not surprised his approach is rubbing off on his teammates

"That’s pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible," Greinke said.

Not many pitchers think that way. But then, Greinke, 26, is not like other pitchers.

No, he’s not. He’s probably the first supremely talented pitcher to believe that nerds like me — or rather, truly brilliant nerds like Bill James and Voros McCracken and Tom Tango — might actually have something to teach a supremely talented pitcher.

It’s actually happening, right now, and we’re here to enjoy it.

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/1447/greinke-learns-from-the-nerds

http://news.lalate.com/2009/11/17/emily-kuchar-photos/

Greinke…at 22…abruptly left baseball and received a diagnosis of depression and social anxiety disorder.

Greinke rarely talks publicly about his ordeal. When asked Tuesday if he could be a positive example for people dealing with similar issues, he gave an unflinching response. Greinke said he was not interested in being a spokesman or a role model.

"So even if I am looked at that way, I still don’t do anything about it, because I’m real uncomfortable doing stuff like that," he said.

This is awesome, asking someone with a social aniexty disorder if they’d like to be a spokesman. Nice job, whomever asked that question, you just won douche of the week!

Greinke is pitching with his stats in mind:

With Zack Greinke, we have a pitcher discussing Defense Independent Pitching Statistics with the press following the announcement of his 2009 Cy Young Award. That’s a whole different animal.
However, what has not really been discussed much since he said that is whether what he describes is a good idea. It is smart for general managers to look at FIP or xFIP or QERA, etc., when determining which pitchers are likely to improve or regress in the coming year, but it is quite different to say that an individual making in-game baseball decisions should minimize his FIP.
I am not suggesting that Greinke does this—to the contrary, he reported throwing more fly balls to allow David DeJesus to prevent runs (thanks to his good Zone Rating), thus lowering his ERA but not his xFIP or his QERA, which look at ground-ball and fly-ball rates, rather than home runs like FIP does. He also discussed avoiding walks and seeking strikeouts in his characterization of minimizing FIP, too. However, I thought it would be important to consider the difference between minimizing FIP and minimizing ERA.

He throws more fly balls because of DeJesus’ UZR? This is amazing. Are we really getting to the point where players are more cognizant of stats to where it is affecting how they pitch/hit/position themselves? Pretty cool.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9791