Dodgers blast Zack Greinke, win 10-2

The ballpark throbbed with elation when Arizona Manager Chip Hale left his dugout Monday night. An extra emotion filtered into the mix as Hale took the baseball from his starting pitcher: Vitriol. The fans at Dodger Stadium showered the pitcher with jeers as he left the diamond.

The sight of Zack Greinke inside this park once delighted its inhabitants. In his first start against his former team in his former ballpark, he suffered through a 10-2 shellacking by the Dodgers, and the crowd treated him not as an old friend but as an enemy clad in the murky grays of the Diamondbacks.

The Dodgers (77-60) knocked Greinke out of the game in the fifth inning in vicious fashion, hitting four home runs in a seven-batter sequence that was stunning in its efficiency. Joc Pederson started it with a solo shot. Corey Seager unleashed a three-run homer. Justin Turner followed up with a homer in the next at-bat. Yasmani Grandal ended Greinke’s night with a homer of his own.

“To the guys’ credit, they had a game plan,” Manager Dave Roberts said. “They stuck with it. And when he made mistakes, we took advantage of it.”

The team blitzed Greinke for five homers and eight runs in all, with a two-run shot from Adrian Gonzalez serving as a harbinger in the fourth. The power obscured a splendid night for Kenta Maeda, who struck out eight as he allowed one run in 6 1/3 innings.

The outing from Maeda (14-8, 3.29 earned-run average) underlined an unexpected reality — in 2016, he has been a more effective, more reliable pitcher than Greinke (12-5, 4.54). And unlike Greinke, Maeda will almost certainly pitch in the playoffs. The victory expanded the Dodgers’ lead in the National League West to four games over San Francisco and moved them 17 games above .500, both season highs.

“We’ve just got to focus on winning games and playing the game right,” Gonzalez said. “We can’t let a bigger lead change the way we go about things.”

A year ago, Greinke served as one half of this team’s two-man foundation. Along with Clayton Kershaw, Greinke dragged the Dodgers into the playoffs. The team went 43-22 in games started by the duo, and 49-48 otherwise. Despite the fearsome pair, the team could not advance past the National League division series.

For 2016, the Dodgers hoped to become a club no longer reliant on any one man. Propped up by Kershaw for the first three months of the season, the team has played its best baseball since the three-time Cy Young Award winner suffered a herniated disk in his lower back in late June and landed on the disabled list.

The fifth inning offered a microcosm of the difference between 2015 and 2016. Pederson is not caught in a second-half spiral. Seager is the probable NL rookie of the year and a candidate for the league’s most valuable player award. Turner does not need microfracture surgery. Grandal does not need shoulder surgery. Those four have combined for 93 home runs.

When Greinke signed a six-year, $206-million contract with Arizona last winter, he joined a team with inflated aspirations. Both he and the Diamondbacks have fallen short of expectations.
The 4.54 ERA is Greinke’s worst since 2005, and nowhere near the 1.66 ERA he posted in 2015. He also missed six weeks with a strained oblique muscle.

The performance reminded why Dodgers officials showed restraint in the bidding for Greinke during the winter. Pitchers do not age so much as they decay, losing fastball velocity and reliability in rapid succession. The team reallocated money toward signing Maeda and Scott Kazmir.

Kazmir has disappointed as a Dodger, with a 4.59 ERA, his worst walk rate in five years and a neck issue that has placed him on the disabled list. But across the three-year span of his contract, he will earn $48 million. In 2021, when Greinke turns 37, Arizona will still owe him $35 million.

The crowd on Monday showed little interest in saluting Greinke for his three seasons as a Dodger. He received a tepid reaction when introduced before the game, and a hearty round of boos when he batted in the third.

In the fourth, Maeda reached the 150-inning mark for the season, which triggered a $250,000 bonus. He has earned $9.40 million in 2016, a relative bargain given the sums doled out to pitchers in free agency.

“He was really good tonight,” Seager said. “He attacked them, went right at them, made some good pitches, got some weak contact. That’s what we were looking for.”

Greinke matched Maeda through the first three innings. In the fourth, the Dodgers bruised him. After Seager doubled, Greinke tried to pound Gonzalez on the hands with an 0-1 fastball. Gonzalez turned on the pitch and sent it into seats near the right-field pole.

An inning later, Greinke unraveled. Pederson clobbered a thigh-slider for the first homer. After singles by Maeda and Chase Utley, Seager attacked a changeup that floated over the middle.

At this point, Greinke appeared incapable of avoiding the heart of the plate. Turner crushed a fastball at the belt. Grandal ended his night by hammering another fastball.

“Can you foresee five home runs? Absolutely not,” Roberts said. “But we put some good swings on him.”

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