The Reasons for Pessimism and Optimism Surrounding Zack Greinke

Zack Greinke made his second start in spring training yesterday, and it did not go well. Facing off against Team Mexico, he allowed six hits in 2 2/3 innings, including a number of balls that were crushed by a line-up of guys who won’t play in the big leagues this year. Of the 12 batted balls that Greinke allowed that were tracked by StatCast, four of them were hit at least 100 mph. This is not really what you want from a guy who got paid like an ace in large part because of his perceived contact management skills.

But while the exit velocity numbers showed that Greinke was getting squared up regularly, the pitch velocity numbers were the most concerning elements of the day. Statcast didn’t record a single pitch even at the 90 mph threshold, with Greinke essentially sitting at 89 with his fastball all day. Given that he averaged 92 on his fastball last year, that’s a fairly steep decline, and Greinke even admitted after the game that his stuff isn’t where he wants it.

“It’s still early,” Greinke said. “It is what it is. It’s still early and it’s not like some crazy, crazy thing. But it’s not ideal, either.”

Not ideal is one way to put it. He still has $172 million left on his deal, is coming off one of the worst years of his career, finished last year battling shoulder soreness, and is now missing his top-end fastball a month before the season starts. As a 33-year-old, some decline is expected, but Greinke only managed a league-average strikeout rate last year while sitting at 92, so if he has to adjust to life with diminished velocity, the Diamondbacks might end up realizing they signed rumored-target Mike Leake after all, just in a much more expensive package.

And if Greinke has to evolve into a pitch-to-contact guy who gets by with command and deception, then the Diamondbacks are probably stuck with him. The D’Backs are long-shots to contend this year, and if they end up as also-rans, the best thing they could hope for this season was a return to form from their ace, allowing them to move most of his remaining contract so that they’re not on the hook for the years where there won’t be much value. But the only way to move Greinke without paying a massive portion of his $34M salary is if he’s perceived as a frontline starter, a guy who can be a difference maker in the playoffs.

Even if Greinke reinvents himself, as CC Sabathia did a year ago, the market just showed us what kind of value it is putting on league-average innings eaters these days; Ivan Nova got 3/$26M, Jason Hammel got 2/$16M, and Jeremy Hellickson took the qualifying offer. Greinke’s better than those guys, of course, but there just wasn’t much appetite league wide for strike-throwers with mediocre stuff, and if Greinke’s lost a couple of ticks on his fastball, he’d probably start to fall into that category, though his command should let him be among the best version of that pitcher type.

So that’s the bad news. If Greinke’s velocity doesn’t come back, the Diamondbacks are probably stuck with him, even if they decide to kick off a rebuild later this year. And since the Diamondbacks aren’t a team with sky-high revenues, having Greinke’s $34 million on the books for his decline years could significantly hamper how quickly the team could turn this thing around.

But, as the headline promises, there’s some good news here too. Despite the doom and gloom of the last few paragraphs, I would suggest not overreacting to Greinke’s velocity on March 8th.

For one, Greinke’s done this before. From Brooks Baseball, here are Greinke’s spring ball velocity numbers dating back to 2008.

This is now Greinke’s third time in the last six years showing dramatically reduced fastball velocity in March. For Greinke, looking for his fastball in spring training is becoming old hat.

Back in 2011, he sat at just under 91 in spring training, despite sitting between 93-94 in the 2010 regular season. In the 2011 regular season, his fastball averaged 93.4, down just three-tenths of a mile per hour from his 2010 regular season velocity.

In 2014, he again sat just under 91 with his spring training fastball, down from 92.4 in the 2013 regular season. His 2014 regular season velocity? 92.5, actually up a tenth from the year before. In both 2011 and 2014, we graded Greinke as roughly a +4 WAR pitcher, though his runner-stranding results were quite different in those two years, so his ERA in 2014 was over a run lower than it was in 2011.

But in both of the last two seasons where Greinke’s fastball velocity was concerning in March, his fastball velocity in April-September was just fine, and he pitched at a high level both times. The fact that he’s shown that he can find his fastball after not having it in Spring Training suggests that, even if this is the first time Greinke has sat at 89 in a spring training game, there are reasons to hope that he won’t be sitting at 89 once the games start to count.

And even though velocity is one of the things that most carries over from spring training to the regular season, the magnitude of the changes is still less than what you’d think if you just looked at changes from last regular season. As Mike Fast showed a while back, velocity increases pretty steadily as the temperatures get warmer, and it isn’t unusual at all for pitchers to experience their lowest velocity numbers of the season at the beginning of the year. Even if Greinke begins the year throwing 90, we’d expect him to get back up to 91 by mid-season just by the nature of velocity’s relationship to the weather.

Fast’s article notes that pitchers retained 41% of their spring training velocity changes, which is certainly large enough to be notable, but not large enough that we should assume that Greinke is still going to be throwing 89 for much longer. For one, he averaged 90.7 mph in his first spring training start, so this isn’t even a trend yet; this is literally just one start where he didn’t have his fastball. If Greinke goes back to sitting closer to 91, like he did on March 3rd, we’d be looking at a two mph loss relative to last year’s regular season velocity, and if we expected 41% of that difference to carry over, then we’d expect Greinke to lose about .8 mph off his fastball in 2017. That would put him at an expected velocity of around 91.4, two ticks up from what he was yesterday.

And that’s not really unusual at all. Guys in their mid-30s lose a tick off their fastball all the time, and while eroding stuff will cut into Greinke’s value, there’s probably not enough evidence here to dramatically alter our forecasts for him, and ZIPS and Steamer both have him as a +3 WAR pitcher this year. That’s not an ace, and Greinke’s probably never going to be the guy the Diamondbacks thought they were getting, but if pitches at a +3 to +4 WAR level this year, then he’s tradable as long as the team picks up a bit of the remaining contract.

So, certainly, the Diamondbacks have to hope that Greinke sitting at 89 was a one-game fluke. His velocity is now something to watch, and if it doesn’t bounce back as Opening Day gets closer, that’s a problem. But despite the fact that spring training velocity is somewhat predictive, I wouldn’t freak out about one start with a missing fastball. Greinke’s had slow starts in spring training before, and they haven’t stopped him from finding his fastball by Opening Day. If he’s throwing 89 on April 8th, the team has a real problem, but on March 8th? I wouldn’t ring the panic alarm just yet.