An appreciation of Maddux's career
Posted: Monday, December 08, 2008 8:01 PM
Greg Maddux used to annoy the hell out of me. This was 10 or 12 years ago when he was mystifying hitters for great Atlanta teams with an assortment of off-speed stuff and an 88 mph fastball, none of which ever got more than an inch of the plate.
It wasn’t anything personal. My unhappiness was really with the umpiring at the time. The strike zone, which had once stretched from the armpits to the knees and did not venture outside the black border of home plate had gradually grown squat and wide. It was like a letterbox strike zone that didn’t rise above the belt and extended several inches on either side of the plate.
No one was better at exploiting the phantom strike zone off the plate than Maddux. At times it seemed he went entire games without ever throwing what would have been considered an actual strike back in the good old days. I kept thinking that if you had to throw the ball in the strike zone to have it called a strike, Maddux would lose his effectiveness.
It’s time to apologize to Maddux for any doubts I had back then. In the last quarter of his career, the strike zone changed so that the outside pitches he lived on were no longer strikes. At the same time, it rose to a bit above the belt – maybe belly-button level – but it never went back up to the chest as it used to be when Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays were defining the art of hitting.
And Maddux just kept on winning. And as the victories piled up, it became obvious even to an skeptic like me that most baseball fans would be lucky to ever see a better pitcher than Greg Maddux.
There are plenty of guys who throw harder. Scores have nastier out pitches – biting sliders, sick splitters, unhittable cutters. Maddux never buckled anybody’s knees, and he rarely made hitters look overmatched. He just kept getting them out and piling up the wins.
He’s retired now, and he takes with him 355 wins, one more than Roger Clemens and more than any right-hander has won in nearly 80 years. We don’t know what sort of vitamins Maddux trained on, but no one has ever suggested that he used HGH or steroids or anything else. How could you think otherwise? Maddux never looked as if he had enough muscle to open a pickle jar, and he didn’t throw hard enough to splash water. Clemens was big and mean and pitched better as an old man than he had a decade earlier. Maddux was slim and studious and calmer than a convent. He didn’t get better as he got older, but that was only because he was as good as it was possible to be.
Nobody ever had better control. Nobody ever got so many batters to make so many comfortable outs. My one-time annoyance has long since turned into total admiration. Year in and year out, the man just kept taking the ball – he almost never missed a start – and winning ballgames. And every fan should be eternally grateful to Maddux for sticking around long enough to pass Clemens to take over eighth place on the all-time victories list. Nothing can be more annoying to Clemens than to be overtaken by a finesse pitcher who never knew what it was to blow hiters away.
Maddux won 20 games just twice, but he won four Cy Youngs and finished his career with a .610 winning percentage and a 3.16 ERA. If Nolan Ryan, who won just under 53 percent of his decisions, won at the same rate as Maddux, the Von Ryan Express would have finished with 375 wins instead of 324. If Phil Niekro had won at the same rate, he’d have retired with 361 wins instead of 318. Don Sutton would have had 354 instead of 324. Tommy John would have won 317 instead of 288 and would be in the Hall of Fame instead of just short of it.
A lot of people in the game say we’ll never see another 300-game winner after Randy Johnson likely reaches the mark this season, and that maybe 270 is the new 300 when it comes to wins. I know I won’t see anyone win 355, but I’m not sure we won’t see someone else get to 300. It won’t be sooner than 15 years from now and it will probably take even longer than that to see it done. But someone will do it.
It’s true that pitchers don’t start as many games and they lose too many decisions to inept bullpens. But 300 is attainable, even today. Maddux won at least 13 games for 20 straight seasons – a record. That’s the kind of consistency it will take for someone to get to 300. It’s asking a lot, but it’s not impossible.
Once a generation or so there is a freak who starts young, never gets injured, plays for good teams with good bullpens and gets a shot at it. Sooner or later some kid will get to 300 again. It’s inevitable even in these days when 20-game winners are as rare as snakes in Hawaii.
It’s hard to find a candidate among active pitchers. By the time he was 32, Maddux had 202 wins. Tim Hudson is the highest 32-year-old on the active list and he has just 143. Maybe the best bet is CC Sabathia, who has 117 wins at the age of 27. If he collects 160 wins over the next 10 years – an average of 16 a year -- he’ll have 277 at the age of 37. The thing that makes you think it won’t happen is Sabathia’s girth. He’s enormous now and not getting any skinnier, and that’s not a recipe for longevity.
After Sabathia, you have to go down to kids like Scott Kazmir, who has 46 wins at the age of 25. It’s a long way to 300, but if he can win 100 over a five-year stretch, then settle in at a 15-17 win pace, he has 46 wins at the age of 25. That’s good for that age these days, but Maddux had 75 wins at the same age. That’s how hard it is to do what Maddux has done. That’s how great he was.
