SCOTTSDALE, AZ. -- Here’s where you can find the newest $126 million dollar pitcher in baseball: on a Tuesday morning in Scottsdale, on a secondary field sequestered from the position players, Barry Zito ran from foul pole to foul pole with not a camera in sight and not a fan in attendance. As it turns out, all the money in baseball can’t buy you a work ethic. It either came with the deal or it didn’t.

Zito arrived with a new windup and promptly dismissed it, but the story that he changed his mechanics didn’t make nearly as much news as the story that he went back to his old windup a few days later. The Giants couldn’t have been thrilled to learn that their new ace was ignoring pitching coach Dave Righetti (teams love nothing more when players change things and don’t tell them), nor could it seem comforting to think that there could be a divide between pitching coach and ace. Righetti couldn’t understand why Zito would change anything, but perhaps he underestimated a personality trait of his new pitcher. Zito likes to fiddle, likes to tweak, sometimes thinks too much and too often, but it is never out of the desire for anything less than to challenge himself. That initiative shows as much effort as running in spring training solitude. You don’t do it only because it’s part of the job. You do it to get better. Baseball becomes incidental to the process.

His arrival with the Giants is also a study of contrast in baseball thought process itself: do you prefer the younger, curveball-tossing Zito to the older, hard-throwing right-hander Jason Schmidt? The Giants believed so, thinking it was advantageous to have a pair of left-handed starters in Zito and Noah Lowry at wind-driven Pac Bell Park, the park where hanging an off-speed pitch means it has a much greater chance to slowing when it reaches the warning track.

Thus, inserting Zito into its rotation with change-up specialist Lowry makes sense on several levels. They view Matt Cain as their younger replacement model for Schmidt, and have veteran right-hander Matt Morris and emergency spare Russ Ortiz to bridge the gap until right-handed power arm Tim Linecum is ready. The purchase of Zito is about more than this year, but for a five-year plan, and you must credit Scott Boras for reading into General Manager Brian Sabean’s orchestrations to engineer the seven-year deal Zito wanted.

Yet the money a team invests on a player is only worth as much as a player invests in himself. The returns have to begin coming from within first.

There are many caricatures of Zito presented in the media: from free-thinking liberal, to humorous extrovert. All of this likely falls somewhere between truth and exaggeration, but what you can’t take away from Zito is the work ethic that drives him not simply to settle for being one of the best pitchers of his time, but one of the best pitchers of all-time. There’s a reason he keeps a baseball signed by Sandy Koufax in his locker, a reminder of his own expectations. It’s a dangerous line to walk, for if anyone in almost any line of work dares boldly to declare that they wish to be one of the best who ever lived at their given skill, they are immediately opened up to second guessing at best and disdain at worst.

What remains is the work that is done alone, far away from the public, the effort put forth in the trade of a professional. If ever you dare fall into the trap to think that every single player works as hard as any other guy in the major leagues, it would be a mistake. There are those with ordinary skill and extraordinary work ethic; and there are players with superior abilities who put forth inferior effort. True, someone is always chasing a player for his job, but at some point, the only person a player must chase is himself.

And here is Zito, chasing his own expectations, from pole to pole. No matter what happens over the duration of his career with the Giants, they can be as confidant as an organization possibly can be after having made a $126 million dollar investment. A left-hander who can throw a curveball can name his price. A left-hander who wants to achieve beyond what the contract says can also name his price, but this time, he’s wagering against himself alone.