CINCINNATI – When Zack Greinke arrived in the major leagues at age 20, he relied on control. He struck out fewer than six batters per nine innings in his first two seasons, walking not a third of that.
After a self-imposed sabbatical, he returned reinvented, walking and striking out more hitters, throwing harder than Justin Verlander. That led to what’s been his best year to date, his Cy Young-winning 2009 season for Kansas City.
As he aged, Greinke lost some of that velocity, experienced worse results and attempted to reverse course, back to a command-and-control type. That did not work so well. Well, it worked OK – he was still an above-average pitcher. But he sought more, and found more.
The man chosen by Giants manager Bruce Bochy to start Tuesday’s All-Star Game for the National League, then, is in his fifth iteration. The 31-year-old Dodgers right-hander is a new pitcher, and he leads the world in ERA. In this latest iteration, he cares only a little about how fast he’s throwing and more about where he’s throwing.
“I’ve probably changed more than anyone else in baseball over the last 10 years,” Greinke said. “It’s been a lot of changes, going from control pitcher to power pitcher to power pitcher that wasn’t very good to control pitcher that was OK. I’m kind of a mix right now.”
It is a good mix. Greinke has held his 2015 opponents scoreless in nearly half his 18 starts and to one run in another quarter of them. He has essentially halved his ERA from a year ago. His 1.39 mark is more than 30 percent lower than the next-best mark in the majors, owned by Oakland’s Sonny Gray.
And, until now, he has done it somewhat stealthily, without much of the baseball world realizing he has changed and improved.
“I don’t think he’s changed,” said Yasmani Grandal, the man who most often catches Greinke. “But don’t tell him I said that.”
That is an over-simplification. Greinke’s pitch mix is definitively different. He’s throwing a far higher percentage of changeups than ever before. Every pitch he throws besides the fastball is faster than it used to be, but the fastball’s slower, creating a new paradigm on which to change speeds.
Other pitchers rely on large gaps to confuse and deceive hitters. Greinke is content to mess with them with tiny tweaks. Nearly 90 percent of his pitches are clocked between 86 and 92 mph, according to PITCHf/x data. Outside of today’s occasional curveball, there are only small variances in velocity.
Compare that to 2007, when fewer than 10 percent of Greinke’s offerings were in that range.
“That is different,” Grandal said. “But I don’t consider that to be change. I consider that him being smart and him being a perfectionist. He wants to be perfect on every pitch. He doesn’t want any pitch to be the same.”
Clayton Kershaw said Greinke has demonstrated he can reinvent himself more often and more quickly than he can.
While a capacity for reinvention is not a prerequisite for success, Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez often says players must change with the game when the game changes. And he believes the game changes almost annually.
Regarding Greinke, Gonzalez said he has become smarter and ceased trying to throw the ball by the opposition.
“Knowing him, this year he’s become more of a fastball-changeup guy,” Gonzalez said. “The way he pitches, where before it was fastball-slider, he’s kind of turned it over to fastball-changeup. He’s really focusing on staying in the edge of the strike zone. His command’s so good that he can stay there, he lives there.
“He’s not really making any mistakes.”
After his starts this season, Greinke has readily admitted mistakes. There’ll be errors in judgment he confesses to, such as misunderstanding fellow All-Star DJ LeMahieu’s weakness against fastballs, and errors in execution, such as hanging curveballs and such.
But he will not reveal his plans for this offseason, when he can opt out of the remaining three years and $77 million on his Dodgers deal. Unless the second half goes dramatically differently, Greinke will have the opportunity to obtain more money on the free-agent market.
The expectation is he’ll take it, which would likely mean leaving Los Angeles. But the Dodgers produce the largest crowds in the major leagues, and the facilities for players are state-of-the-art. There are plenty of other perks to his current situation. Where else in the majors offers as many?
“If you take out the beach part, there’s probably a couple,” Greinke said. “But only a couple.”
Greinke’s wife, Emily, is due to give birth to a boy, their first child, in three weeks. She came to Cincinnati anyway, “even though she probably shouldn’t have,” he said.
For all of the things he has changed, Greinke has not changed his personality. His bluntness, by now, is storied. He has nearly no tolerance for small talk. But his teammates have come to appreciate it.
Gonzalez said everybody prefers honest players, men who won’t beat around the bush in conversation. The perfect major-league clubhouse, the Dodgers first baseman said, would be one where everybody behaved like Greinke.
That would not make for perfect television. On Monday, as Greinke was introduced as Tuesday’s starting pitcher in a packed Cincinnati hotel ballroom, news conference host Matt Vasgersian asked him live on TV if he’d like to say a few words about the honor.
“No,” Greinke said.
Contact the writer: pmoura@ocregister.com
