Mad Dog and Glory

My favorite pitcher of all-time, Greg Maddux, has retired.

The guy they call “Mad Dog” (for no good reason except that his last name sounds like “mad dog”) is the greatest pitcher of his generation. He ends his career with more wins than anyone alive (355), and he’s second only to the great Warren Spahn in wins by pitchers after the “dead ball” era. He won 15 or more games 17 years in a row, better than even Cy Young. He’s 10th among all-time strikeout leaders despite never being known as a strikeout pitcher.

He won four straight Cy Young awards (1992-1995), right in the heart of what is now being recognized as the “steroid” era in baseball. And in two of those years, 1994 and 1995, he had ERAs below 1.65, numbers bested only by Dwight Gooden over the last 40 years. And Maddux, standing six feet tall and weighing 170 pounds, has seemed to escape any suspicion at all of using performance enhancers– in fact, the idea seems laughable.

If Roger Clemens was a car bomb, Greg Maddux was a computer virus. There was nothing loud or overtly destructive about what he did, he wasn’t going to grab highlights by striking out 20 batters in a game or completely overpowering the other team. No, Maddux worked his way into your system and shut you down. Froze you out. While some batters feigned sickness to avoid playing on days when Nolan Ryan pitched, it seems unlikely that Greg Maddux struck anything like “fear” into the hearts of the opposition. I would guess that it was something more like serious, serious irritation. And then, once the game started, paralysis.

Maddux must have looked eminently hittable to anyone walking to the plate. His fastball was generally in the high-80s to low-90s, and he hardly ever walked a soul, so you knew you were going to get something to hit. But while a misplaced fireball from Randy Johnson could be sent out of the park in a hurry, Maddux offered nothing like that. He moved the ball, inside, outside, he varied his speeds, adding a few extra miles per hour here, taking a little off it there. You might have thought you knew what was coming, you even might have known what was coming, but you didn’t know what was coming.

Imagine, you’re a batter, you step to the plate against this guy who looks like a schoolteacher or an accountant. You take strike one (always strike one), you probably take strike two, and then he throws a fat one. Just serves it right up. You swing for the fences, ready to send the ball into the next county… and you ground out to second base. Or hit a lazy fly to center-left. You walk back to the dugout shaking your head.

Because, you see, Greg Maddux was also a mind-reader and a body-snatcher. He knew what you were going to do before you did it, and then, even more importantly, he took control and made you do it. He knew exactly where every single batter’s weak spot was, and he exploited it. I remember regularly turning on Baseball Tonight and seeing that Maddux had pitched another eight or nine innings and thrown 80, 85 pitches for the whole game. His goal was for you to hit the ball. His teammates always seemed to be in exactly the right place on defense because he threw the ball so you would hit it to exactly the right place. You have a tendency to ground out by swinging at a ball three inches outside just below the knees? That’s where it’s going. You like to fly out to center on a ball high? Enjoy. Maddux’s control was near-perfect, his ability to change speeds was unmatched, and he knew even better than you did what to do to get you out. (I remember being crushed as I watched his streak of 72 1/3 innings without a walk come to an end… with an intentional walk.)

But there’s also a reason he’s #10 on the all-time strikeout list. Some players like to take a pitch or two before really getting after it, but against Maddux this was deadly. To take two pitches generally meant to take two strikes. And at that point, all you can do is foul pitches off, hit the ball wherever Maddux wants you to, or watch another pitch go by. You have no control, because Maddux has the ability to do whatever he wants. He’s not going to make a mistake. If you’re not a fan, this next bit is hard to describe, but if you are, you’re used to seeing any number of pitchers throw a fastball that looks like it’s going to end up a few inches outside, but right at the end it breaks back over the plate for a strike. This is so common now that it doesn’t fool a ton of hitters, even if it’s effective. They throw this pitch because of Greg Maddux. He may not have invented it (he may have, too, but baseball has been around long enough that I really doubt it), but he absolutely perfected it. How does it look if you’re a hitter and you see a fastball coming that’s obviously going to be outside? You’re not going to swing at that. But now how does it look when that ball is all of a sudden on the outside corner of the plate and you’re heading back to the dugout? And swinging at the pitch was essentially useless because, again, you’re just going to force the fans to enjoy another routine groundout to the right side.

I don’t remember anyone in baseball being more effective at rendering the other team impotent and frustrated. And who can hit when they’re frustrated? It ends up creating this feedback loop where the batter tries harder the more frustrated he is, which leads to mistakes and outs, which leads to more frustration. Struggling against a boa constrictor will get you nowhere but eaten.

I once heard a young pitcher talking about advice Maddux gave him in a pressure-packed situation. He said, the higher the stakes, the more intense the circumstances, the softer you throw. At a tense moment in the game, the batter is going to be juiced and looking to hit the ball. Hard. Most pitchers will try to overpower him, to blow him away. Instead, take the air out of the place.

No matter how much the other guy wants to hit the ball, if you throw him a wad of wet paper it’s not going to go very far.

Greg Maddux will, obviously, be a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer. By all rights, he should be a unanimous first-balloter, although there’s this strange cabal of sportswriters who refuse to vote anyone in on the first ballot on the grounds that “not even Babe Ruth was voted in unanimously.” Whatever. All that means is that they’ll have to live with the shame that they didn’t vote for Greg Maddux for the Hall of Fame.

Bye-bye, Mad Dog.