A lot of stuff has happened to me in my sportswriting life. But I&#8217;ve never had to deal with THE JINX before, all capital letters. It is true, I&#8217;ve had to deal with some lower-case jinxes. For instance, I do have some kind of curse thing going with Tom Watson. I&#8217;ve never seen him win a golf tournament. I&#8217;ve seen him lose playoffs. I&#8217;ve seen his charges fall short. I&#8217;ve seen him struggle in countries all over the world. I&#8217;ve never seen him win.</p><p>One year, I decided not to go to the U.S. Open at Olympia Fields, Ill., and Watson at age 52 had a magical first day and led the Open. I raced up to Chicago, took a train to the course, and got there just in time to watch Watson double bogey a hole and fall out of the tournament.</p><p>But this was different, this was THE JINX, something much bigger than me. This week, I wrote the cover story for Sports Illustrated about Royals pitcher Zack Greinke. And while this was a thrilling thing being a part of the first Kansas City Sports Illustrated cover in almost six years, and the first Royals cover since David Cone in 1993, more than a few people this week mentioned something about how the subjects of Sports Illustrated covers often are jinxed.</p><p>&#8220;I cannot believe you would allow them to put Zack on the cover,&#8221; Tom wrote in.</p><p>&#8220;Please, please, please don&#8217;t jinx Zack,&#8221; Lisa wrote in.</p><p>&#8220;If he has a bad start, you might want to have some plane reservations for someplace far away, like Malaysia,&#8221; wrote Greg. &#8220;Or Mars.&#8221;</p><p>So it goes. A few years ago, Sports Illustrated writer Alex Wolff went back to look at the subject of every SI cover at the time there were almost 2,500 and found that about 37 percent of them had some distinct and noticeable downswing. Now, I&#8217;ll tell you, I don&#8217;t believe in curses or jinxes or hexes or voodoo. Don&#8217;t believe in them. The Cubs have been mostly lousy, that&#8217;s why they haven&#8217;t won the World Series in forever. The Red Sox did not fail all those years because they sold Babe Ruth.</p><p>But I&#8217;m not going to lie to you. That Sports Illustrated jinx percentage, to be perfectly honest with you, is a bit higher than I would like.</p><p>Then came Wednesday. You know the situation. Zack Greinke went into Wednesday&#8217;s game with a 0.00 ERA. He went into the game with a chance to become the first pitcher in baseball history to go seven consecutive starts without giving up an earned run. Then, right away, he gave up a double to Toronto&#8217;s leadoff hitter Marco Scutaro.</p><p>The first &#8220;JINX!&#8221; e-mail came seconds after that.</p><p>Greinke struck out Aaron Hill. He struck out Alex Rios. This is something we have seen from Greinke all year. He has been remarkable pretty much all the time, but he has been twice that good with runners in scoring position. Greinke says that last year, at some point, he started to figure out what kind of pitches he could throw to get big strikeouts. When he got ahead of Blue Jays cleanup hitter Vernon Wells no balls and two strikes, it sure looked like Greinke had his man set up.</p><p>Greinke then threw a 96-mph fastball, just to wake up Wells, remind him who he was dealing with. And he went for the kill, throwing his most devastating pitch, the strikeout pitch, the slider that starts in the strike zone and then rushes down, like a cartoon character falling down stairs. Wells has a reputation for chasing those sorts of pitches. Most hitters do. Wells held back.</p><p>Greinke&#8217;s next slider was hot and on the outside corner of the plate. Wells waited on it and ripped it to center field for a single. That scored the first earned run off Greinke since last September.