Some believed it was his luck running out — he did have a minute .229 BABIP in 2015, after all — but Greinke put their claims to bed and turned his season around. Since that poor outing in Arizona, he has returned to excellence in his last 10 outings to the tune of a 2.41 ERA, 0.97 WHIP and a fantastic 8-1 record. How did Greinke save himself from the dreaded “bust” label?

There are plenty of mechanical adjustments pitchers can make: changing their leg kick, altering their stride length, shortening their arm circle, etc. Greinke made a tweak that can be difficult to detect by the naked eye, but it has made a massive difference to the batters facing him.

Since the start of the season, Greinke has been slowly shifting his horizontal release point on all of his pitches in each of his games:

Over the entire season, Greinke has pulled his arm farther away from his head gradually, changing the perspective of hitters trying to get a look at the ball in his hand. To reinforce the dramatic shift across the season, here’s a chart of Greinke’s release points from all his pitches during his Opening Day start. Notice how these pitches are cluttered, but spread out a bit where you distinctly can see a release point for his fastball and a slightly adjusted spot for his change-up.

Now here are his release points from his most recent start against the Phillies. Not only has he shifted a full inch toward third base, but he’s also replicating the same release point for nearly all of his pitches, making it difficult for hitters to distinguish what pitch is being thrown until the ball is well out of Greinke’s hand. Additionally, a more consistent release point allows Greinke to command his pitches better, as repeating the same delivery makes it easier to adjust elsewhere on the fly.

This adjustment may seem minor, but there has been a clear improvement of his command since the beginning of the season. Take a look at this strike-zone plot of Greinke’s first five games of the season. Greinke was keeping the ball down in the zone, though he wasn’t nibbling along the edges often, and threw a good amount of pitches down the heart of the plate.

In the 10 games following his seven-earned-run blowup against St. Louis, however, Greinke has been spotting his pitches much better. Not only are fewer pitches finding their way into the middle of the zone, Greinke has been able to effectively hit both corners of the plate, and has begun to command his pitches consistently down and glove-side.

It’s one of Greinke’s favorite pitches, and we’ve seen him time and again locate a slider or changeup in this very spot to get easy whiffs from left-handers and right-handers alike:

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