PHOENIX -- It’s easy to portray the brilliant seasons Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw are having in tandem as some kind of intra-staff rivalry, with Greinke competing like crazy to show he’s just as good as Kershaw, who by most accounts has been the greatest pitcher on earth for the last four or five years.
Only both pitchers reject the narrative and there has never been much evidence for it.
But Greinke is a sit-back-and-think sort and he admits he wanted to do something Kershaw was doing with regularity the last two seasons. He wanted to learn how to pitch a shutout.
“I would always find a way to give up one and I was watching Kersh and he did it all the time, where he’d give up none,” Greinke said. “I thought that was just how it was always going to be.”
It wasn’t. Greinke shut out the Arizona Diamondbacks for eight innings Sunday and his Los Angeles Dodgers held on for a 4-3 win at Chase Field. Greinke has allowed zero runs in 11 of his 29 outings this season. He has allowed zero earned runs in 12. He has allowed zero runs or one run in 20 of his 29 starts.
He learned the lesson, but how is he doing it?
“Probably just pitching a little bit better this year and a little bit lucky,” he said.
But generally you make your own luck in professional sports, where the competition tends to weed out people getting by on good fortune as time goes on. There is no level of competition for Greinke higher than facing Paul Goldschmidt, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ best player, who came into Sunday with a .985 OPS and would be a bona fide MVP contender again if his team were better.
And there’s no better indication of Greinke’s confidence this season than the way he attacked Goldschmidt, a player with power to all fields and as discerning an eye as there is in the game. Greinke pumped first-pitch fastballs to Goldschmidt in all three at-bats against him and got ahead in all three at-bats, each of which ended in a strikeout.
Goldschmidt foul-tipped a 94-mph fastball to strike out in the first inning. He swung through an 87-mph slider in the third and he missed a 94-mph fastball that flirted with the outside edge of the strike zone in the sixth. What hitters are seeing with Greinke right now is a rare combination of effective weapons and effective marksmanship. His stuff is dynamic without being quite as dominant as Kershaw’s, but his command is lethal.
After the game, Goldschmidt -- perhaps the biggest Dodger killer in all the land -- was upset he didn’t do more damage with those first-pitch fastballs. He’s not alone. Bryce Harper, the presumptive NL MVP, talked about Greinke being hittable when the Dodgers were in Washington after the All-Star break. And that was after Greinke’s best outing of the season.
“When he makes a mistake, you’ve got to find a way to put them in play and get a hit because he doesn’t make many of them,” Goldschmidt said.
Greinke (17-3) lowered his major league-leading ERA to 1.61 and made another strong case for the Cy Young award. He leads Jake Arrieta by 0.38 runs for the major-league ERA title and Kershaw is another 0.16 runs behind that. Greinke said he has seen “a bunch of articles being written” about the Cy Young race but he said he never clicks on them.
“It seems like it’s a little too early, for one, to be talking about. It started like two or three weeks ago,” Greinke said. “And it’s just not interesting to me to read it.”