Currently viewing the tag: "Zack Greinke"

One of the first evolutions in sabermetrics was the idea that pitchers didn’t control nearly as much as was widely believed for a very long time. Some things pitchers clearly do influence heavily: strikeouts, and walks. And with those “defense-independent pitching” principles, we got the first generation of “ERA estimators,” statistics that derive most of their meaning from the outcomes …

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In case the secret isn’t out yet, Diamondbacks starters have had a bit of a rough go of things to start the season, with home runs allowed serving as the main bugaboo – 17 allowed by the starting rotation in their first 19 games. As Ryan wrote about after the team acquired Shelby Miller, the mix of his fastballs has …

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It’s a magical time of year, the time in which mountains are made of molehills, common sense proves evasive and The People generally freak out. The Diamondbacks have sunk below .500 for the first time in 2016 as of this writing (hopefully they’ve “surged” to even in the standing by the time of this reading) and we’re all basically doomed. …

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As of the moment this post goes live, it’ll be something like 33 hours since the moment Zack Greinke got pulled from his first Diamondbacks start. That’s about an hour earlier than he and everyone else would have liked. An hour and a half if you’re greedy. To say it didn’t go well would be an understatement. He sort of …

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It’s that time, sports fans: Opening Day for the Diamondbacks and 19 other teams. If you follow the D-backs, you’ve survived a slow death to the season in 2013, a 2014 that was derailed before it got going, and a 2015 season that included some long-lasting experiments that were at least as frustrating to watch as they were smart to

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I’ve been room-temperature about Rubby De La Rosa since he arrived in Arizona. Watching him in Los Angeles and Boston a time or two, he was the kind of pitcher that had the raw stuff but didn’t maximize it. At 23 or 24, that was understandable. Now, just a few days before De La Rosa turns 27, it remains a …

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It would appear that Robbie Ray is some kind of Inside the ‘Zona favorite. In the short time that he’s donned Sedona Red, he’s been covered here at length. Initially it was talking about the trade that brought him to Arizona. Then it was talk of his new breaking ball and how he was getting the job done with

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Zack Greinke has a great track record — in each of the last eight seasons, he’s made at least 28 starts, pitching as an ace or close to it in every one. Last year, though, the results were astonishing. In 32 starts, he managed 222.2 innings, an average of just under 7 per start which was the third-highest rate of …

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Depending on how you look at it, the D-backs will only pay substantially over the major league minimum for sixteen players in 2016. One of them is Bernard Gilkey — and his is not even the lowest figure. The way things stand, the D-backs payroll is not very top heavy, despite the large commitment to Zack Greinke; the second-highest …

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Strikeouts were a problem for the Diamondbacks’ pitching staff in 2015. As a collective group of pitchers, they were 19th in the majors in strikeout rate. The starters were 18th and the relief corps ranked 24th. It was a bottom-third result when you put it all together in terms of strikeouts. We like strikeouts, but as you’ve hopefully noticed here, …

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It’s expensive to own a major league baseball team. If I win Powerball, I’ll probably buy a team and move them to Portland, Oregon and call ’em The Jeffs (but after taxes, shoot, I probably still can’t do it – I’ll start a GoFundMe page for the rest). To own a team, you really need to understand business because the …

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If you read The Inside the ‘Zona 2015-16 Offseason Plan, you probably noticed that we advocated for signing a couple of short-term, mid-level starting pitchers. No one in their right mind thought that Zack Greinke was an option but apparently he was after the appropriate amount of deliberation. Shelby Miller was always sort of on the radar but then …

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We know that the Diamondbacks’ rotation will be better in 2016. Part of that is because it would have been hard to be worse, but there have also been some notable additions. You may have heard about this. I’m guessing you did. For a team with big aspirations, a boost to the rotation was at the top of the holiday …

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Whether a trade is “good” or “bad” may not usually have to do with how “big” it is. When we’ve done offseason report cards in the past, we’ve taken care to try to evaluate impact separately from quality, and for good reason: the smallest decisions can still be approached with care. The questions in the wake of the Shelby Miller

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The D-backs have set about rotation upgrades with the relentless abandon of Liam Neeson in Taken, signing Zack Greinke and trading for Shelby Miller in the last week without blinking at the cost. But those two pitchers have something in common other than some sweet new uniforms — they both surprised with especially low ERAs in 2015. So low,

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Why would the Braves think that Shelby Miller and Arodys Vizcaino are worth A.J. Pollock and Aaron Blair? Even by just making a quick calculation, it’s pretty clear that Arizona would come up short in that deal from a value standpoint. Yet the Braves asked anyways and were fine with being turned down for now. They’ll leave their ringers

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