From the athlete's perspective, sports are about discipline, and camaraderie, and sticking together—all with the hopes that winning will be the end result. But if you listen to retired athletes, they seldom talk about wins. They talk about the locker room. They talk about specific plays they'll never forget. And they talk about the life-long friendships they made during their playing days.
From the perspective of the fan, sports are a way of identifying with a team, a city, and with other likeminded fans. And sports are a release from the pressures of everyday life. Perhaps I'll write more about sports fans in another post on another day, but for now I want to talk about an athlete who is enduring hard times. And I want to talk about how his team is helping him to cope.
Zack Greinke is a 22 year-old pitcher with the Kansas City Royals. He was drafted by the Royals straight out of Apopka High School in Florida in 2002. He's never known failure on the field. In his senior year in high school he was 9-2 with an unheard of 0.55 ERA in 12 games. He struck out 118 hitters and in 63 innings, and he only walked eight guys. He was named the Gatorade National Baseball Player of the Year that year. In 2003, he pitched in the Royals minor league system (for Wilmington in A-ball, and for Wichita in AA-ball) and he had a combined record of 15-4 with a 1.93 ERA. The Sports News named him Minor League Player of the Year. He made his major league debut with the Royals in 2004, posting a respectable 8-11 record with a 3.97 ERA on a team that lost more than 100 games.Then 2005 came along and, for the first time in Greinke's career, he struggled. He was 5-17 with a 5.80 ERA. Fans had no idea that he didn't know how to cope emotionally with struggles. He says now that he has always struggled with locker room environments. He just doesn't feel comfortable around groups of people. As somebody who has been in the Royals locker room, I know how tense their locker room feels when the team is losing. When you are winning, everybody is nice, and accepting. When you are losing, people want answers. And Zack didn't have any answers—at least any that made sense.
Zack reported for Spring Training for the 2006 season a couple of months ago and he immediately knew that something was wrong emotionally. Manager Buddy Bell called him into his office, and Greinke assumed that Bell was going to yell at him.
"But that wasn't the case," Greinke is quoted as saying in an article on the Royals website. "Buddy was watching my bullpen and saw that I was doing some crazy stuff and he wanted to know what was wrong with me. He wasn't yelling at me. He saw that there was something really wrong with me—not just pitching."
So, he flew back home to Florida and got the help he needed. His teammates called him continually to check up on him. And maybe, for the first time, he was starting to feel like he belonged—even though he admits to not always being the friendliest guy. Just a couple of days ago, he reported back to extended Spring Training in Arizona and he's on the road back to the major leagues. His praise for the Royals continued:
"I couldn't have done this without Allard (Baird, the general manager), (manager) Buddy (Bell) and my parents," he said in an article published in the Kansas City Star yesterday. "They’ve done so much more than they needed to do or should have done. I'm still amazed by it. When I left, I thought they'd just kick me out the door. The way they've done it, I wasn't expecting it. It's just been incredible."
The Royals are off to another horrible start. They've lost 10 games in a row and are already quickly dropping out of contention in the American League Central Division race. As much as that bothers the players and the fans, I'm thinking that we could all learn a lot from the way a team rallied around a guy who desperately needed help.
