Zack Greinke is one of the most talented starting pitchers in all of baseball, but he can be his own worst enemy. Greinke thinks too much at times, and it doesn’t help that he has a social anxiety disorder. The 30-year-old righthander says that he has been trying to learn to keep it simple.
Greinke, who is very intelligent, wishes he was just plain stupid at times. Why? Because stupid people tend to succeed on the baseball diamond, as he recently explained to Everett Cook of the Los Angeles Times.
“Baseball is a sport where being stupid and keeping things really simple a lot of times is the right way to do things,” Greinke said. “There are very few guys that are capable of processing a lot of information and applying it and still being good at it. … I don’t want to name names, but there were guys I played with that were so stupid that they’re really good, because their mind never gets in the way.”
Come on, give us names! When you start thinking about it, you know exactly what Greinke means. Some of the best players in baseball — and professional sports in general — come across as moronic off the field. There are so many trends and statistics to consider in baseball that you can easily become overwhelmed instead of just trying to throw or hit a ball.
The best example of Greinke’s theory that I can think of would be the 2004 Boston Red Sox. Those guys called themselves “The Idiots.” While some of them were actually very smart people, do you really think they spent all of their free time crunching numbers and studying opposing pitchers? No, they were taking shots of Jack Daniels instead. Sometimes less is more.
H/T Big League Stew
