John Lowe spent 29 years as Tigers beat writer at the Detroit Free Press, after stints at the Los Angeles Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer.
John Lowe ties his life-long love of baseball back to Wednesday, Oct. 5, 1966, when the Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers were playing Game 1 of the World Series. First pitch: 3 p.m., Central time, just as a second-grader from suburban St. Louis was to get out of school. He figured, if he walked home like he usually did, he’d miss the beginning of the game. So he asked his mom if she could pick him up, so he’d get home quicker. She said yes.
“Coming out the front door,” Lowe said, “I saw her waiting in her gray Oldsmobile.”
Decades later, Lowe asked his mom why she picked him up that day.
“She said, ‘I thought it was important,'” Lowe recalled Saturday afternoon, a newly minted member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Once again, mom is right. I realized that by striving to see the start of that game, I began a lifetime lesson: The more enthusiastically I dove into baseball, the more I would be rewarded. The ride home from school that day in my Mom’s carer became the first few minutes of my journey of baseball enthusiasm.”
Lowe, who covered the Detroit Tigers for the Detroit Free Press for nearly three decades after previous stops in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, entered the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, on Saturday, as winner of the Baseball Writers Association of America’s Career Excellence Award.
Lowe covered the Tigers for the Free Press from 1986 until his retirement in 2014, chronicling some of the biggest moments in franchise history, including the 1987 pennant race; much of the careers of Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Sparky Anderson; Cecil Fielder’s 51-homer season in 1990; Magglio Ordonez’s American League pennant-clinching home run in 2006; Justin Verlander’s first no-hitter in 2007; the Armando Galarraga game in 2010, Verlander’s Cy Young and MVP season in 2011; and Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown (and first of two MVP awards) and another World Series in 2012; Max Scherzer’s Cy Young season and heartbreak in Boston in 2013, among others.
On Saturday, he became the fourth Detroit-based writer to win the BBWAA’s highest honor, joining Detroit News alums H.G. Salsinger (1969), Joe Falls (2001) and Tom Gage (2015).
“From Tiger Stadium to Comerica Park and so many places in between, you represented the Free Press and baseball to the highest standard,” MLB Network’s Jon Morosi, who previously worked alongside Lowe on the Tigers beat in Detroit, said in a video highlight introducing Lowe on Saturday.
“You were my journalism teacher even before we met,” continued Morosi, one of the countless collection of sports writers Lowe mentored — teaching them everything from how to meet deadline to always remember to tip the housekeeping staff at the hotels. “Such was my great fortune as a young reader of the Detroit Free Press.”
Shi Davidi, president of the BBWAA who covers the Toronto Blue Jays for Sportsnet, called Lowe, “equal parts wordsmith and newshound.”
Lowe’s journalism career began in Long Beach, California, as a part-timer while he still was in school at the University of Southern California. He moved on to the Los Angeles Daily News, first covering the Angels, and then the Dodgers, before moving to the Philadelphia Inquirer to cover the Phillies.
In 1986, he was hired by then-Free Press sports editor Dave Robinson to cover the Tigers. He remained for 29 years, working much of that time under another sports editor, Gene Myers. He thanked both men in his speech Saturday, crediting them with allowing a schedule that would keep Lowe from suffering the fate of many other beat reporters: Burnout. Lowe also thanked his longtime Tigers beat partner, the late Gene Guidi.
Lowe and Guidi worked together for 20 years.
“He taught me a lot about Detroit, about the Tigers and about life,” Lowe said of Guidi, who died in 2022 at 79.
Lowe was honored Saturday alongside Chicago Cubs radio broadcaster Pat Hughes, recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award. Former players Fred McGriff and Scott Rolen will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday.
Lowe, snappily dressed as always in suit and tie (though without the Panama hat that was his trademark), kept his remarks tight, like he always did with his copy. He said he’d deliver most of his thank-yous in person.
But he did mention a few others, including the late Hall-of-Fame catcher, Gary Carter, and Whitey Herzog, the legendary manager of Lowe’s hometown Cardinals. Herzog was Lowe’s first mentor in the game of baseball.
“Whitey Herzog is the epitome of the many managers who have taught me the game,” Lowe said. “When I was young, Whitey deepened and sharpened my understanding of baseball. He did so avidly and repeatedly.
“Wherever I have gone in baseball, I have heard your voice.”
Lowe thanked his mom for his “love of reading, which inspired my love of writing,” and his dad for instilling in him “promptness and mathematics.” Lowe, while in Philadelphia, invented the still-valued baseball stat of the quality start, when a pitcher goes at least six innings and allows three or fewer earned runs. He also thanked his fellow baseball writers, the fans who read his work, and his editors and copy editors in the newspaper office.
Lowe, in his writing, mastered the skill of telling the readers what happened, usually finding a unique angle that no others had thought of, while giving a free history lesson, too. Like at the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland, which was 56 years after Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak in 1941. At the 1941 All-Star Game, Ted Williams hit a winning home run in the All-Star Game; at the 1997 All-Star Game, Cleveland’s Sandy Alomar Jr. entered with a 30-game hitting streak of his own, and while he wasn’t likely to catch DiMaggio (he didn’t), he did match Williams’ heroics from 1941, also hitting a winning home run in the All-Star Game.
Lowe, in his report for the Free Press, tied it all together.
“There it all was, the mix of past and present,” Lowe said Saturday. “Now, I have a ’57, too. I’ve made it 57 years in my journey of baseball enthusiasm, the journey that began 57 years ago in my mom’s Oldsmobile.
“The whole ride has been outstanding.”
tpaul@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @tonypaul1984