‘What the heck was that?’: 10 stories that explain why there's no pitcher like Zack Greinke (2024)

If one theme has defined Zack Greinke across his 20 seasons with the Royals, Brewers, Diamondbacks, Angels, Astros and Dodgers, it is his penchant for invention, his ability to create on the fly. It’s why he has grown from prodigy to power pitcher to cagey vet, and why last month he became only the fifth pitcher in MLB history to strike out one thousand different hitters, joining a group of immortals: Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux.

Greinke, at 39,remains a marvel: innovative, confident, cerebral, a pitcher like no one else on planet earth.

Why? Well …

1. It all started because Zack Greinke wouldn’t throw his side sessions. He didn’t see the need. Sure, he would loosen his arm in the outfield, and he loved to field grounders at shortstop. But when it came to bullpen sessions between starts — the age-old form of training — Greinke was resolute.

“I don’t need to work on my pitches,” he told Dave LaRoche, the Royals’ pitching coach at Triple-A Omaha.

It was 2004, and Greinke was a 20-year-old prodigy on the cusp of the majors, an inscrutable talent who was equal parts stubborn, confident and blunt, gifted with extraordinary feel. Once, when Greinke was in A-ball, he called catcher Scott Walter out to the mound. Greinke sensed it was the perfect time for a cutter.

“Do you even throw a cutter?” Walter said.

“No,” Greinke said. “But I can do it.”

It did seem like Greinke could do anything, but he would still not throw a side. Finally, LaRoche offered a mea culpa: If Greinke threw a few fastballs to prove he was healthy, he could spend the rest of the sessions messing with other pitches.

One day Greinke asked LaRoche to show him his famous eephus pitch, which he’d used as a reliever with the Yankees in the early 80s. LaRoche had nicknamed the pitch “La Lob,” a high-degree-of-difficulty Bugs Bunny curveball tossed extra high.

“Well, I can do that,” Greinke said.

LaRoche agreed to show Greinke the way, but with one nonnegotiable rule: Greinke had to promise to never, ever throw it in a game.

Five months later, as a 20-year-old in the big leagues, in just his 19th career start, Greinke threw a 50 mph “La Lob” curveball for a strike against Omar Infante.

On the mound, Greinke told himself: Don’t start laughing out here.

2. Greinke has never stopped learning, never stopped tinkering and searching for something new. Even at 39 years old.

One day this winter, he was throwing in Kansas City. Brian Sweeney, the Royals’ first-time pitching coach, showed up to meet him. For most of the session, Sweeney, 48, stood silently. He just wanted to watch. Finally, Greinke turned to Sweeney, who had never spoken a word to the pitcher.

“Are you going to coach or what?” Greinke asked.

A few weeks later, Greinke and Sweeney were lost in a conversation about Greinke’s new “sweeper,” a type of pitch that didn’t exist when Greinke debuted. Was the sweeper more effective with eight inches of horizontal break or 18 inches? What did the data reveal? What did hitters see? What other pitches complemented the sweeper? Greinke engaged with all of it, eager for an edge. He looked at Sweeney again.

“Better job coaching this time,” he said. “You weren’t very good the first time.”

3. When Greinke was young, he hated the label “genius.” What he did was not genius. It was pragmatic. And to him, at least, it was obvious, even if almost no one else saw it that way.

Years ago Greinke and Arizona catcher Jeff Mathis were going through the game plan against the Cincinnati Reds’ lineup. But when they got to first baseman Joey Votto, Mathis could tell Greinke didn’t have an answer. Votto, himself a cerebral iconoclast, possesses one of the best eyes in baseball and an appreciation for Greinke.

“I feel like we have some similarities,” Votto said. “First of all, I have a lot of respect for him. But I just remember going to All-Star games with him and thinking: ‘I f— with this guy.’”

Greinke was stumped. Then, boom, it hit him: He was going to throw Votto a hanging slider in the middle of the strike zone.

“Uuuuuhhh, I don’t really know,” Mathis said. “But if you want to do this, I’m not going to argue.”

Greinke threw a slider that spun aimlessly across the top of the zone. Votto took it for a strike. Greinke threw another cement-mixer at the belt. Votto took it again.

“He steps out,” Mathis said, “and kind of does his Joey Votto look around like, What the f— was that?”

What Greinke had intuited was that no hitter recognized spin like Votto, that he would see slider and expect it to break out of the zone, that he could use Votto’s own gift against him, that all he had to do was throw a meh slider that stayed in the strike zone and Votto wouldn’t swing.

“I just left that game shaking my head like, ‘This son of a bitch,’” Mathis said.

4. In time, Greinke came to love his bullpen sessions. They became another canvas on which to paint, a place for him to experiment with new pitches. “His bullpens are something to behold,” Sweeney said, “because you never know what you’re going to get.”

Sometimes he throws 15 pitches. Sometimes he throws 70. Sometimes Greinke just throws one pitch. Once, at spring training, catcher Paul Phillips watched Greinke spend an entire bullpen session trying to hit specific speeds on the radar gun.

I’m going to try to throw this one 71.

I’m going to try to throw this fastball 92.

“That’s like going to the fair,” Phillips said. “Guess your speed! You get three pitches!”

Last year, Greinke walked up to rookie catcher MJ Melendez before a game with some news. He was going to throw a two-seam sinker. Melendez was caught off guard for one small reason: He didn’t know Greinke even threw a two-seam sinker.

But Greinke had worked on the pitch in the bullpen between starts, and he believed it would stump the White Sox’s right-handed hitters. He allowed just two runs in 5 2/3 innings, then didn’t throw the sinker again for five or six starts.

“He’s the most creative guy I’ve ever been around,” Royals pitcher Kris Bubic said.

5. When Greinke was a rookie, people wondered if his pitching style was too … well, cute. The thing people missed about Greinke was that there was usually a method to the madness, even then. When he arrived at spring training in 2007, he promised to ditch the slow curve. He wasn’t worried about optics; he just wasn’t sure it actually worked.

The year before, he had stepped away from baseball while dealing with social anxiety and depression. When he returned to the majors in late 2006, he had an epiphany of sorts in an appearance against the Twins. He threw soft and got bombed. He needed to throw harder. Everyone kept saying he was like Greg Maddux. Greinke didn’t agree. The way he saw it, Maddux had better movement on his pitches and a wider strike zone.

Greinke started throwing harder. He touched 100 out of the pen (It is entirely possible that Greinke has thrown a pitch at every mph from 50 to 100). He re-joined the rotation and his career took off. But then something happened: the Royals acquired reliever Joakim Soria, who had his own Bugs Bunny curveball.

So in 2009, Greinke faced the Tigers. He was a sensation that year. Sports Illustrated put him on the cover and called him the best pitcher in baseball. (“They’ll probably sell their least amount of magazines in a long time,” Greinke told the Kansas City Star at the time. “Except when NASCAR was on the cover.”) He made his first All-Star game in Chicago and shook hands with President (and White Sox fan) Barack Obama, although Greinke was disappointed by the interaction. “Because none of the White Sox guys like me,” he explained to the Star. “So I was hoping that he’d recognize me and be like, ‘You punk, I hate you.’”

In the ninth inning, Greinke was about to close out another gem. Tigers slugger Magglio Ordonez came up with two outs. Greinke wanted to end the game with a slow curve — an homage to Soria, the team’s closer.

“I wanted to do it,” Greinke later admitted, “so I could talk trash to Soria.”

He spun a 62 mph curveball with two strikes. It just missed. He struck out Ordonez anyway with a slider on the next pitch.

6. That Greinke can manipulate a baseball at will is a testament to his athleticism, touch and extraordinary feel. He once pulled driver on a 190-yard par 3 and hit his ball to five feet of the hole. He once smacked a double using a split-grip on the bat because he liked the way it felt when he swung a samurai sword. In Arizona, he would realize a pitch was bad the millisecond the ball left his fingertips and use it to his advantage.

“It might be the only time I heard Zack cuss,” Arizona pitcher Archie Bradley said. “He’d be like ‘f—!’ or ‘dang it!’ He said he did it because he tried to throw off the hitter.”

“Some of the hitters would turn around,” Mathis said, “and be like: ‘What the heck was that?’”

When Diamondbacks manager Torey Luvullo visited Greinke on the mound to gauge how he felt about the next hitter, Greinke wouldn’t give a yes or no answer — he’d give a specific, honest percentage.

“He’d say: ‘I’m like 60 percent positive I can get this guy,’” Bradley said.

His feel shows up in other unorthodox ways. During a recent start against the White Sox, Greinke should have backed up home plate but instead cut off a throw between home and third base and nailed a runner at second. Greinke returned to the dugout, and Sweeney, the pitching coach, joked about what seemed like good fortune.

“Perfect place to be, huh?” Sweeney said.

“Yeah,” Greinke said. “I’ve actually done that eight times in my career.”

Not seven. Or nine. Greinke knew the exact number, and he knew exactly where to be to make the play.

“Against all conventional wisdom,” Sweeney said.

7. Greinke is not afraid to fail, and when a hitter does get the best of him, he lets them know.

“Zack would throw what he thinks is the perfect pitch and the guy doesn’t swing at it,” Bradley said. “And in the middle of the at-bat, Zack will ask him: ‘How did you take that?’”

One time Greinke gave up a triple to Neil Walker in Pittsburgh and rushed over to back up third base. When the play ended, he walked up to Walker.

“How did you hit that pitch?” he said. “Like, that was a really good swing. I don’t know how you hit that.”

8. Greinke observes. He’s curious. He asks questions. One of those questions came in 2018, when Greinke was standing next to catcher Alex Avila during batting practice. Greinke’s fastball velocity was declining, and hitters weren’t swinging and missing as much. All his pitches seemed to be just about the same speed.

“Alex, what do you think?” Greinke asked.

Avila is pretty sure Greinke already had the answer, that he just wanted confirmation, so Avila mentioned an old pitch.

“What about the curveball?” he asked.

The Dave LaRoche Special had never left Greinke’s back pocket, but for years it was more of a novelty. Greinke liked Avila’s idea, so one Saturday in June, he threw the slow curveball 12 times against the Pirates, the most in his career. He struck out four batters with the pitch. When the game was over, however, Greinke was already thinking about the next adjustment. The Pirates’ Austin Meadows had hammered one curveball to deep center field. It stayed in the park, but Greinke wondered if he needed a new trick.

“Maybe 12 times was too many,” he said.

9. The first time Jeff Mathis met Greinke was at a restaurant in Kansas City. They weren’t teammates yet and the pleasantries quickly turned into a conversation about pitching. Greinke was at the height of his powers, so Mathis asked what Greinke’s favorite thing to do was, expecting a response along the lines of “just blowing people’s doors off.”

Instead, Greinke’s answer shocked Mathis: fielding bunts and holding runners.

A few days later, Greinke faced Mathis with runners on. Mathis was often asked to bunt in those days, and Greinke knew it, so he spun his La Lob curveball up there. (When a pitcher came up in a bunt situation, Alex Avila didn’t even bother putting down the sign. He knew the slow curve was coming).

Mathis started to push the bunt down the third base line, and it was right then he realized Greinke was standing on the line, almost waiting for the ball, a step ahead of everyone else as always.

“Zack is the only pitcher I know that would throw a pitch, sprint off the mound to a point on the field and I’ll be damned if almost every time he did that it wasn’t weak contact and he fielded the ball and threw the guy out,” Bradley said. “It was in-credible.”

Several years ago, Greinke was pitching for the Diamondbacks in Boston. Greinke didn’t survive the second inning, but before he was pulled, a Red Sox hitter sent a swinging bunt up the line. Greinke bolted from the mound, fielded the ball and fired an off-balance throw to home, nailing the runner.

When the inning ended, Greinke walked back to the clubhouse. Bradley, curious how Greinke would react to a rare shelling, followed. Greinke headed right for a video monitor and watched the play he’d just made. Then he turned to Bradley: “That play just won me the Gold Glove.”

“I couldn’t help but laugh,” Bradley said. “And you know what? He won the Gold Glove.”

Much later on, Greinke was sitting with Bradley when a Diamondbacks’ PR staffer walked by. Greinke won three Gold Gloves in Arizona. “Hey Zack,” the staffer said. “Your Gold Gloves are still in the office if you want to take them.”

At least one of them had been there for two years.

10. Twenty seasons into his career, after one Cy Young, 224 wins, six Gold Gloves, and nearly 3,000 strikeouts, Greinke still cares about the little things. Just the other day, Royals reliever Scott Barlow watched Greinke in the outfield. Greinke tossed balls into the padded wall, then fielded them as they rolled on the warning-track dirt, hit the lip of the grass and popped up in unpredictable ways.

For a moment, Barlow watched in appreciation, a future Hall of Famer trying to simulate bad hops, using his own unique approach to get better.

(Top image: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images; Stephen Brashear / Getty Images)