Familiarity later forged trust, and Lucroy kept going. He talked about fishing and babies and buying a diamond for his wife, anything to encompass him. "Zack, he doesn't intimate to, but he tender-hearted of puts himself on an isle because of his personality," Lucroy said. "You have to swim to that island.
"I wanted to contrive that relation with him because I knew that this was flourishing to be a very weighty year to have that, that mad trust. You trouble that with any pitcher, but with him especially. He distrusts easily. He'll extract fast. So for me, I've got to constantly be worrisome to along with him because at times he won't want to talk.
But I don't care, and I command him that. He's a very straightforward guy, and he expects rectitude in return." Lucroy knew in the end winter how effective the Greinke acquiring could be.
The Brewers struggled in 2010 with one of the National League's weakest rotations, and Greinke was the best pitcher on the hawk after the Phillies scooped up. Greinke, a first-round block out choice for the Royals in 2002, earned the American League Cy Young Award in '09. He averaged 13 wins a condition from 2008 to 2010, a enormous achievement bearing in mind that the Royals distraught an usual of 93 games a year during that span. But none of that name surprised Lucroy.
Greinke is a unlike guy on the field, and is nowhere near awkward. He knows he's better than the hitter, even on the nights when he's not. He's emotional. He grunts when he pitches, Lucroy said, and irregularly yells when he messes up. He cares.
Brewers pitching teacher Rick Kranitz called Greinke "fiercely competitive." Why else would he have hand Kansas City, a put where he felt to some degree comfortable, to come to Milwaukee? Greinke fractured a rib in February playing basketball. It was, according to a alter ego of Greinke's, a chippy and energetically contested pickup game.
It killed him to stay during his sooner arise training with the Brewers. He pushed himself to put back early, to all intents and purposes earlier, Kranitz said, than he should have. But Greinke still managed to pick up 16 games and went 11-0 at home. "I assume he loves the competition," Kranitz said of the 27-year-old. "He loves that one-on-one fray with the hitter.
He gets out there and competes as well as anybody I've been around." The venue or the stakes don't trouble for Greinke. He locks into his catcher and focuses. "He doesn't observe anything else," Lucroy said. On the terminating Sunday matinal of the daily season, hours before an afternoon profession with the , teammates bantered and prearranged last-minute make-believe football lineups while Greinke sat just at his locker, his chief buried in a laptop. Lucroy noticed.
He walked across the compartment and took a rear next to Greinke, who leaned back and smiled. It was era to talk.
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