Prior to the 2005 MLB season, Baseball Prospectus had the following to say about Zack Greinke, a 21-year-old starting pitcher for the Kansas City Royals:
With apologies to Jon Landau, we have seen the future of pitching, and his name is Zack Greinke. There are two sets of opinions on Greinke. There’s the camp that thinks all the talk about him being the most unique young pitcher of our generation is overblown hype. Then there’s the camp of people who have seen him pitch.
Greinke, they would go on to say, possessed not only an All-Star caliber arsenal, but also a crafty pitching style which was perhaps unique in the game, especially among pitchers his age and with his ability. Though he could throw a mid-90s fastball, he preferred to sit in the upper 80s, sacrificing speed for impeccable control. He was prone to quick-pitch batters to catch them off-guard, teasing them with a slider or cutter before making them look foolish with a big sweeping curveball that dipped into Tim Wakefield territory.
That spring, the Royals decided that they could squeeze considerably better results out of Greinke — he’d posted a 1.17 WHIP his rookie year, but struck out “only” 6.21 batters per nine innings — if they tinkered with him a little bit. And so they did, encouraging him to throw the ball harder and eschew some of his former style. His WHIP ballooned to 1.56, thanks to a walk rate that was nearly twice what it had been in his rookie season.
Just 22 years old, Greinke appeared broken. That winter, he was diagnosed with a “personal mental health condition.” The Royals placed him on the 60-day DL and he essentially disappeared for the 2006 season, returning later in the year to make starts in AAA after undergoing treatment for what would eventually be revealed as Social Anxiety Disorder.
Greinke would essentially reemerge as a starter at the beginning of the 2007. He was throwing harder, and from a statistical standpoint, matched the success of his rookie season. In 2008, he was even better; still just 24, his return had gone largely unnoticed by the national media. That wouldn’t be the case for much longer: Greinke set the baseball world ablaze at the beginning of the 2009 season, and between the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, he went 38 straight innings without allowing a run, capping the streak off with back-to-back complete game victories. At 10-3 with a 1.95 ERA and 114 Ks in 115 innings, he’s the early favorite for the AL Cy Young Award.
What, if anything, does this all mean?
Greinke’s condition — Social Anxiety Disorder — is psychiatric condition that affects, by most estimates, approximately 5% of the adult population in America. Usually brought on by situations of intense (real or imagined) social scrutiny, it’s characterized by excessive sweating, nausea, stammering, and in some cases severe panic attacks. It can be specific (only brought on by certain situations) or generalized. He was a highly-touted young prospect who came to the majors, encountered intense stress, and essentially wilted. He disappeared from the game, underwent some form of treatment, and then reemerged the dominant force many imagined he’d become in the first place.
The problem here, of course, is that this all sounds very wishy-washy to the majority of those who care to watch and have an opinion on the matter. During that difficult 2005 season, Greinke was paid about $330,000 to pitch relatively poorly for the Royals. He was paid money — a lot of money, by most everybody’s standards — to play a game, a beautiful game, a cherished American game. Wasn’t that good enough for him? A normal person wouldn’t be given reprieve by their boss for feeling anxiety — why should this guy, rich as he was, and playing a sport where we expect men to be men, be afforded such a fairy-pants luxury?
The criticism was, and still is, very easy: grow up, you big baby, and deal with your failures, just like the rest of us normal folk do. If you can’t take the pressure, you don’t belong; go push papers back in Orlando.
Then, there are the results.
Zack Greinke, snowflake that he was, is embarrassing your favorite hitters right now, and at 10-3 might be the best pitcher in the American League. He was featured — knock on wood — on the cover of Sports Illustrated earlier this year, and hasn’t skipped a beat, even with the national spotlight now officially on him. So can you really say that whatever happened, whatever he took time away from baseball to do, whatever he’s currently doing to help himself cope with the pressure, is all some big scam? Some fraud perpetrated by the oversensitive clinical zeitgeist that’s wrapped the country in its big pink Snuggie? Or, heaven forbid, was Zach Greinke cured?
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Though he’s something of an afterthought in the minds of most baseball fans, many will recall that in the first half of the decade, Khalil Greene was considered a very good prospect. The Clemson product was drafted by the Cubs in the 14th round of the 2001 draft, but elected to return to school to complete his senior year. The decision certainly worked out: he posted a crazy 470/.552/.877 line in 2002, offensive stats which accompanied by his excellent defense at shortstop earned him USA Baseball’s Golden Spikes Award and a first-round selection by the San Diego Padres, who gave him a $1.5 million signing bonus. He finished out 2002 playing for A+ Lake Elsinore, posting an .893 OPS alongside then-teammate Xavier Nady.
Greene was a September callup in 2003; the Padres, lacking a better option at short, opened 2004 with Greene as their starting shortstop (incumbent veteran Ramon Vazquez was sent to the bench). Batting 8th in a lineup that included Sean Burroughs, Phil Nevin, and Ryan Klesko, Greene had a solid rookie season and managed a .795 OPS in 139 games. His defense was not spectacular (.965 FPct was fifth-worst in the majors) but he stood out in his rookie class, taking home second honors in the Rookie of the Year voting behind former teammate Jason Bay.
Then his career basically stalled. His 2004 season started a four-year period during which Greene batted a pedestrian
.256 with a .313 OBP while averaging just 497 plate apperances per season thanks to many handfuls of minor injuries. He did showcase decent power, especially on the road: he hit 15 homers in each of his 2004, 2005, and 2006 seasons, two-thirds of those homers coming away from Petco’s power-stifling confines. In 2007, Greene finally logged 600+ appearances at the plate, popping 27 homers to go along with his a tepid .254 average. Almost half of his 2007 home runs (44%) came at Petco.
There were some underlying signs of a gradual change in approach. While he spent those years battling cold stretches by tinkering with his stance, his selectivity at the plate waned: the percentage of balls outside the zone that he swung at increased with each passing year. Of those bad pitches, he made contact with about half. There are two types of hitters who can sustain success while swinging at high percentages of bad pitches: those who make up for it with tons of power (like Alfonso Soriano), or those who are just exceptionally good at hitting bad pitches (like Juan Pierre). Greene, despite his modest HR totals, was neither of those things.
In 2008, the bottom fell out. After parlaying those 27 homers into a 2-year $11m deal with the Padres, his average plummeted to .213 while his HR rate dropped over 40% from 2007. Greene’s discipline at the plate suffered further, and he struck out five times as often as he walked.
July 30th of that season would be his final game in a Padres uniform. Playing shortstop and batting 8th against the Diamondbacks, Greene grounded out twice to the left side of the infield – one going as a double play – and then struck out swinging against Dan Haren in the 7th, his 100th K of the year. Following that at-bat, he returned to the clubhouse and punched an equipment storage container, fracturing his hand in the process. He was replaced in the game by Edgar Gonzalez; the Padres, trailing 5-3 at the time, would go on to lose 7-3.
An ugly back-and-forth between Greene and the Padres ensued; never one to be particularly comfortable in the spotlight, the shortstop was now involved in a public battle over his salary, which the team attempted to recover after Greene’s self-inflicted injury ended his season. Already in salary-dumping mode, the Padres had all the more reason to move Greene; they traded him in December to St. Louis for bizarro rightie Mark Worrell.
At this point, Greene is by no means a newcomer to the game; after breaking into the bigs in 2003 at age 23, he’s logged almost 2,800 plate appearances between the Padres and the Cardinals. His career line of .245/.302/.423 is unsightly, and has not earned him much sympathy in the month since this story has broken. Where, many ask, was this anxiety when he was doing well? The more obvious question to me is: why now? It’s been a very up-and-down ride for Greene, with an emphasis on the down: random variance in production is to be expected, but he’s made frequent habit of plummeting below the mendoza line. Could his slumps hold any clues to his breaking point?
There have been 18 points throughout Greene’s career at which his 10-game average has cratered below the .150 mark. Three of those “craters” were also associated with dips in his 20-game average below .150. Though Greene, prone to these bouts of poor play, has been streaky throughout his entire career, these prolonged extreme dips in his production are a relatively new phenomenon. He’d always bounced back to mediocre before; now, he’s really wallowing.
Two of these three dips — those occurring on 7/18/2008 and 5/27/2009 — seem to be closely tied to Greene’s apparently exceptional levels of anguish. Two weeks after the 7/18/2008 crater was when Greene punched the storage locker. The timing there did seem off: Greene had actually raised his average a bit prior to that game, and his 20-game strikeout rate (then 3.4 AB/K) was not too far below his career rate (4.6 AB/K). Still, it was obviously out of frustration over his poor play that Greene lashed out, and it can be seen that he was playing exceptionally poorly at that time.
The second bout of problems, his being placed on the DL with an “anxiety disorder,” occurred around the 5/27/2009. Not only was he playing some of the worst baseball of his career, he’d also been basically relegated to a utility role on LaRussa’s squad, and had been the subject of some trade rumors. This was all too much for Greene, who actually tried to come back , went 5-25 with 3 HR, and then was returned to the DL with Social Anxiety Disorder.
What about his first foray into Batting Average Hell? That occurred at the end of the 2006 season, when he missed time with a lingering finger sprain (he sprained it swinging a bat, then was hit in the hand by a Brandon Backe pitch when he attempted to return to the lineup after a few games off). The sprain severely hampered his offensive output: the Cardinals were simply killing themselves with Greene in the lineup, as he went 1-23 with 10 strikeouts to finish the 2006 season. We can give him the benefit of the doubt: this particular extended slump appears to have been related to the finger injury (he’s missed 155 games over his career due to injury, an amount which encompasses almost a full season’s worth of games; actually, Greene has never played 155 games in any season).
It’s somewhat absurd, of course, to pretend that still-mysterious mental disorders can be studied in any meaningful way by looking at such crude statistical measures. This is what we have, though, and aside from a very loose correlation, we can’t make any meaningful armchair diagnoses. So did Greene have these problems prior to arriving in St. Louis? What, if anything, set him off?
It’s entirely possible that nothing really changed in Greene. We don’t know if he approached the team, or the team approached him: it’s entirely plausible that someone on staff thought they saw something troubling in his demeanor and set the process rolling him- or herself. The organization might be slightly more inclined to notice these things: Greene’s current teammate, Rick Ankiel, who famously imploded during the 2000 NLCS in front of a national television audience and whose setbacks were so severe that he had to abandon pitching altogether, has basically recovered from a far more public nightmare.
Complicating matters is the fact that we can’t really say for sure who Greene is as a player – and neither can he. He had an accomplished college career, but in truth, has never excelled at any professional level. Is his poor hitting caused by anxiety, or is his anxiety caused by poor hitting? Many have made careers of being slick-fielding offensive failures; does Greene’s embattled exterior mask the innards of a good-glove-no-stick infielder who’ll occasionally run into 10-20 homers per season? It’s possible that he holds himself to higher standards than he’s destined to ever achieve, and that he’s basically been unable to cope with what he is.
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This all sounds somewhat strange, this business of players having to understand things like value, much less comprehend and accept their own value. Once upon a time, if a little rocket-armed right-hander couldn’t handle pitching games all year, he was a failure, a weakling, the stuff of boorish clubhouse jokes strung up on beer-stained breath. Then someone came along and decided that maybe there should be such a thing as a relief pitcher, and that maybe some of these kids who couldn’t throw 200 innings could throw 80 and be really, really good at it. Suddenly, the reliever was born, and from that radical thought, the closer. Now, some of the most feared and respected pitchers in the game — Joe Nathan, Jonathan Papelbon, and the best relief pitcher in baseball history, Mariano Rivera — are in fact failed former starters. Sixty years ago, Mariano Rivera is just a dumb fisherman who couldn’t hang with real men. Now, he’s a legend.
Often, their shoulders simply couldn’t handle the load. It’s easy to forget how absurd the notion of pitch counts once was; now, if you aren’t up on keeping your pitchers healthy, you’re seen as an idiot. Some still disagree with the concept of protecting pitchers from excessive physical stress, but those stalwarts are very much dying off. And it’s not just pitchers. It used to be that injuries were seen as a sign of some nonspecific “weakness” in a person’s fortitude. Now, the diligent prevention of them is big business. Ignoring a physical injury isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of stupidity, one that costs teams ballgames and millions of dollars (look at what some are whispering about the Yankees’ treatment of A-Rod’s injury).
Mental disorders are essentially uncharted territory. If Cubs fans could go back in time and collectively give Mark Prior’s shoulder a hot, therapeutic massage with some garish pink vibrating implement, they absolutely would, pride and toughness be damned. It is difficult to say exactly what the difference is between a physical issue, like a weak shoulder, and a mental issue, like a weak sense of self-worth. We can test for the former, and while some say we can test for the latter, it still doesn’t feel right to us. This might be because it’s already been so embraced — and almost certainly abused — in other areas. Suddenly, common mental disorders like SAD and ADHD aren’t legitimate medical conditions, they’re excuses used by lazy parents to shield their coddled sons and daughters from the altogether normal pressures of childhood. We see a ballplayer claiming to have the same problem, we make a connection; this guy is just making excuses. It’s totally natural. But is it right?
Football players are famously given Wonderlic tests during their young careers. Most would bluntly argue that the tests are designed to see if that big, hulking quarterback is smart or an idiot; mental deficiencies are cutely expected and dealt with in sports where men are often measured by the force with which they are able to hurl themselves about. Really, they test intelligence, logic, and decision-making abilities, or they’re supposed to. Even then, a poor Wonderlic score is not a sign that a person isn’t cut out to play football.
It’s not difficult to see a world where baseball teams start paying attention to this sort of thing, assessing both mental quickness and fortitude alongside their physical counterparts. While society can’t even really decide what a person’s mind “should” be like (because really, there’s no answer to that question), teams are already paying attention. They’re The “Disabled List” has been somewhat radically re-purposed to handle players dealing with stress- and anxiety-related issues; in addition to Greene, Dontrelle Willis, Joey Votto, and Ian Snell have all thusly missed time this year.
It will be a very long time before baseball considers a chronic personality issue in the same way they treat a chronic hamstring issue, but it’s reasonable to expect that it will happen. Until then, it’s worth plenty of discussion. We’ll never stop worshipping our favorite players, because god dammit, we want to. That’s what makes all this steroid business so troubling: you’re making it too damned hard for us to love you. And so we may as well ask ourselves what we really want from these guys. We are willing to pay you all sorts of money so that we can sit around and watch you play baseball. Most of us would like you to do this without taking anabolic steroids or HGH or any other dubious creams, ointments, pills, or injections. Do we also expect stone-faced toughness at all costs in the face of adversity? We no longer hiss and spit when shin splints disable our favorite lumbering first baseman. Will there come a time when a monthlong stress-induced DL stint isn’t met with indignant scoffing?
Zach Greinke and the Royals may have done something relatively revolutionary, if we ever come to deciding that what they did was a model for success. There will always be decisions to make. We can’t keep paying for your surgeries if you can’t throw a strike to begin with, and maybe Khalil Greene is just not good enough to be paid $6.5 million to undergo counseling. Baseball, at some level, will embrace this. It’s about talented superstars and winning organizations. If the next Tim Lincecum needs a little help understanding how to deal with his situation, why shouldn’t we as fans demand that our training staff gets right on that?
