Zack Greinke's Home/Road Splits

One of baseball's mysteries: Zack Greinke's Home/Road Splits

Greinke has started 11 games in Miller Park, and the Brewers are 11-0 in those games.

He's started 9 on the road, in which he's given up 35 runs in 50 innings, and the Brewers have managed to eke out a 4-5 record in those games only because they've scored 7 or more in six of the nine! (And they even lost two of those .)

Is it because Greinke, Mr-Scared-of-New-York, who's kind of a head case with anxiety issues, gets upset when the opposing fans or players taunt him? I dunno. But this is not a new phenomenon. His lifetime winning percentage is .611 at home, .386 on the road, and the big difference is that he's given up far more walks on the road. (164 in 576 innings on the road, 142 in 646 innings at home). This year that particular problem has gotten even worse. He's allowed twice as many walks on the road: 1.51 per nine innings at home, 3.04 on the road. It is difficult to attribute walks to stadium effects, so that seems like a genuine problem.

However, whatever anxiety Greinke suffers, it only affects him in certain ways. Within the game, pressure situations don't bother him at all. Over the course of his career, his very best pitching, by far, has been in the late innings of close games, in which he's held batters to a .616 OPS, compared to .721 for all innings.

'Tis a mystery.