That’s a fastball. Or a sinker. Or a sinking fastball. It wound up getting called for a borderline strike. That is by no means the important thing. Look up. The recorded velocity starts with a 7. Look down. Rowen submarines. Yeah, that’s the quirk.

72, called strikeout. Breaking ball. Rowen has a breaking ball. He submarines it. So it’s established: Ben Rowen is a right-handed submariner. In his limited big-league exposure last year, he threw a slow fastball and a slower breaking ball. He told Laurila he messes around with a changeup, but he never threw it for the Rangers. It’s in there, somewhere; probably, it’s not very good.

dot dot dot

There’s not much we can do with Rowen’s big-league data. There’s some PITCHf/x stuff, and we’ll get to that. But the actual results were generated over just a few games. Rowen has more of a minor-league track record, being 26, and having been drafted in 2010. His minor-league ERA is 1.72. It’s 1.84 in Double-A and Triple-A. He’s allowed just six home runs in 262 innings. His BABIP is right around .260. Roughly two-thirds of the balls in play he’s allowed have been grounders. Roughly two-thirds of the pitches he’s thrown have been strikes.

Rowen isn’t a big strikeout guy. It’s just about impossible to be a big strikeout guy when you top out around 82 miles per hour. But he’s proven himself to be a strike-thrower. He’s proven himself to be a groundball-generator. The latter, you expect from anyone with that sort of delivery. The former is what gives Rowen a chance.

You always figure a guy like this will have a big platoon split. And Rowen himself has said he’d like to make his changeup better, specifically so he can use it against lefties. Yet for whatever it’s worth, in the minors, Rowen has held both righties and lefties to OPS figures in the mid-.500s. And as long as he throws strikes, he can at least be effective against righties in the majors, making him useful. The stuff he throws isn’t unprecedented, but it’s extraordinarily rare.