What Year Is This? Greinke Great Again But Offense Let Him Down Again

This game felt an awful lot like something from 2008-2010.

The story is that Zack Greinke wanted to finish his career where it all started. Whether or not this is his last year doesn’t matter right now. It’s just that I don’t think this is what he was thinking on that front. Because here we are, 12 years after his most recent season with the Royals, and he’s giving the team six innings with one run allowed and not getting himself a win. Time, they say, is a flat circle and if you believe this is all just a simulation, you might wonder if this simulation simply reset itself.

I will say that I keep finding myself waiting for the other shoe to drop with Greinke. He’s now made five starts and he’s struck out more than one batter in just one of them. He’s struck out exactly one in three and didn’t strike out anyone in one of them. Yesterday, he got the Cardinals to swing at 46 of his 88 pitches. They came up empty thrice. And even with those whiffs, they generally simply didn’t make good contact against the pitches.

His four-seam fastball averaged 88 miles per hour, which is around his season average. He maxed out at 89.9. His curve was the swing and miss pitch, getting two on 15 swings and a ton of weak contact with an average exit velocity on nine balls in play at 81.1 MPH. I thought he made two mistakes yesterday. The first came in the first inning to Paul Goldschmidt. He was 0-2 on him and wanted to put a slider off the plate, but it caught the whole plate. Even with Goldschmidt still working to find his power stroke, he isn’t going to miss this.

And then he made a mistake with his fastball to Andrew Knizner in the fifth. He let him get his arms extended and Knizner hit this ball a long way.

But oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that Michael A. Taylor was there for the play of the year. I mean come on people. That’s an amazing defensive play and I would say there’s at least a 75 percent chance we don’t see anything better in the final 141 games of the season.

So in the end, it was one run on three hits for Greinke and another game with no walks. He’s walked three batters this season in 28 innings. He hasn’t walked a batter in either of his last two games. And somehow, the strikeouts simply aren’t there. He’s struck out seven batters in 28 innings. His 2.25 strikeouts per nine innings are the fourth fewest in Royals history of a season with at least 28 innings. That, of course, can change throughout the year, but at the start, he’s doing this in a way that not even the guys in the 1970s did when nobody struck anyone out.

I want to take a closer look at how he does it. Let’s start with his pitch chart from yesterday.

You might remember that I was very excited about Brad Keller’s chart the other day because the middle was empty. This is not that. For a guy throwing 87-90 with his fastball and filling up the middle of the zone, this doesn’t make any sense. Until you remember that pitching is super simple if the pitcher can do the hard part and execute it. I always think if a hitter can change eye levels and disrupt timing, they’re golden. It’s why a guy like Brady Singer can dominate some games even without that third pitch.

Yesterday, Greinke utilized the eye level part exceptionally well. His changeup makes zero sense. It averaged 86.3 MPH yesterday, which is basically the same velocity as his fastball, at least in terms of what a hitter sees. But the way the pitch moves makes a difference.

But the way the pitch moves completely differently is something that allows him to be successful. His fastball had an average vertical movement of 20 inches yesterday. That was right on par with his season average. His changeup, though, with a very similar look, had an average of 32 inches of break. It’s just a tough below his season average of 33 inches. And that can be incredibly difficult to pick up for opposing hitters.

Take a look at two pitches in basically the same spot and almost the same velocity and you can sort of see how different the pitch looks when they’re presented on top of each other.

Fastball:

Changeup:

But then he uses the curve to slow the hitter’s bat down. It was especially slow yesterday, averaging just 69.9 MPH compared to 71.1 MPH for the season before yesterday. I’m going to isolate the curves only from his pitch chart.

How in the heck is he able to get big league hitters while throwing essentially batting practice speed in the zone that much? I’ll be honest when I saw that I’m just not sure. I think some of it is the element of surprise. But generally, my personal opinion is that it plays on a lot of hubris from big league hitters who see their eyes get big when something that slow and looping comes to the plate. But he doesn’t catch the middle much. I’m going to pull it back even more. Here’s his curve against righties yesterday:

And against lefties:

Sure there are a couple of mistakes in there, but generally he’s staying away from those guys. The very first plate appearance of the game against him is a great example of both surprise and great location. Greinke missed away with his first pitch of the game and then came back with what was honestly a hanging slider that Harrison Bader probably wishes he had hacked at. The 1-1 pitch was the curve.

And it’s just a soft pop-up for the first out. He did it again against Corey Dickerson to start the second. Dickerson had a long battle with Greinke, seeing four fastballs and three changeups before Greinke turned to the curve.

After seeing seven pitches between 86.6 MPH and 89.2 MPH and moving all the way from the bottom of the zone to above the top of the zone, a curve on the outer third was never going to be a pitch Dickerson could do anything against.

He actually did it again to the next hitter with Paul DeJong getting himself out. The one mistake he made with it was to Brendan Donovan and it's just the curve caught too much of the plate on a pitch Donovan lined to center field for a single. But that curve, which was a novelty pitch for him years ago has become such a vital part of his repertoire. It allows him to throw 89 with his fastball in the zone against hitters who are geared up for 95+ against just about everyone.

The one thing that has interested me a lot about Greinke so far this year is his slider usage. He used it a lot in that first game of the year and made note that he wanted to be throwing it more. Then he sort of backed off it a bit and then threw it a little bit more. He threw 14 of them yesterday. Six of them got swings and none got a whiff. The home run from Goldschmidt was on that slider that didn’t slide enough. I still think there’s potential for that pitch for him, especially if he’s going to rely on the curve so much. I sort of wonder if maybe he needs to take off a couple miles per hour on it so it maybe looks a bit more like his curve but is still fairly significantly harder.

If he has that to continue to disrupt timing, I could see more swings and misses down the road, but I also trust Greinke to not have to listen to a shlub like me. The thing is that even though we can see how he got it done yesterday, I still have some very serious doubts about how long he can keep this up with a 2.57 ERA and basically getting nobody to swing and miss like ever. I don’t care how good your defense is. A swing and a miss is never a hit. Even the softest batted balls end in hits sometimes. So his work is a mystery, but it’s also very familiar given the history.

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Crown Jewel

Un-Clutch Salvy

I’ve been almost annoying about pointing this out, but Salvador Perez has been absolutely terrible with runners on base this season. The Royals have a lot of offensive issues, but they’ve left 82 men on base as a team since the start of the road trip in Seattle. That’s a span of 10 games. In those 10 games, they’ve scored 32 runs. They’ve lost two games by one run and another three by three or fewer. A big hit could have changed many of those games. And in those 10 games, Perez has left 26 on himself. Just a note, that doesn’t mean 26 of the 82 have been left on by him. If Perez leaves two on and then Carlos Santana comes up and doesn’t get a hit, he’s left the same two on.

And I bring up Santana because there’s been a lot of response to me on Twitter regarding his lineup protection, or lackthereof. That is absolutely, 100 percent an issue. But also I don’t think it’s as big of an issue as a lot of people have made it out to be.

Here are the numbers from last year:

And this year:

He’s seeing fewer strikes in general this season with runners on than he did last year, but this is where the sample comes into play and maybe pitchers are attacking an obvious issue with him that has plagued him throughout his career. I say that because if you just take away the last weekend’s worth of games, the numbers look a lot more like last season and this isn’t just a one weekend issue.

It’s clear that the guys behind him in the lineup are causing a problem as teams are pitching him differently than last year, but I think the big discrepancy we see in the year-to-date numbers are from the Yankees realizing that he’ll just swing at anything right now. But even with his current issues, he’s hitting .244 with five homers with nobody on base. And he’s now hitting .125 with no homers and just two extra base hits with men on. And up until a couple days ago, he wasn’t even getting pitched significantly differently.

We can argue all day whether or not the offense should run through Salvador Perez, but it does. And when he’s hitting like this, they’re just not going to score many.