DownSwinging.com

Zack Greinke is off to a fabulous start. Everyone knows that. After his latest outing, he is currently sporting a casual 0.84 ERA, which actually went up after pitching his complete game one-run outing two days ago. We forget that this guy is only 25, he’s been in the majors since 2004, had some hype, and each year continued to pitch at a mediocre level, until now that is, with his apparent breakout season. The question is, however, is Trey Hillman pushing his luck with Greinke? Currently, Greinke has five complete games and is second in major league baseball in innings pitched, with 75, behind only Roy Halladay. If you look at Greinke’s career numbers, he has been at the 200-inning plateau before, last year in fact. But the year prior to that he pitched just 122 innings, and before that just 6.1. The point is that for a guy who has struggled with health issues for his entire (albeit young) career, is it wise to maximize his innings now, early on in the season, after such a big increase the year before? Hillman would probably argue that we should look at his pitch counts. For each of his ten starts this year, his pitch totals were: 95, 104, 111, 108, 111, 104, 115, 106, 103, and 116. Now none of those are that bad, but they are pushing it for pitch totals at the beginning of the year. Now that we are at the end of May, having pitchers go 115 pitches is perfectly acceptable, but 111 on their third start might be a little much. All I’m saying is that maybe Greinke’s workload should be scaled back a bit to avoid turning his fabulous season into a fabulous first half.