Zack Greinke is not excited about opening the season in Australia

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If there’s one thing we can always count on, it’s a good (and honest) quote from Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Zack Greinke. No matter what the topic of the day is — even a former teammate like Ryan Braun — he’s never afraid to speak his mind and lay out a thought we can have some fun with.
On Saturday, Greinke delivered another of these quotes while discussing the Dodgers season opening series against the Arizona Diamondbacks on March 22 and 23. The location of said series will be the Sydney Cricket Ground in Australia. And even though Greinke is tentatively scheduled to start one of those two historic games, he's finding it difficult to get excited about the trip.

“I would say there is absolutely zero excitement for it," Greinke told ESPN Los Angeles.
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Very difficult.

"There just isn’t any excitement to it."
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It's not even an option.

"I can’t think of one reason to be excited for it.”
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That's one Greinke response broken down into its three sentences.
The first sentence pretty much said it all. That Greinke immediately followed up with two more sentences saying the exact same thing probably means he doesn't plan on changing his mind in the next four weeks.
And really, it's not difficult to understand why he's annoyed. In order to make the scheduling work, the Dodgers (and D-Backs) had to report to camp one week before everyone else. They'll also have to break camp on March 16 and travel to Australia, meaning they'll miss out on nearly two weeks of spring training games and structured preparation time. That hurts pitchers more than anyone, as they typically need a full spring to stretch out and prepare for 30-plus starts, and Greinke is one pitcher who doesn't like his routine being altered.
It's basically a two-week inconvenience, but few players would go out of their way to state the inconvenience and reiterate it over and over again. But hey, that's what makes Zack Greinke interesting.
On another note, it's not like Greinke is completely blind to the purpose of the event. He knows it's designed to help get baseball on the map in the land down under.

"It's a baseball thing. It's an ownership thing, spreading stuff around," Greinke said. "That's what it's for and it's for the greater good of baseball."
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(But man, that's a ridiculously long one-way flight.)
He actually didn't add that quote about the flight, but I'm pretty sure he wanted to.

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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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