Doing Everything Right

I touched on this in a previous post, but it’s worth repeating here, at length. The Kansas City Royals’ Zack Greinke is 8-1 with a 0.84 Earned Run Average, and has staked a claim to being the best pitcher in baseball. Last night he was throwing 95 miles per hour fairly regularly, then I did a double-take at the picture-in-picture in which he was throwing. Something strange had happened. I switched the windows and rewound it and there it was: out of nowhere, he dropped a 63 mile-per-hour curveball to a befuddled right handed batter who watched it drop like a beach ball for a strike. The announcers were agog. So was I. Greinke’s expression did not change.

Greinke has followed a long, long road to get here, and he’s only 25 years old. He was called the “future of pitching” five years ago by Baseball Prospectus, only to fall on hard times and basically give up the sport. Rather than sugarcoat it, here’s what happened: he more or less had a nervous breakdown. He didn’t want to pitch any more. He had a load of talent but he couldn’t harness it and that could have very easily been that.

What did the Royals do? They did everything right. They gave him a wide, wide berth, telling him to take as much time as possible before coming back. He saw a therapist and learned to deal with his emotions. In professional sports! This is a rarity. When he finally did come back, it was to the minor leagues—for as long as he wanted—then the bullpen then, two years ago, the rotation. He pitched really well last year, finishing with a 3.47 ERA. He’s pitching really, really, really well this year.

Part of the way he deals with everything is to talk pitching only—he doesn’t discuss the past. Unlike Mark McGwire, it’s an admirable thing. He barely changes expression on the mound, staying calm in situations that would send Joba Chamberlain bouncing around the infield like a firecracker, or screaming like a madman. Most articles attribute a lot of his calmness to his wife, a swimsuit model, but it’s clear that they’ve got the order backward—he had to get his head right to even get to the place where Mrs. Greinke could help. The Royals did everything they could to make that happen, and for that reason, they are a model organization.

They also employ Sidney Ponson, the international joke I extended to two columns last time.
Sidney Ponson sucks. He’s not an embarrassment to baseball as much as he is an embarrassment to whatever team signs him. I mean hey, it’s their money. He’s very likely all things considered the worst player in the league in that he’s just mediocre enough to remain employed in a league where healthy starting pitchers are hard to find, and as a result has many innings over which to spread his awfulness. On the bright side, he was on the Yankees last year.

But here’s what the Royals are dealing with: they get to keep Zack Greinke through a thoroughly modern and enlightened method of dealing with a player’s very real emotion problems, and are forced, through baseball’s free market structure, to employ a clown like Ponson to round out their rotation. I’m not saying the structure is right or not, but it’s sure as shit not fair to them or their fans. For all their years of being downright awful, their signs of turning around are a lot like Greinke’s themselves—just like he had to get right before his marriage would really help, the Royals had to get here before they can take the next step.
The difference for them is that the next step is hardly possible. There’s not much they can do except sit back and watch Greinke mow down batters, knowing that he’s locked up until 2012. Ponson will be long retired by that point (God willing). Here’s hoping there’s no one equally crappy taking his place.