Sport
EXCLUSIVE: He called the Dodgers “Scrappy underdogs” -A devastating season-ending for most teams
Growing up in Cincinnati during the 1970s, he became a huge fan of the game during the “Big Red Machine” era. He also attended the 1978 World Series, where Reggie Jackson and the Yankees beat the Dodgers — Lowe’s team of choice since he moved to Los Angeles.
The Hollywood star recently chatted with MLB.com’s Michael Clair about his new favorite team and what their postseason chances look like.
“I mean, look at it,” he said. “Big Red, you know, [Dustin May], who blew his arm out. He was gone for a year and a half. Yamamoto, we’ll see what happens with that. The Cat Man, [Tony Gonsolin]. Any two of those people, and that’s a devastating season-ending for most teams. I’m not looking for a handicap going into the postseason, but the notion that the Dodgers are the best team that money can buy, a super team? We’re going in as scrappy underdogs.”
“Scrappy underdogs” is definitely a “clickbait headline” but Lowe makes a solid point.
“Do they have to win a little bit? Yes. Does it have to be this year? Going to be tough unless [Yoshinobu] Yamamoto comes back strong this week, Walker [Buehler] continues to do something, and then we need two other guys, but I don’t know who they are,” Lowe said.
There is one thing that Lowe said has to happen for this year’s team to cement its legacy: win the World Series.
“I think Andrew Friedman and ownership would agree,” Lowe told Clair. “You look at what’s happened to us with injuries with the pitching. And as you know, the postseason is almost only about pitching. What Dave Roberts has been able to do to keep us, I think — what are we five games up today? — with the amount of starting pitching injuries we’ve had is, I think, really, really, really extraordinary.”
Lowe’s passion for baseball runs so deep that he’s even ruffled some feathers with studio executives for sneaking in a few innings of a World Series game. Fortunately, on the “Parks and Rec” set, it was no issue at all, thanks to showrunner Michael Schur being another big baseball fan.
“That was definitely not a problem,” Lowe joked during a recent phone call with MLB.com. “You know, he and I beefed about Fire Joe Morgan [the baseball website where Schur wrote under the pen name “Ken Tremendous”]. I made a Joe Morgan T-shirt. He wanted to fire him. And, of course, he’s a noted Red Sox fan. So we would go back and forth about that. That was a great baseball-friendly set.”
