If Greinke doesn’t win the Cy Young, I’m going to…

So I woke up this morning to find my neighbor distraught. Sometime during the night, someone bashed in the small, blind spot window on the passenger side of his 14-year-old Cutlass Supreme.

But I have more bad news for him.

If the Royal’s Zack Greinke doesn’t win the American League Cy Young award, I’m going to be pacing the neighborhood taking vengeance upon small animals, i.e. squirrels and quail, and irreplaceable car windows.

I’ve already called Neighborhood Watch.

I don’t expect there to be as much competition in the American League Cy Young race as many of the popular media outlets prophesy. It’s going to come down to two guys: the Royal’s Greinke and Seattle Mariner’s ace Felix Hernandez. If anyone else wins, it’s official: I’m switching to football.

First, I think its important to put their numbers side-by-side. Here are their statistics, per order of ESPN’s Cy Young Predictor module:

At just 23-years-old, King Felix finally had the breakout that had tantalized many analysts since the beginning of his career. In 2009, Hernandez posted career highs in wins, innings pitched, games started, strikeouts, and earned run average. He kept lefties to a .228 average and righties to a .226 average using his dazzling fastball, 2-seamer, hard curve, slider, and change.

The campaign was good enough to earn him his first All-Star nod. His incredibly consistent season also placed him atop the leaderboards for Win-Loss Percentage, Wins, and Hits Per Nine Innings with marks of .792, 19, and 7.542, respectively.

Not too shabby, by any measure.

But Greinke’s 2009 was even better.

Sure, he started one less game and pitched nine less innings. Sure, his win-loss record of 16-8 pales in comparison to Hernandez’s 19-5.

But wins are slowly becoming an antiquated stat, one that will almost surely lose its significance one of these days (my guess being December 21, 2012). Simply put, pitchers don’t have much control over whether they win or lose. They can stack the deck in their favor by pitching well, but the statistic is almost completely reliant on potent offenses and capable late relief.

And Greinke played for the friggin’ Kansas City Royals; the fragile, anemic team with the 12th worst batting average among the 14 American League clubs, the team that slugged just 144 homeruns over the course of a 162-game season, good for 13th best in the same field.

But that’s not even the worst part. That dubious distinction would belong to the tremendously awful bullpen. In 2009, the Royal’s bullpen went 16-26 with an earned run average over 5.00. They let 45 percent of inherited runners score, 11 percent worse than the league average. Just one regular reliever, stud closer Joakim Soria, posted an ERA below 4.00.

In two starts where Greinke left the game without allowing a run, he got no-decisions. In two more starts in which he allowed just one run, he got a loss.

The team ended the season 32 games below .500.

Assumptions like this are almost always faulty and unfair, but it’s fair to proclaim that Greinke should have a markedly better record.

And let’s not forget that Greinke allowed 11 fewer runs than Hernandez in just one less start. And that he struck out 25 more batters in nine less innings.

Greinke’s season was part of history. Hernandez’s wasn’t.

Chances are that many of us have forgotten about this now, but his 6-0 record and 0.40 ERA through the season’s first six starts put him in the elite company of just two men: Walter “Big Train” Johnson and Fernando Valenzuela. Extend that through his first 10 starts and Greinke’s 0.84 ERA is a measure of dominance unseen since Juan Marichal’s historic run in 1966.

A Cy Young Award would be another notch in Greinke’s headboard.

And if he doesn’t win, well, watch out neighborhood: there’ll be hell to pay.

UPDATE: Everyone is safe.

Will Detroit end the season with a roar (or a meow)?

Over the course of this baseball season, my interest in the American League Central has waned. Something about the brand of no-frills baseball being played in the American Midwest leaves something to be desired. Couple that with the I’d-Rather-Be-Pummeled-Than-Listen-To-This announcing of Chicago’s Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, and it was just a matter of time before I tuned the entirety of the Central Division out.

Perhaps I was too hasty.

The race to crown a Central Division champion is by far the most exciting thing happening in baseball right now. Since Atlanta got knocked out of the National League Wild Card by the surging Colorado Rockies and all the other playoff bound teams are trotting out their Quad-A squads, it’s tremendously refreshing to see do-or-die baseball being played in Motown and Minny.

It also helps that I work with a girl from Michigan. She talks like she’s straight off the set of Fargo, but she certainly loves the Tigers.

“How’d dose Tigers d’oh?”

For the past week or so, my responses have ranged from hopeful to futile: “They have an upcoming series versus Minnesota so they’ll probably clinch” to “I’m not going to be surprised if they don’t win the division and are playing golf in a few weeks.”

With three games left in the regular season, Detroit needs to take two of its next three games against the Chicago White Sox. Edwin Jackson will take the bump for Detroit and former-Cy Young winner Jake Peavy will toss for the ChiSox in the series’ opener tonight.

Detroit has won six of its last 10 games, but given the chance to solidify the division during the last season series with Minnesota, the team settled for a split. Does Detroit have the killer instinct to close out the season? Or will Ozzie Guillen motivate his White Sox a few games closer to .500 and end the season on a solid note?

Detroit holds eight wins to Chicago’s seven during the two’s season series.

Minnesota has to sweep the beguiled Kansas City Royals to have a chance at postseason play. And while no team other than Kansas City affords the Twins a better shot at that chance, Mauer and Co. will have to face locked-in, sure-shot Cy Young Zack Greinke in the second game of the series.

Minnesota is streaking its way into the series with Kansas City. Despite losing three of its last five games, Minnesota has been bludgeoning the ball, winning seven of its last 10 contests. In the season series, Minnesota has taken nine of 15 games against KC. It’s relatively probable that Minnesota will take two of its three games against the American League’s worst overall offense.

But will they have enough to take the game against Greinke?

I want to see a one-game playoff between the two Central teams.

Here’s to Detroit losing two and Minnesota winning three! Here’s to the perfect storm!

I’m hitting baseball’s D.L. with an anxiety disorder. Why? Everyone’s doing it!

Anxiety disorders have never been this prevalent in baseball.

Sure, it was clear that the Cardinal’s Rick Ankiel was dealing with something during his precipitous fall from stud-pitcher to batting practice fodder in 2001. And then there was the case of the Royal’s Zack Greinke, who all but gave up baseball before sitting an entire year to battle depression and anxiety. The cases, however, have always been few and far between though and usually extremely isolated.

At the mere mention of the problem as a reason for a trip to the disabled list, any old-timer would query, “Whatever happened to going out after the game, grabbing a beer and blowing off some steam?”

Having dealt with anxiety issues myself, I know the affliction is anything but a joke. It’s a very real problem with very real implications. It makes life a constant struggle and every moment is a battle. However, unlike Ankiel and Greinke, today’s star are treating it as anything but.

In this day of handout psycho-meds and therapy, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Detroit’s Dontrelle Willis has hit the disabled list two times this year with social anxiety. St. Louis shortstop Khalil Greene has, too. Neither has a documented history of the disorder, and their diagnoses are leaving health officials “suspicious.” Willis has been called up numerous times and when he inevitably falters, it’s “social anxiety” and not his horribly unrepeatable mechanics that is to blame. And Khalil Greene’s downfall from slugging shortstop to Mendoza-hoverer has nothing to do with the fact that he has the plate discipline of a little leaguer or the injury he sustained smashing a storage unit in the dugout during the 2008 season.

While their problems may be manifestations of something more significant, they are handling it in a shameful way. Willis is making routine trips to the minor leagues where he is pitching ably against shabby competitors. Greene spent less than a month on the D.L. (22 days) before coming back for the first time. He spent everyday with the team taking batting practice and fielding. It’s hard to believe that such a serious disorder can be solved by continually playing the game that is causing such distress.

Earlier this season, Cincinnati’s Joey Votto spent time on the disabled list with what was originally dubbed an “inner ear infection.”

Votto had started off the 2009 season hot, amassing eight homeruns and 34 RBI through the first two months. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he was gone.

At the end of last season, Votto’s father passed away. His idol, his mentor, the man who taught him how to play the game, had died. Votto trudged through the end of the 2008 season without him, but a quarter of the way through 2009, the pain was too hard to handle. Spring training was a positive outlet for his emotions, but once the pressure of the season rolled around, Votto was paralyzed. He couldn’t spend time alone and he slept holding a telephone, waiting to inevitably call the hospital for help.

He took a month off from the game, sidelining himself with “stress-related issues.” He didn’t play ball. He got help; he vocalized his emotions, spent time with his brothers (who he was now responsible for), and dealt with the issue he’d been avoiding for an entire offseason. He finally spoke to the media about what ailed him.

That’s how it should be. If Willis and Greene are actually suffering from something, perhaps they can ask Joey Votto, Rick Ankiel, and Zack Greinke how to deal with it.