The Miami and earlier Florida Marlins have had 590 players get onto the field for them during the regular season over their first 27 seasons of play.

Mike Lowell was the 155th player in Florida Marlins history, making his debut in late May, 1999.

Lowell was a six-foot-four, 195 lb. right-handed hitting and throwing third baseman from San Juan, PR. Born 46-years-ago today, he was taken in the 48th round of the 1992 MLB Amateur Entry Draft by the Chicago White Sox. He didn’t sign, and three years later was again taken in the draft, but this time in the 20th round by the New York Yankees.

In mid-September, 1998, Lowell made his first major league appearance with the Yankees, and went four-for-15 in eight games for the Bombers. Just prior to Spring Training in 1999, New York traded Lowell to the Florida Marlins for Todd Noel, Ed Yarnall, and Mark Johnson.

JUPITER, FL – MARCH 3 : Infielder Mike Lowell #19 of the Florida Marlins. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images) /

After a month in the high minors, Lowell was called up to the Marlins for good on May 28th. He played in 97 games through the rest of the campaign for Florida, clocking a team-third dozen home runs and slashing .253/.317/.419 with 47 RBI. The Marlins were 64-98 overall, and 37-44 in games that Lowell started (.457) compared to 27-54 in other games (.333). Florida loved Lowell at the hot corner, and never tried him elsewhere until his final year with the Marlins, in 2005. That first year, he was 28 points above National League fielding average at third base, posting a mark of .981.

In 2000, Lowell stepped up his production to .270/.344/.474 with 22 home runs and 91 RBI in 137 games. The effort pushed his OPS+ above the league average for the first time, settling in at 110 and earning 2.2 bWAR. Defensively, he was again well above league-average, coming in at .968, 18 points above the average 3B in 1191 1/3 innings.

2001 would see Lowell take another small step forward offensively, when he reached the 100 RBI plateau for the first time. He clubbed 18 homers with exactly 100 RBI while slashing .283/.340/.448 in 146 games. As usual, he was well above average at third base, 26 points above average at .976 for the season.

MIAMI – JULY 29: Third baseman Mike Lowell #19 of the Florida Marlins. (Photo by Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images) /

Lowell turned in his first All Star season for the Florida Marlins in 2002, leading the team with 44 doubles, 92 RBI, and ranking second with 281 total bases and 165 base hits. In 160 games, he slashed .276/.346/.471 and turned in a 116 OPS+, his best mark to date. In 1400 1/3 innings at third base, he was 12 points above average at .969.

If there’s one thing you can take away from Lowell’s career, it’s that he was always, from his first game to his last, an above-average fielder at the hot corner. In 2003, Lowell’s won his first World Series title with the Florida Marlins, who were claiming their second at the time. Lowell also made the All Star team for the second time and won his only career Silver Slugger with a .276/.350/.530 line in 130 games with a career-high 32 home runs and 105 RBI. He was five zone total fielding runs and 18 points above average in fPCT. at third base. Lowell only hit .196 through the playoffs, but did club two taters in the National League Championship Series against the doomed Chicago Cubs.

Lowell made the N.L. All Star team for the third time in a row in 2004, although the Marlins didn’t quite make it back to the playoffs. In 158 games, he hit .293/.365/.505 with 27 home runs and 85 RBI. At .982, he was 26 points better than the average third baseman defensively.

MIAMI – JULY 27: Mike Lowell #19 of the Florida Marlins. (Photo by Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images) /

In 2005, Lowell didn’t make the All Star team and didn’t win another Silver Slugger, but he did take home his first and only Gold Glove. He did that by putting up pretty much the same defensive numbers as he did every other season he was in professional baseball. He was 13 zone total fielding runs and 25 fielding percentage points above average. On the other side of the ball, Lowell turned in a career-worst OPS+ of just 77, while slashing .236/.298/.360 with eight home runs and 58 RBI in 150 games.

More from Marlins History

The dip in Lowell’s hitting metrics turned out to be temporary, but not before the Florida Marlins traded him away. They sent him with Josh Beckett and Guillermo Mota to the Boston Red Sox for Jesus Delgado, Harvey Garcia, Hanley Ramirez, and Anibal Sanchez.

Lowell remained with the Red Sox through the next five seasons, making his first American League All Star team in 2007 and later winning MVP of the World Series. In 612 games, he turned in a .290/.346/.468 line with 80 round-trippers and 374 RBI.

Since retiring after the 2010 season, Lowell joined the MLB Network as a Network Analyst and remains until the present day.

Criminal charges will not be filed against the officer who beat a woman at Lowell Correctional Institute in Lake County.

The Phoenix Flyer

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating a disturbing incident of abuse involving a corrections officer and an inmate at Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, the largest prison for women in the U.S.

The Florida Department of Corrections acknowledges that an incident at the facility took place this week, but otherwise is providing no details at all about what actually happened.

Quoting anonymous sources, the Miami Herald is reporting that the incident involved a 51-year-old woman who was “gravely injured” after getting involved with a confrontation with corrections officers. The story was first reported by the Ocala Star Banner.

The Herald reports that the woman “was slammed to the ground, then dragged to a wheelchair, with her head bouncing along the ground, before ending up hospitalized.”

The Department of Corrections says that involved inmate is “receiving appropriate care and treatment,” adding in a statement that “full details of this incident are unclear at this time.”

“We recognize that preliminary reports from this incident are concerning,” Department of Corrections Secretary Mark Inch said in a written statement. “We’ve committed to examining all the details regarding this situation and ensuring appropriate action is taken.”

Unlike most incidents of alleged abuse in Florida’s prisons, the investigation is being outsourced to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, with the Department of Corrections Office of Inspector General offering assistance.

The officers who were allegedly involved are still working at Lowell Correctional, but have been reassigned to posts that do not have contact with inmates.

The abuse at Lowell Correctional comes a year after members of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division began an investigation into alleged abuse at the facility, located just north of Ocala.

The incident follows several other reported accounts of abuse against inmates in Inch’s first year on the job. He recently told the Florida Phoenix that “our violence rates are simply unacceptable,” referring not only to abuse by corrections officers against inmates, but also inmate-on-inmate attacks and violence by inmates against corrections officers.

By Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board | insight@orlandosentinel.com |

A two-year Department of Justice investigation into the Lowell Correctional Institution near Ocala has confirmed what anyone who cared already knew.

America’s largest women’s prison has been a hellhole of sexual abuse and corruption for at least 15 years. But as disgusting as the 34-page report is, the most disturbing thing isn’t the rapes or beatings or cover-ups.

It’s how few people in power cared. And that indifference has left inmates in danger to this day.

“Our investigation found that staff sexually abused women incarcerated at Lowell and that these women remain at substantial risk,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband said in a press release.

Remain at substantial risk.

That line should ring like an air raid siren throughout the legislative halls in Tallahassee.

Four female legislators have called for the removal of prison administrators and introduced a bill that would improve treatment of prisoners. That’s a start, but the rot in Florida’s prison system calls for a major reckoning.

It should start at the top. Ron DeSantis has paid scant attention to Lowell’s problems. Of course, neither did Rick Scott, Charlie Crist or Jeb Bush when they served as governor.

Fingers could also be pointed at all the legislators and administrators who should have detected the scandalous stench emanating from the 2,200-prisoner facility.

The Florida Department of Corrections has been aware of the abuse at least since 2006, the DOJ report said. But the department “failed to take timely action to remedy the systemic problems.”

State officials can’t plead ignorance. A Miami Herald investigation in 2015 was based in part on FDOC documents and public records requests.

The Herald also interviewed more than 30 inmates. People like Casey Hodge, who was sentenced to three years in prison on a drug trafficking charge in 2012. She was legally blind and had a glass eye.

When Hodge showed up at Lowell, guards made her remove the prosthetic eye and pretended to vomit. Hodge said a guard threatened to send her to solitary confinement if she didn’t regularly have sex with him.

“I did what he said because I didn’t know what would happen,” she told the Herald. “I didn’t know what he was capable of.”

Other inmates said guards slammed inmates against walls, spat in their faces, ogled them as they used the bathroom and poured coffee or bleach on them.

The Herald’s stories prompted the FDOC to replace Lowell’s warden and hire more than 100 new guards. That didn’t stop the abuse.

The DOJ report said prison authorities did not properly investigate a long list of abuse complaints. The lax atmosphere explains how guards beat inmate Cheryl Weimar in 2019 after she told them a chronic hip problem kept her from scrubbing a toilet as they’d ordered.

Weimar ended up with a broken neck and is a paraplegic. She filed a federal lawsuit that was settled last August, with the state paying Weimar $4.65 million.

You’d think lawmakers would notice such a case. You’d think it might put the fear of God or DeSantis into Lowell officials. But the DOJ report said abuses continued into 2020.

And those were just the complaints prisoners actually filed. There’s no telling how many were coerced into silence over the years. Inmates were even told not to speak openly to the DOJ.

“During the Department’s onsite visits to Lowell, we received information that supervisory staff had threatened prisoners against cooperating with our investigation, and in one case retaliated against a prisoner for providing us with information,” the report said.

The DOJ is threatening to bring a civil rights lawsuit if the prison doesn’t make changes by Feb. 8. The “minimal remedial measures” include educating prisoners on complaint procedures, new training for staff and improved video monitoring.

Those are baby steps. The Lowell travesty calls for drastic measures and a huge dose of accountability.

Of 161 sexual abuse investigations the DOJ reviewed, only eight resulted in the arrest of an officer. The FDOC put out a statement saying it cooperated with the DOJ and will crack down on any employee who violates the law.

“FDC has zero tolerance for staff who act,” Secretary Mark Inch said.

Given the prison system’s history, such assurances mean nothing. Sen. Janet Cruz (D-Tampa) has called for Lowell warden Stephen Rossiter to resign.

Prisoner-rights advocates want a special prosecutor appointed or the state to create an independent agency to oversee Florida’s prisons. From staffing to budgets to policies, the whole system needs a serious overhaul.

Whatever actions are taken, potential crimes are not the only things that need to be investigated. Somebody needs to find out how so much abuse could go on for so long — and why state leaders barely even looked Lowell’s way.

If they had, they’d have seen a sign outside the prison gate. It says, “We Never Walk Alone.”

Tell that to Cheryl Weimar.

Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.

As temperatures in Florida get hotter, the portable coolers bought by the Florida Department of Corrections last year are finally getting put to the test.

Prisoner advocates confirmed the state has started evaluating a series of large, portable evaporative coolers at Lowell Correctional Institution as part of a pilot program that will determine if it can set up more at other state-run prisons that lack air conditioning.

If the coolers work well this summer, FDC will consider a request for funding later in the year, but little is known about how exactly FDC plans to measure the pilot’s success.

Officials at the department have not responded to multiple questions from the Orlando Sentinel seeking to learn more about the pilot, including when the coolers were turned on, how many are being tested, or how much the state paid to purchase them.

Here’s what we know — and don’t know — so far about the pilot program.

How did this all begin?

The pilot takes place a little less than a year after a cooler demonstration was held at a prison in Ocala, following a campaign from State Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson, D-Gainesville, and advocate Connie Edson to find a solution to the harsh heat experienced inside prison dorms without an air cooling system.

After the demonstration, the FDC bought three of the portable coolers, but according to a statement made by state Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon at a press availability, the equipment arrived too late into the year to be tested in the summer.

Why do prisons in Florida need coolers?

While some newer prison institutions in Florida were built with air-conditioning, many current FDC facilities, like Lowell C.I., were not built to supply full air conditioning, so when Florida’s hot and humid summers come around, incarcerated people and correctional officers become exposed to extreme heat temperatures.

Only about 24% of Florida’s 639 housing units have air conditioning, according to the FDC. Of its 50 correctional institutions, only 18 offer air-conditioned dorms.

The air-conditioned areas usually cover areas where prison programs take place or in living spaces that are designated to the most vulnerable populations like the geriatric population in prison.

When did the pilot start?

Despite multiple requests for clarification, FDC officials have not confirmed when coolers started being tested.

In an email response to the Sentinel, Malik Moore, the legislative aide to State Rep. Diane Hart, D-Tampa, said the representative saw two portable coolers that were switched on in select dorms at Lowell C.I. as early as April 10.

Though coolers have not been made available throughout the entire compound, several people who’ve seen them said the portable evaporative coolers are being used inside at least three different dorms at Lowell C.I., the state’s largest women’s prison.

What kind of coolers are FDC testing?

The FDC bought portable evaporative coolers, also known as swamp coolers, which pass hot air around a water source and push out cool air using generated evaporation.

These particular kinds of coolers are used at correctional institutions across the nation, but their efficiency depends on the environments they are placed in — hence why FDC is testing the coolers before ordering more.

Humidity levels can make a big difference in the efficiency of swamp coolers, because higher humidity levels weaken their ability to evaporate air making them less effective as a cooling solution.

How much does the pilot cost?

It’s unclear how much the state has spent to test the swamp coolers.

The Sentinel has not received responsive records to a request submitted on Feb. 8 seeking a copy of the purchasing order for all the portable evaporative coolers in possession of the FDC, in addition to other details about the pilot.

An evaporative cooler from Texas manufacturer Portacool can typically range from $1,199 to $6,495 per cooler, depending on its size. According to its website, its models can push cool air up to 5,625 square feet.

arabines@orlandosentinel.com