Greinke dominates to avoid sweep
Diamondbacks starting pitcher Zack Greinke throws his first pitch on Sunday.
Zack Greinke said his start on Sunday carried no special significance. Just another game, he called it. Stepping back from the daily emotional swings a baseball season tends to evoke, his cold rationality is hard to debate, particularly with at least another 62 games still to be played. But that doesn’t mean the opposite viewpoint can’t also be true for the Diamondbacks.
Not after they suffered two brutal losses in as many days to the Colorado Rockies and fell into third place for the first time this season. Not with the Los Angeles Dodgers appearing primed to take off after their Manny Machado acquisition. And not with the Diamond-
backs perhaps needing to play better to compel their front office to charge headfirst as buyers in the trade market.
However the afternoon is framed, there was no ambiguity in the performance. Greinke was dominant in a 6-1 victory over the Rockies on Sunday, a win that avoided a three-game sweep and gave the Diamondbacks at least a little positive momentum heading into a four-game series with the first-place Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field.
Greinke completed eight innings, his longest outing since September. He struck out a season-high 13. He retired 12 batters before allowing a hit, a solo homer to Ian Desmond in the fifth that represented the Rockies’ only run.
“That was a phenomenal effort,” Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said, “on a day when we really, really needed it.”
The outing was further evidence that Greinke is entrenched in another of the hot streaks that have defined his career the past half-decade. It was the sixth consecutive outing in which he’d given up two runs or less and the fourth time he’d given up one or no runs. In those six starts, he has a 1.13 ERA with 42 strikeouts and only five walks in 39 2/3 innings.
While his overall strike-throwing, fastball command and his ability to dot the edges of the zone have been on point for weeks, perhaps the pitch that took the biggest step forward on Sunday was the slider, which he used to induce seven swinging strikes.
For most of last year, the slider was Greinke’s go-to secondary weapon. It has been far less effective this year, but catcher Jeff Mathis believes that is beginning to change.
“I think it’s getting to where it kind of was last year,” Mathis said. “It’s a credit to the work he’s been putting in.”
The win enabled the Diamondbacks to leapfrog the Rockies and move back into second place. It also allowed them to keep pace with the first-place Dodgers, who won in Milwaukee and remain 1 1/2 games ahead.
“I don’t think we’re feeling desperate or anything,” Greinke said. “Just another game. Long way to go. We played all right the first two games and just barely lost.”
The Diamondbacks lost by one run in each of the first two games of the series, both outcomes decided by late-inning, pinch-hit home runs. The way the Diamondbacks saw it, they could have easily won both. But those go down as losses, and they come at a time when the organization is likely trying to determine how high a price it’s willing to pay to improve a club that has been inconsistent throughout the first 3 1/2 months.
A strong performance this week against the Cubs – the team with the best run differential in the league – would help ease persistent concerns about the Diamondbacks' ability to beat good teams.
“They (the front office) have probably already decided whether they’re going to try to do something,” infielder Daniel Descalso said. “I wouldn’t think what we do over the next few days is going to make or break their minds. This group has showed us they’re going to do whatever it takes to give us the best chance to get into the postseason. They’re not afraid to go out and add to this group. If we do, we do. If we don’t, we don’t. But our job is to go out and win games.”