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Mike Lowell: Attitude Problem?

By mike42

In this week's edition of The Sporting News (August 5th edition, page 42 in the Inside Dish article) there's a note about Mike Lowell. It says:

Marlins 3B Mike Lowell began the week with the seventh-lowest on-base/slugging percentage among major league regulars, and suddenly even his makeup is in question. Most consider Lowell a high character player, but one executive said that Lowell is not all that well-liked by his teammates. "He's a good guy, but he wears his emotions on his sleeves, and his emotions tend to be tied to his success," one agent says.

I've never heard such a thing about Lowell before. In thinking about this for a little bit, I feel like this has more to do with Mike's performance this season than his attitude. This is something of a "What came first: the chicken or the egg?" type of an argument. Did Lowell's attitude go downhill first, or was it his performance? Since he's (for the most part) been in a season long slump, it seems easy to jump on the guy for having a poor attitude.

By that I mean that a guy who "wears his emotions on his sleeves" is a good thing, at least when things are going well. In his own clubhouse, Dontrelle Willis is a much-loved example of this; nearly everyone seems to love Willis' free-spirited and fun-loving attitude. Last year, everyone (or least it seemed) was enamored with the Red Sox and their "idiots" philosophy. Had the Red Sox been losing, taking shots of Jack Daniels' in the clubhouse before games would probably have been frowned upon, but they won, so it's joked about.

Maybe I'm wrong about Lowell, but he sure seems like a nice enough guy. If nothing else, he's stayed on the right side of the law. Given that, it seems a little unnecessary to pile on the guy about his demeanor when he's in the midst of the worst season of his Major League career. Sorry that I wasn't able to find a link.

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