JUPITER, Fla. • It wasn’t the elevated anxiety on the mound, the touch-and-go command, or even the jostled focus that finally assured Conner Greene something was amiss for him this past season. A few phone calls with his father did. Their brevity was unnerving.
Here was the man who raised him to be a ballplayer, who took him to a park at 3 days old and held him as he chopped grounders to an older brother, and whom he relished talking to, at length, always. Greene called him “like my best friend in life,” and suddenly he was sharp and short with him, bristling in ways he never did.