Greinke’s Frustration

Last week, Zack Greinke spoke pretty candidly about his thoughts on the Royals organization. Needless to say, he’s not a big fan of where the organization is currently at. Years of losing have a way of taking a toll on a player’s loyalty.

As I flew up to New York last week for our live event, I was pondering Greinke’s comments. As most people know, he’s part of the stable of pitchers that like advanced statistics, and will look at sites like this one to evaluate how well they’re performing. He quoted FIP at his Cy Young Award press conference last year. Odds are pretty good that not only does he look at his own stats here on the site, but he looks at some of the other metrics available and some of the commentary as well.

Needless to say, none of it has been very favorable towards the Royals the last few years. If Greinke is looking at his own FIP, he probably knows that Yuniesky Betancourt ranks as one of the worst defensive shortstops in baseball by UZR, and yet he had to sit and watch as his team traded for Betancourt to try and turn ground balls into outs. Imagine the frustration of a guy who is being told to pitch to contact believing that the shortstop his team is excited about acquiring has the range of a wilted fern.

So, when someone asked me at the event on Saturday what I thought the effects of sabermetric ideas and statistics gaining traction with players was, this was the first thing that came to my mind. It is certainly not our intent to cause discord between players and their organizations, but I have to wonder if part of Greinke’s frustration with the Royals stems from the fact that the advanced statistics that interest him paint a poor picture of almost everything that Kansas City does.

If more players begin to take an interest in evaluating themselves and their peers in this way, it will be interesting to see if there’s a trickle-up effect. In some sense, it’s easy for Dayton Moore or Ed Wade to dismiss the criticism of their moves as just the rantings of fans, but it is a much more delicate situation when that frustration is coming from your best player. Will owners be willing to continue hiring GMs who ignore UZR if their pitchers are using it to determine how good the defenders behind them are?

Perhaps Greinke, Bannister, and Scherzer are just outliers, and we won’t see any serious uptick in this kind of statistical usage by big league players. That’s certainly possible. On the other hand, though, if this becomes more prevalent in major league clubhouses, it could present an interesting dilemma for teams that don’t really want to use these kinds of numbers to make decisions. Pressure from your players is a lot different than pressure from your fans.





Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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Adam
13 years ago

From which MLB players do we have documented quotes that they refer to fangraphs.com or other similar websites?