Greinke Be Gone-ke

Let's have an article about losing our main 2012 rental where everybody on HH can freely post, Ok?

Zack Greinke signed a 6-year contract with Magic Johnson and company, dipping his ladle into the well of the future LA Dodger Television revenues for $147,000,000. This includes $12,000,000 for a few inches of ballpoint pen ink alone. Zack is set to draw a paltry $17 million for 2013, but then averages a little more than $23.5 million for the subsequent 5 seasons. Clearly REAL Mexican food trumps Tex-Mex, as Nolan Ryan was left with all hat and no cattle, again.

That is a pretty hefty chunk of change for a player who will be assigned the responsibility of participating in a little more than half of about 30 baseball games. On the one hand, its good to avoid those kinds of commitments. On the other hand, if we were going to stick our necks in that particular noose, it would have been wiser to do it with a Greinke than a Wells.

Score 1 for the Dodgers. Score -1 for us. Score 0 for the TexA$$ Rangers. And score -10 for Jim Bowden, the asshat who was cackling on twitter within the past 48 hours as he mocked the Dodgers certain loss to the Rangers in this bidding contest.

Meanwhile, NOW we can see some serious scrambling for the players still on the board.

Anaheim Recap: Zack Greinke came to the Halos on July 27th as the Milwaukee Brewers bailed on their ownership of his final season and traded him to Jerry Dipoto in exchange for Ariel Pena, John Hellweg and Jean Segura. Greinke then started 14 games for us and fit right in during our sputtering pursuit of 3rd place in the AL West. He surrendered 80 hits (11 of them home runs) and 26 walks (none on purpose) in 89.1 innings of service. 35 runs scored, all earned, resulted in a 3.53 ERA and an ERA+ of 107.

His first appearance for us was July 29 against the Rays and he went 7 innings, yielding 2 runs on 7 hits with 8 K's in a 0-2 loss to Tampa Bay. The nest two outings were also losses and we were all wondering where the hell did they hide the REAL Zack Grienke!? Over those two starts he went 12 innings but gave up 16 hits, 7 walks, 10 runs with 3 homers and the Angels lost both. Over the final 10 starts the Angels would win 7, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Two of those losses were 2-3 and 1-3, and two of the wins were 2-1 and 3-2. So Zack was in some tough ones and our offense swooned late in the season.

Finally, as the Zack Greinke Time Share expired, we should observe that the process of his parting was a hell of a lot cleaner than that of Mark Teixeira. No jerking anybody around. He came, he played, he went to the market and gave everybody a fair shot to pay more than Magic Johnson. And we didn't play any games, either. No reason to hate on Zack here.