Like so many before him, he left to win. He left because he felt that was the only way he could win.
Zack Greinke represented a generation of Royals baseball, the kind where hope manifested in individual players, not the team itself, but eventually you knew that too would be snatched away.
The 20-something-year-old Greinke personified that guy, the one worth the price of admission for a team that so often was not. The one who eventually had to leave town to find the two things baseball players crave most — money and winning.
And a dozen years later, he now believes he can find that here.
In Kansas City.
Really.
That's the point in all of this, a reunion fortified Wednesday with a one-year contract worth $13 million.
This is the romantic part of baseball, isn't it? After days — or weeks — of those in charge providing us a reason to hate the game, this is a reminder of why we fell in love with it. It's a sweet story.
But it's not the story. The homecoming illuminates where the Royals believe they are in the bigger picture.
Ready to win. Or at least on the verge of it.
They are in a new place than when Greinke departed 11 years ago — than when he demanded his way out to avoid the rebuild. His arsenal hasn't changed much since then, Royals team president Dayton Moore said Wednesday, with the notable exception of the power behind each of his pitches. But the the organization looks quite different than when Greinke last wore this uniform.
He left to win, and the Royals went ahead and won without him. Well, because of him actually. They traded Greinke to Milwaukee, you'll recall, a deal that netted them the building blocks of a 2015 World Series championship — center fielder Lorenzo Cain and shortstop Alcides Escobar were part of that package.
They reached the mountaintop before falling back to familiar territory, finishing 19 games out of first place in the AL Central a year ago. This isn't the same rebuild. Rather, it's not the same stage of the rebuild. Back in 2010, Greinke had looked at the organization's incoming prospects and remarked, "There's no reason for me to get real excited about it, because the chance of more than one of them making a major impact by the time my contract is up is pretty slim."
The Royals are young at the major-league level once again, same as before, but they see the future as more immediate.
The kids are here. Unproven? Yes. But they're here. And there's some optimism in that.
A one-year contract Greinke offers sense from a baseball perspective and from perspectives far behind it. But it's the former that proves more revealing.
You don't pay $13 million for sentimentality — even when the sentimentality makes for one hell of a compelling story.
The Royals might not be referring to themselves as World Series contenders, but they aren't viewing 2022 as another step in the waiting game. Yes, they will need their young arms to emerge, along with a couple of the highly touted bats. That's as obvious as it is uncertain.
Greinke offers an accelerant to the process. He is 38, not the Cy Young pitcher he once was, but the artistry of his method always lent itself to pitching effectively deep into his 30s. There are few who study in the game in the manner in which he does. Few who, as Moore put it, read a hitter's swing the way he can. He pitches more than he throws. Those are traits the Royals hope he will pass on.
And in the end, he still wins games. At age 38, he fits closer to the top of a rotation than he does the bottom. He was credited with a loss in only six of his 29 starts in 2021. His teams were 42-32 when he started games in the past three years. There's something there, even if it's not the same velocity that powered him to the Cy Young Award in Kansas City in 2009.
Greinke is a unique person, documented in the stories his former teammates, coaches and acquaintances seem to love to share. Among his traits, he can be brutally honest. For a rotation stacked with young arms, that isn't the worst thing.
He was once one of those young arms here in Kansas City, back when he nearly quit baseball. He was later diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. Moore would take over as general manager a year later, and expressed his desire to treat Greinke as a human being before a commodity.
Same as Moore did the trade request in 2010. Although Greinke would later say he was "pretty rude" when he left in Kansas City, the two sides kept the possibility of a future match alive. Moore said he couldn't help but continue to follow Greinke's career, his life and his family. He always felt pulled by their connection.
They delved into a conversation about a reunion before the lockout, and after a new collective bargaining-agreement was ratified this month, Moore's first call was placed to Greinke, he said.
So, sure, sentimentality is partly what made Wednesday's reunion possible.
Partly. Mostly, he's back for the same reason he left.
Hoping to win.
Why can't it be both?
