits in 4 1/3 innings of the Royals’ 8-3 loss.
“I’m getting a little tired, to be honest, of having to come here and say that and have taken us out of games,” Kowar said in his postgame news conference. “I’m getting really frustrated.”
Kowar’s comments weren’t directed at anybody other than himself and an expression of his own dissatisfaction with his performance. With seven major-league starts under his belt, the 24-year-old isn’t content being tagged with the “potential” label.
The 6-foot-5 right-hander selected No. 33 overall in 2018 has been ranked among the Top 100 prospects by MLBPipeline.com (No. 86) as well as Baseball America (No. 76).
He’d been dominant at Triple-A before his initial promotion to the majors in June, and earned the Royals’ organizational Pitcher of the Year award.
In the majors, things have gone askew. Following Monday’s outing, Kowar has now gone 0-5 with an 11.28 ERA. He has given up four runs or more in six of his seven starts.
Monday afternoon, Kowar gave up five extra-base hits to the Indians. Four doubles and one home run did the majority of the damage.
While he was erratic to the point of not being able to throw strikes — he walked just one — he still described his main problem as “poor” fastball command.
“Going into the game, I put a big emphasis on being aggressive and being aggressive in the zone, but, for me, that doesn’t mean being aggressive down the middle,” Kowar said. “It means executing to corners and thirds. I haven’t seen too much video, but when I got hurt it was just a lot of center-cut, thigh-high stuff. That’s not going to work anywhere, but especially not here against an aggressive lineup.”
He seemingly has a handle on the causes of his struggles, and he knows what he needs to do in order to find success.
Kowar referenced an issue with his pitching delivery as keeping him from commanding consistently. He said the time he has spent around the major-league coaching staff has given him confidence that he’ll be able to clean up his mechanical issues.
“We’ve kind of started to refine more of a plan, so the encouraging thing is I feel really good about my plan,” Kowar said. “I feel good about the direction I’m going. I feel good that when I execute pitches, I’m getting the results that I want. It’s just how do we narrow that gap from when I execute and I don’t and not have so many in the middle. … At this level, that’s everything.”
Last season, one of the big strides Brady Singer, Kowar’s friend and former college teammate, identified in the middle of his rookie season was being able to make his misses better in the sense that they were less likely to get hit hard.
That’s an area in which Kowar must improve.
“They’re going to face the best hitters in the world,” Royals All-Star catcher and five-time Gold Glove winner Salvador Perez said. “This is the big leagues. You need to keep the ball down, try not to miss a lot of pitches back to the middle of home plate. …
“Every time I called a fastball away to a lefty today, it was back to the middle. He needs to pay attention to that, work a little longer. He’s still young.”
Kowar struck out four batters in his four innings, three using his changeup and one when he froze a batter on a 95 mph fastball located at the bottom of the strike zone and on the outside corner.
“This guy has got such good stuff, it’s going to play,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said. “He’s going to be able to translate. He’s going to be able to take the good stuff that we see in his work. Even in many of these (outings), we’ll see an inning or two like we did in the fourth when he pounds the zone and makes good, quality pitches in the lower part and not in the middle of the plate.”
This story was originally published September 27, 2021 at 6:06 PM.
