LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The story of former University of Louisville and Kentucky Country Day catcher Will Smith remains a terrific tale of baseball success.
Locally, it has been told many times. Smith went national last week. His three-run home run in Game 5 and two RBIs in Game 7 were critical to pushing the Los Angeles Dodgers into the 2020 World Series, which starts at 8:11 p.m. Tuesday in Arlington, Texas. (The Series will air on WDRB.)
There is another Louisville World Series angle that must be told.
It is a story about a local baseball guy that the Tampa Bay Rays will entrust with strategizing to stop Smith, Mookie Betts and the Dodgers, a guy who grew up not far from Smith in east Louisville.
He attended Ballard High School. He pitched for the Cleveland Indians, who drafted him in the first round.
I’m certain that Jeremy Sowers wanted to get to the World Series as a left-handed starting pitcher. It didn’t happen. Shoulder issues ended his big-league career after four seasons and 18 victories.
But Sowers is front and center at the 2020 World Series. For the Rays, Sowers, 37, is the manager of major league operations.
“I know what the game looks like standing on the mound, and I know what it looks like from the dugout,” Sowers told David Laurila of Fangraphs, the baseball analytics site.
Advance scouting, gameday planning, instant replay decisions are several items under the directions of Sowers and his assistants. His job is to funnel information about the Dodgers to Rays’ players.
Although Sowers has been off the major league radar as a player for more than a decade, people who followed his career are not surprised by his success.
Once, when I interviewed Sowers in the Indians’ locker room, his teammate C.C. Sabathia teased him for regularly bringing a laptop and briefcase to work. Sowers has always been an analytical guy, a player who friends predicted would run a franchise one day.
He made his big league debut in June 2006, two years after Cleveland drafted him with the sixth overall pick. He went 7-4 with earned run average of 3.57 as a rookie. By 2009, his major league career was over. Shoulder issues diminished his fastball and hurt his control. Access to more analytics might have helped him prolong his career.
“After about two weeks with the Rays and hearing some of the information they could bring to me, I kind of began wishing I had approached pitching differently,” Sowers told Fangraphs. “It wasn’t super, profound intellectual stuff. It was just another way of thinking about first-pitch strikes or trusting my breaking ball or understanding sink versus carry. It’s all stuff you could think about in 2009, but not in the same way we can look at it now.”
Sowers retired in 2013, when he was just 30, after suffering a torn Achilles’ tendon while playing in an independent league.
He earned his undergraduate degree in political science at Vanderbilt University as well as a Masters in business administration at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
After three months in the management program at Walmart in 2014, Sowers returned to baseball as an intern with the Orioles. Tampa hired him in 2016. Sowers has earned a pair of promotions, moving into his current position after former general manager James Click left the Rays to run the Astros in February.
“While I was in Chapel Hill, I realized that I had a genuine love for this game,” Sowers said in that Fangraphs interview. “Sometimes you need to step away from it to realize just how special it is to be part of this industry.
“We’re stilling in a dugout in a historic ballpark. People dream about sitting where we are right now. When you’re playing professional baseball, it’s very easy to take this for granted. It’s actually kind of expected that you do.
“This becomes normal, even though it isn’t, and you have to treat it like’s it’s normal. You can’t allow yourself to get caught up in the awe of it. On the flip side, you shouldn’t lose sight of how special the opportunity really is. The time I spend away from the game got me thinking about that and about maybe working in a front office.”
There’s no better front office to work in than the Tampa front office. The Rays deal with a meager budget compared to the Yankees and Red Sox, but they finished second in the AL East last season and delivered the best record in the AL this season. Not only do the Rays trust the numbers, they rely on them to find an edge and market inefficiencies.
Opposing franchises regularly recruit the Tampa front office. Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman came from Tampa. So did Red Sox Chief Baseball office Chaim Bloom. Houston turned to Click to repair its image after the cheating scandal.
Sowers is working in a great spot, and the Rays have an opportunity of a lifetime in the 2020 World Series.
Copyright 2020 WDRB Media. All Rights Reserved.