Zack Greinke and Amir Garrett, Come On Down!

The Royals traded a lefty starter for a lefty reliever and brought back an old very good friend.

The cries to “DO SOMETHING” must have been heard loud and clear by the Royals front office. Either that or they were able to get a deal that they think helps their team and their bullpen and that started a bit of a domino effect. They traded Mike Minor and his lesser-known teammate “cash considerations” for Amir Garrett from the Reds. I figured they’d be shopping for a lefty reliever and even went as far as to predict they’d sign Andrew Chafin, but once Chafin signed a two-year deal with the Tigers, the Royals moved on to their next target in Garrett.

And then the question immediately became what they’d do with the vacant rotation spot. Would they let the young guys pitch? Would they go out and get a veteran? Johnny Cueto is a name I’d heard. Ken Rosenthal tweeted that they were in the market for Frankie Montas. But the first move was signing Zack Greinke to a one-year deal for $13 million with some bonuses that can get it up to $15 million. It was a bit more than I expected, but not by a huge amount, so I guess this is where I could insert the shrug emoji.

Let’s go out of order and start with the Greinke signing.

I should begin by warning everyone that if you didn’t know it already, this is not the same Greinke who we last saw more than a decade ago in Kansas City. According to Baseball Savant, his fastball averages 88.9 MPH and did get hit a bit. But he still gets swings and misses on his changeup, slider and curve and the changeup, in particular, is still very good.

There is a part of me that wonders if he wore down last season. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising. In his first 24 starts, he averaged six innings per start and struck out 18.6 percent of hitters while walking just five percent. In his last five starts, he averaged just five innings per start with a strikeout rate of 8.9 percent and a walk rate of 6.3 percent. Then he was hit around a bit in his first two postseason appearances before throwing four solid innings in the World Series. That could go one of two ways. Either he hit a career wall or he really did just wear down.

After a shortened 2020, I think it’s fair to think it was the latter, but we have to be realistic that the former is possible. If he is the guy who the Astros got from the start of the year through mid-August, they’re getting some serious rotation help. The strikeouts aren’t there anymore for him, but he still has elite control and can mess with timing with the best of them. He can still reach back for a little extra.

But he can also take a ton off.

Greinke has taken to being more of a finesse pitcher over the last few seasons and you can see that he hasn’t stopped throwing the kitchen sink at hitters.

As is the case when a pitcher can’t overpower opponents with pure stuff, Greinke does need to get ahead. Because when he does, he’s very tough to square up.

To that end, Greinke controls the zone well and threw a first-pitch strike two-thirds of the time. He also threw 75 percent of his pitches either ahead in the count or even in the count where he found the most success. If he can continue that trend, he’s likely going to be just fine. As I said with Soren Petro yesterday, he’s savvy enough that even without elite stuff, he shouldn’t completely fall off a cliff. Still, there’s at least some concern that you’re looking at something like 140-150 innings with the team backing off him a bit at times.

Ultimately, I think Greinke is better than Minor and Garrett is better than whoever it is the Royals would have had in the bullpen so they got better as a whole. Though it isn’t all without risk.

Let’s get to that Garrett deal.

I love it. First of all, let’s talk money because money talks or something like that. Minor was owed $10 million by the Royals and there was a $1 million buyout on his 2023 option. The Royals are sending $1 million to cover that buyout along with Minor to acquire Garrett, who had an arbitration estimate of $2.2 million by MLB Trade Rumors. So that’s a big net win for the Royals there in terms of money. Garrett is also under team control for 2023, so if things work out, he’ll be a part of next season’s bullpen as well, which I’ll get to in a minute once I finish talking about Garrett and what he can bring to the team.

So what can he bring? I’m not sure what’s more prevalent. It might be his nasty slider that has been an absolutely dominant pitch throughout his career.

That’s his whiff rate on the slider. It’s a good thing when the line just stays at the top of a chart like this. He throws the slider a lot and it’s a very good slider to throw a lot. While he gave up some bigger hits on that pitch this past season, a lot of it was probably a bit of misfortune as his expected stats on the pitch were basically in line with previous years where the results were even more dominant.

Does striking out Juan Soto interest you? It’s a very good pitch.

Or it might be his nasty streak. You may recall there was a bit of a brawl between the Reds and the Pirates a couple years back. But you’d be recalling wrong because it was actually a brawl between Garrett and the Pirates.

Cody Tapp @codybtapp

Royals new signing

He’s got a lot of fire. He has a bit of a rivalry with Javier Baez, who signed with the Tigers and, well, let’s just say there’s some energy with him. Is that a good thing? It worked for him up until 2021, so hopefully it becomes a good thing again in 2022 and 2023 with the Royals.

But he is coming off a bad year. So what happened?

The easy answer is his control faltered. His walk rate jumped from 10.1 percent in 2020 to 13.5 percent in 2021. But also he was at 14.2 percent in 2019 and pitched to a 3.21 ERA (that was helped by a pretty great strand rate). So it’s not all control. There’s an argument to be made that he was in the zone a bit too much. In 2019, he threw 37.8 percent of pitches in the zone. In 2020, it was 35.8 percent. Last year, it was 41.3 percent.

We talk about this all the time, but it’s not just balls and strikes. It’s good strikes. And there are good balls too. Some pitchers can live in the zone while others likely need to work around the zone a little bit more, and I think Garrett benefits from working around the zone a bit more. Even on his vaunted slider, he allowed a .276 average and .500 SLG on it when it was in the zone. That’s up from .130/.261 in 2020, .172/.310 in 2019 and .190/.381 in 2018. But I’m more concerned about him throwing strikes with his fastball.

He allowed a .286 average and .584 SLG on the fastball in the zone, which actually isn’t that far out of line with some of his previous season numbers. But he threw 54.1 percent of his fastballs in the zone compared with 42.9 percent in 2020 and 48.4 percent in 2019. It’s not the walks. It’s the fact that the fastball gets hit when it’s in the zone.

More specifically, it gets hit when it’s in the middle of the zone. When he throws his fastball to the edges and just off the edges, it’s a very good pitch. He allowed just a .184 average and .289 slugging percentage on it with a whiff rate of 22.7 percent. But when it’s in the middle the average jumps to .383 and the SLG jumps to .809 and the swinging strike rate is just 7.6 percent. This isn’t breaking news. Fastballs down the middle are bad against big league hitters. But they’re maybe just a bit worse for Garrett. If he can refine his location (and that’s a big if), the Royals have another huge late-inning weapon in a bullpen that I’m liking more and more every day.

With his addition, the Royals are deep and versatile back there. I still don’t love Scott Barlow as the closer, but that’s okay. They have Josh Staumont and Dylan Coleman throwing smoke from the right side with Jake Brentz joining Garrett from the left side. When Domingo Tapia averages nearly 98 MPH with his fastball and he’s the sixth option out of the bullpen, that’s pretty fun. They also have guys like Collin Snider, Nathan Webb, Will Klein, Christian Chamberlain and any of the young starters being shifted to the bullpen to help make that unit stay strong.

It was quiet for the Royals for a long, long time. Then they woke up and made two moves that shook up the pitching staff. Fun day. We’ll see if there’s more to come, but in the meantime, we look forward to baseball.