One of the Things That Makes Zack Greinke Special

If it’s a preview of Game 5 you want, here’s all that really needs to be said: Zack Greinke is good, and Jacob deGrom is good, and the rest of the Dodgers are good, and the rest of the Mets are good, and some combination of events is going to lead one good team beyond the other. Maybe the combination will be predictable; maybe a catcher will accidentally throw a return toss off of the batter’s hand in a tie game in the ninth. Maybe that counts as predictable now. We’ll keep our eyes out.

Any preview bigger than that is lying to you. If not lying, then implying this’ll be in any way foreseeable. There’s a game, and things will happen in it. What I want to do here isn’t project which team is more likely to win. Rather, I just want to point out a really neat thing about Greinke’s 2015 record. It does say more than a little something about the way that Greinke pitches, so in that way this is immediately relevant, but mostly I wanted to make sure to get this in somewhere before Greinke’s season was officially over. It might be over in a matter of hours. So, now’s the time.

As we’ve talked about before, every pitcher page has pitch-type run values. The units are runs above average, and for example, this year, Greinke’s fastball came in at +19.3 runs. That’s a good fastball. As we’ve also talked about before, these numbers should be used carefully, because while there’s a relationship between pitch value and effectiveness, the numbers aren’t adjusted for, say, defense. So, there’s noise. But there’s noise in everything. Can’t worry about that in a post that basically comes down to a fun fact.

The fun fact: this year, Greinke’s fastball was worth +19 runs. His changeup, meanwhile, was worth +20 runs. And his slider was worth +18 runs. In other words, Greinke very easily had three different pitches come in at 10 runs above average or more.

I wanted to know how often that’s been done, so I went back to 2002, which is when our data starts. I looked at starting pitchers who threw at least 100 innings, and then it was just a matter of sorting. No pitcher season showed four +10-run pitches. Here are all the pitchers with three:

Nine occasions, in 14 years. This is a rare thing to observe. Obviously, it’s a list of good pitchers, and because reality is what it is, Greinke can’t get away from Clayton Kershaw. They can’t be untangled, which is the Dodgers’ remarkable blessing. To go one step further, I turned the numbers into a per-200-innings rate stat. So now here’s an updated table, with just the pitchers with three +10-run pitches per 200:

And we’re down to four, with two of them being teammates. So in that sense, Greinke has done something extraordinary. And, also shown here, but a little more subtle: Greinke, by this measure, has had the best third pitch since we started collecting the data. Kershaw’s had the second-best third pitch. The Dodgers are about so much more than their top two starters, but at the same time, no they’re not. Without them, it’s just a fairly solid baseball team. With them, you’ve maybe got a World Series favorite.

Here’s a peek at Greinke’s relevant pitch values over time:

The fastball, he’s had. The slider’s been real good to him before. The slider has made a comeback, but the newcomer is the changeup. The changeup that Greinke throws a little like Felix Hernandez. So now Greinke features three premier pitches, and he even occasionally offers a curveball just to further mess with the hitters’ timing. For so many reasons, Greinke is considered perhaps the most intelligent pitcher in the game, and the breadth of his repertoire allows him to make full use of that intelligence.

It’s just about impossible to detect any patterns. One thing that makes Greinke unfair is his balance — against the Mets earlier in this series, he threw 37% fastballs, 30% sliders, and 28% changeups. He’s a textbook example of a pitcher willing and able to throw any pitch in any count, to any hitter. But other times, Greinke will play favorites, putting one pitch in the spotlight while maybe hiding another. On the year, his fastball usage in-game has ranged from 37% to 69%. His slider usage has ranged from 9% to 34%. His changeup usage has ranged from 10% to 41%. Against the Mets, he once heavily featured a fastball, then he heavily featured the change, then he just about split everything in thirds. Because of Greinke’s confidence in each pitch, there’s nothing to gather from his record, and you can’t really eliminate anything at the plate. You just have to react, always with three or four pitches in mind. And he can spot them all around the zone.

In no way should this be interpreted as a slight against Jacob deGrom. deGrom is outstanding, and the Mets couldn’t pick a better guy to have on the mound with their season on the line. deGrom gets his work done differently from how Greinke does it. But Greinke does it in a way few have ever matched. That’s not the whole reason why Zack Greinke is special, but it covers at least a fraction of it.