<table> </table> A Zack Greinke story: This happened in Chicago one warm August evening after he gave up three home runs to the Chicago White Sox. A handful of reporters surrounded him as he stared at the ceiling and gave reluctant and halting answers to their questions.</p><p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; one reporter said, in an apparent effort to make Greinke feel better. &#8220;The White Sox do lead the major leagues in home runs.&#8221;</p><p>Greinke looked at the reporter with the strangest look in his eyes. He seemed entirely unsure what to do with this new piece of information.</p><p>And then, without a touch of sarcasm in his voice, he said: &#8220;Well, good for them.&#8221;</p><p>&#8226; &#8226; &#8226;</p><p>My baseball love affair with Kansas City Royals pitcher Zack Greinke began in Chicago in 2003, about a year before the above story. He was only 19. It was the first time I saw him pitch in a game, though by then his legend was already spreading. Scouts talked about this pitching Mozart who invented new pitches and tried crazy pitching patterns and toyed with minor-league hitters. He pitched with other-worldly control &#8212; Greinke had walked just 13 batters in his first 15 games that year.</p><p>That day, he was pitching in the Futures Game &#8212; a game that featured the best prospects in all of baseball. Grady Sizemore was in the lineup that day; so were Joe Mauer and Robinson Cano and Kevin Youkilis. But the pitchers stood out: Rich Harden and Edwin Jackson and Gavin Floyd and Denny Bautista and others all threw so hard, so impossibly hard, the radar gun was like a thermometer that day, it kept going off at 98, 99, 100 mph.</p><p>Then Greinke walked out there, and he looked to be all of 12 years old. His cap looked too big for his head; the bill stretched out too far, like he was Charlie Brown. And unlike the others, he did not light up the radar gun. More than that, he purposely did not light up the radar gun. He wanted to get hitters out his own way, with slow curves and cunning little sliders and fastballs that tightroped the outside corner. He pitched one perfect inning with two strikeouts, and his fastball never topped 92 mph.</p><p>And when it ended, I asked his catcher, a young Joe Mauer, what he thought.</p><p>He said: &#8220;Wherever I put the glove, he hit it. He was definitely different.&#8221;</p><p>Then I went to talk to Zack Greinke. Well, he <em>was </em>different. I asked him if he had felt any nerves out there &#8212; the standard Futures Game question &#8212; and he gave me the strangest answer. He said he definitely felt something, but he did not think the feeling was nervousness. He did not know what the feeling was, but no, the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that he wasn&#8217;t nervous.</p><p>&#8220;Um, so, why were you so good?&#8221; I asked, or something like that.</p><p>&#8220;It was just kind of crazy,&#8221; Greinke said. &#8220;I mean, I don&#8217;t know how, but it&#8217;s like everything I threw just kept going over the plate, you know? And it didn&#8217;t just go over the plate, but it went over the corners. It was crazy.&#8221;</p><p>As I walked away, I did not know if Zack Greinke was a genius or a flake. Here it is, more than five years later, and I still don&#8217;t know.</p><p>&#8226; &#8226; &#8226;</p><p>A Zack Greinke story: At the end of his first full minor-league season, Greinke and several of the Royals&#8217; best prospects were invited to take a tour of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. At some point, Greinke broke away from the pack, and he seemed especially moved by the story of these players who had been denied the chance to play in the Major Leagues because of their skin color.