Greg Maddux has been, simply, the most successful National League pitcher of his generation, compiling a glossy statistical resume that will ensure his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame once his remarkable career ends.
He’s one of 15 pitchers with more than 300 career victories and, given the prevalence of five-man starting rotations and the increasing dependence on relief pitching, he might be the last. He has won four Cy Young awards as the National League’s best pitcher and had a record streak of 17 seasons with 15 or more victories. He has been awarded 15 Gold Gloves for fielding excellence and has struck out more than 3,000 batters.
Mere numbers, though, don’t come close to defining Maddux’s genius. In an era obsessed with power-power arms, power bats and power chemicals-the decidedly average-sized right-hander has dominated as a thinking man’s pitcher, combining uncanny movement with pinpoint control, competitive fire-to his coaches and teammates he’s “Mad Dog”-and an unmatched knowledge of his craft.
“Greg Maddux is the smartest pitcher I’ve ever been around,” says Steve Stone, the 1980 American League Cy Young Award winner who pitched in the big leagues for 11 years and has been a television analyst for more than 20.
“It’s not often that ability, work ethic and great baseball acumen show up in the same person, but that’s Greg Maddux. He’s turned pitching into an art form, and he’s stayed ahead of the game by adapting, adjusting and refining things. The result is a first-ballot Hall of Famer.”
That brilliant career showed no sign of winding down as this season began, though Maddux turned 40 on April 14 and last season’s record (13-15) and earned-run average (4.24) were his worst since 1987, prompting speculation that he was on his way out. n He had become more serious about conditioning, setting out to prove that age is just a number by getting off to the best start of his career, winning his first five starts and compiling a 1.35 ERA. “I don’t know where we’d be without him,” Cubs manager Dusty Baker said at the time. “He’s pitching like he did 10 years ago.”
Maddux’s next outings, however, were disappointing, making fans wonder whether the arrow of time is pointing up or down.
Ten years ago, Maddux was at the peak of his powers, teaming with John Smoltz and Tom Glavine in an Atlanta Braves rotation that ruled the National League. From 1992-97 he was 109-44 with a 2.14 ERA and won those four Cy Young awards in succession.
“He doesn’t throw as hard as he once did, but with the movement he has on his fastball, he doesn’t have to,” says Javy Lopez, long the Braves’ catcher and now with Baltimore. “He’s also got a tremendous curve and a great changeup.”
What he doesn’t have is the high-octane gas of contemporaries such as Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson, but there’s no rule that says a pitcher has to be intimidating to be effective.
“You don’t strike out 3,000 big league hitters by being a soft-tosser,” Stone says. “Strikeouts separate the men from the boys. Maddux (3,081 as of May 7) has about as many as Fergie Jenkins had (3,192), and Fergie was no soft-tosser.”
The perception of Maddux as a pitching intellectual, while valid, sometimes discounts his physical ability.
“He’s a great athlete,” Arizona infielder Craig Counsell says. “Sometimes pitchers are underrated as athletes, but it requires real athletic ability to control his mechanics like he does.”
Maddux, in fact, is an exceptional ballplayer who happens to be a pitcher.
“He fields his position like a shortstop, he can handle the bat and get a bunt down, he can even run the bases,” Stone says. “I’ve always considered [Yankees shortstop] Derek Jeter the most instinctual ballplayer I’ve ever seen, but I’d put Greg Maddux on that level in terms of knowing the game and understanding what he has to do to be successful.
“You see [Cubs rookie] Sean Marshall sitting talking to him in the dugout, and that’s a better education than Marshall would get in four years of college.”
In an age of “look-at-me” athletic narcissism, Maddux steadfastly adheres to such old-fashioned concepts as “team.” He has been famously reluctant to discuss his pitching-philosophy, technique or results-because he believes it’s only one part of a larger effort … and, in keeping with his subtle attention to detail, he doesn’t want opposing hitters to know what he knows about them.
But the nearly two-dozen baseball people interviewed for this Magazine package had plenty to say about Maddux, all of it offered with respect and admiration for a classy professional.
It could not have been easy being Mike Maddux, Greg’s older brother by five years. Now the Milwaukee Brewers’ pitching coach, Mike was also a big-league pitcher, but a 10th- or 11th-man type. He labored 15 seasons to collect 39 wins-or about what Greg manages in two typical seasons.
“He keeps running us up that brother-combination ladder,” Mike Maddux says, referring to the Maddux brothers’ 362 total wins as of May 7, which ranks third behind Phil and Joe Niekro’s 549 and Gaylord and Jim Perry’s 529.
Mike Maddux begrudges his younger brother nothing. “He’s an overachiever-that’s the best compliment you can give a player,” he says. “You’ve gone beyond your talent level, ability level and achieved more than you should have.
“I’m very proud to be his brother. That’s a compliment you can give me-that we’re brothers.”
MADDUX ON MADDUX
Greg Maddux is traditionally as economical with his words as he is with his pitches, but during a recent Cubs homestand he agreed to talk pitching with “Our Guy,” Out Loud author Steve Rosenbloom
Physically, you have to be able to do what you need to do-throw the ball where you need to throw it- but if you’re not there mentally, your location’s going to suffer. I think if you do everything mechanically correct, the ball’s going to go where you throw it. In order to do everything mechanically correct, you have to be mentally strong to be able to repeat that. To me, that’s where the challenge is.
“I’ve gotten tired mentally before I’ve gotten tired physically lots of times. Nobody gets that. ‘You threw seven innings and you were pitching good, but you came out.’ Well, mentally I was done. Physically I was fine, but mentally I was tired.”
“There are always things you do where you try to improve mentally. Basically it’s, ‘How do I improve my concentration?’ What you’re looking for is, ‘How do I stay focused for 85 of my 90 pitches?’ and then next game I need to get to 88 out of my 90 pitches. I think you go out and practice it enough and do it enough to where after the game, you have to recognize the pitches that you threw where you weren’t mentally there before you threw them. Maybe that will eliminate one more pitch next time out. You just have to be disciplined enough to want to do it.”
“I like watching Glavine (1) pitch because he’s very consistent. The consistency with the way he pitches is amazing. You don’t really appreciate him throwing one game, but you appreciate him throwing 10. Smoltzie (2), on the other hand, you think he might throw a no-hitter every time he goes out there.”
“The guys who pitch for the Brewers like Ohka (3) and Bush (4), I like watching guys like that, guys who have to locate their fastball, change speeds, throw two kinds of fastballs, a cutter and sinker.”
“The biggest mistake young pitchers make, to me, is beating yourself. You have to make the other team beat you. If I put myself in position to have success and I get whacked off the field, I’m OK with that. But when I beat myself is when I have problems.”
“I’m easy on myself. You just try to throw the ball where you need to throw it and hope you get the result you’re looking for. I give myself a little room. I do what I can to enjoy it, but at the same time I like to think I have enough respect for myself and the game to try to do it right every time I go out there.”
[MEMORABLE MOMENTS]:“My first day is one of them. First World Series game. Pitching against my brother (5). Sliding, because it’s something you never get to do as a pitcher. Hitting a home run is up there. There are lots of moments. To me, the moments are between pitches and saying something funny to your infielders or having them say something funny to you.”
“There’s a different atmosphere, a different tone, vibe, buzz playing a game at Wrigley. Yankee Stadium had that. We had it in Atlanta at one time. But it never goes away here. When you play 162 games and you’re able to play half of them here, that’s something special.”
“You’re playing a game. You never have to get a real job. Seriously. You’re being overpaid and underworked. Who wouldn’t want that? It’s 100 times easier to play this game when you’re winning, no question, but when you’re working, you’re doing something that you love. It doesn’t get any better than that. Very few people have the luxury of saying that. It’s a privilege and an honor to be able to do that.”
1 – Former Atlanta teammate Tom Glavine. 2 – Former Atlanta teammate John Smoltz. 3 – Milwaukee’s Tomo Ohka. 4 – Milwaukee right-hander Dave Bush. 5 – Former major-leaguer Mike Maddux, now the Brewers’ pitching coach.
THE EARLY YEARS
Jim Colborn, a former Cubs pitcher and a 20-game winner for the 1973 Milwaukee Brewers, was the Cubs’ minor league pitching instructor when Maddux signed with the team as a second-round draft choice in 1984. The slightly built right-hander might have looked like the team accountant, but his talent and tenacity made a lasting impression on Colborn, now the Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitching coach.
“Some of my criteria for judging a player’s potential for future success still come from Greg Maddux,” Colborn says, citing his “aptitude and fearlessness.”
Aptitude, he explains, “is how quickly you learn mechanical skills and recognize when to apply them.” Maddux’s mastery of the changeup, an off-speed offering that is still one of his signature pitches, is a good example of his aptitude, Colborn says.
“We started working with it, and it normally takes several weeks, four to five starts, for a pitcher to feel comfortable throwing it,” Colborn recalls. “In his next start, maybe one day later, Greg threw about 25 changeups. I think 21 were for strikes, and he struck out 11. We figured it was going to be a pretty good pitch for him.”
As for Maddux’s fearlessness, Colborn saw all he needed to see in Maddux’s first major league start in September 1986.
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“The Cubs were playing the Reds at Riverfront Stadium and I went along,” he says. “The Reds weren’t just a good club, they were a big club-they had Dave Parker and a couple of others whose biceps were bigger than Greg’s thigh. I was trying to keep him calm, and I said to him, ‘Remember, Greg, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you look in your uniform.’
“He goes out, gets through the heart of the order with no problem the first time and comes back and sits next to me in dugout. ‘Colby,’ he says, ‘how do I look in my uniform?’ “
Mike Maddux, five years Greg’s senior, says he and his brother were well-schooled in baseball fundamentals by their father, Dave, a career Air Force man who’d grown up playing fast-pitch softball in Indiana.
“We were probably the only 8- and 10-year-old kids who could bunt and drag bunt and hit behind the runner and things like that,” Mike recalls.
They settled in Las Vegas as teenagers, where they came under the influence of the late Ralph Medar, a retired scout with a particular affinity for pitching. Medar sold the Maddux brothers on the value of changing speeds and convinced them that movement and location were more important than velocity.
“He was an old retired guy who loved the game of baseball and liked being around kids with passion,” Mike Maddux says. “We’d scrimmage on the weekends, and once or twice a week you’d throw a bullpen session for him. I think my father took us as far as he could, and then, God bless him, Ralph Medar was there to take us to the next level.”
When did Mike realize his little brother might have special talent?
“Probably when he was 15. I’d come home from college and he’d come along to work out with us, and he’d be holding his own against 20-year-olds. He had the talent and the determination to do that.”
The Cubs’ media guide and the Baseball Encyclopedia list Greg Maddux at 6 feet, 180 pounds. Colborn says he weighed no more than 160 when the Cubs drafted him out of Las Vegas’ Valley High School.
Veteran scout Bill Harford was the Cubs’ assistant farm director then and he recalls the 160-pound estimate as generous. “He weighed about 145 pounds, but we thought we had something special. He knew how to pitch, how to set hitters up. Eighteen years old and 145 pounds, but once he took the mound he was light years ahead of the hitters.”
So far ahead of them that Sox broadcaster Darrin Jackson, an Instructional League teammate in ’84, recalls thinking “I don’t even need a glove” to play center field with Maddux pitching.
“That was my first impression of Greg Maddux,” Jackson says. “This kid who looked like he should be in a middle-school lunchroom was shattering bat after bat, making Double-A and Triple-A hitters look like they had no chance. I think he kind of liked being that underdog: ‘Yeah, I’m little, but I can get you out.’ “
MADDUX IN ATLANTA
Every time Greg took the mound I felt like we were definitely going to win the game. Every single time,” says Bobby Cox, Maddux’s manager with the Atlanta Braves for 11 seasons.
Leo Mazzone, now the Baltimore Orioles’ pitching coach, was Atlanta’s pitching coach during the same time frame. Maddux, he says, “had the greatest control of any pitcher I’ve seen in my life. The greatest command. He could put a fastball where he wanted any time, any place, on any count.
“You can flip a coin between him and [Roger] Clemens for the greatest pitchers of our lifetime,” Mazzone says.
Maddux joined Tom Glavine and John Smoltz in a Braves rotation that ranks as one of baseball’s most effective ever. They were a combined 453-224 in the 10 seasons they pitched together, a .669 winning percentage.
“Greg was a truly unselfish teammate,” Smoltz says. “He was a big part of my Cy Young year (1996). He told me when you’re going good, remember what you’re doing right. Because when it goes bad, those are exactly the things you start doing wrong.”
“He’s a one-of-a-kind guy,” Cox says. “He has a true love for the game, a level of admiration for the game that’s unusual. He has fun every single day. When he’s not pitching, he’s taking ground balls. He’s doing something.”
HITTERS ON MADDUX
A hitter who goes hitless in a ballgame is said to have “worn the collar,” and Greg Maddux has been fitting hitters with comfortable collars throughout his career. He doesn’t overpower them in the intimidating manner of Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson. He just gets them out.
“He does the little things he’s been doing his whole career,” Dodgers outfielder J.D. Drew says. “He mixes his pitches up, stays in the strike zone and never leaves it over the middle of the plate. And he doesn’t give up walks, so you know you have to be aggressive.”
Drew is 3-for-15 lifetime against Maddux. He hits left-handed, but that doesn’t seem to be an advantage against the right-handed Maddux, largely because of a pitch Cubs broadcaster Bob Brenly describes as an “off-the-body change-up”-a pitch that seems headed for a left-handed hitter’s belt buckle, then abruptly breaks down and away from him at an angle that leaves him helpless.
“The way his ball moves, he can cut it in or sink it away from you at any time,” Drew says. “He makes it a mind game for you when you’re at the plate.”
Right-handed hitters are at a similar disadvantage.
“It’s not about blowing guys away; it’s about pitching to spots,” says Braves outfielder Brian Jordan, who has played with and against Maddux. “I knew he was never going to give me anything up, so I knew I wasn’t going to hit a home run. I’d shorten up and just try to get a base hit.
“If you go up there thinking you’re going to bomb him, you’ve got problems.”
Perhaps it’s the “comfortable collar.” More likely it’s the professionalism he brings to his craft. But hitters who are generally disdainful of pitchers express genuine admiration for Maddux.
“A guy that smart is fun to watch, but you don’t want to face him a lot,” Drew says. “You definitely realize he has a good grasp of what he’s doing. You don’t win 300 games in this league if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Jeromy Burnitz, a Pirate this year and a Maddux teammate with the Cubs in 2005, is 9-for-42 with 14 strikeouts against him.
“He has great stuff, great location on all his pitches, plus command and great knowledge of how to pitch,” Burnitz says. “That’s a pretty good starting point.”
Two of Burnitz’s hits are “long home runs, which I never get tired of reminding him about,” he says with a smile. “But over the years, he’s got me a lot more often than I’ve got him.
“He has mastered the craft as well as anybody I’ve ever been around, maybe as well as anybody in history,” Burnitz says. “I can’t say it any better than that.”
CATCHERS ON MADDUX
Joe Girardi, now the Florida Marlins’ manager, joined the Cubs as a rookie catcher in 1989, when Maddux helped pitch the team to a division title with a 19-9 record and a 2.95 earned-run average in his third full season.
“He pretty much called his own game, and I went along with him because he knew exactly what he wanted to do with every hitter,” Girardi recalls. “He was 23 years old, but I thought of him as a veteran even though I was older than he was. That’s how smart he was.”
Not much has changed in the ensuing 17 years, says Michael Barrett, who caught Maddux’s first six starts for the Cubs this season.
“We go over the hitters before the game and he knows exactly what he wants to throw in every situation,” Barrett says. “If they adjust to him, he comes up with something else. He’s fun to catch. He’s always around the plate. I feel like I’m learning a lot from trying to think with him.”
Henry Blanco has served as Maddux’s “personal catcher” in Atlanta and with the Cubs, and he feels Maddux is far from out of gas. “I think he still has a couple more years left. He has the heart to do it, and that’s what separates the guys who win a lot of games from the others.”
Javy Lopez, an Atlanta teammate who is now with the Baltimore Orioles, got a firsthand look at Maddux’s vaunted nerve in 1994, Lopez’s rookie season.
“We were playing the Giants in San Francisco, ninth inning, bases loaded, 3-2 count on Dave Martinez, tie game. He has to throw a strike or he loses the game. The pitch that makes the most sense is the fastball, but he totally shook me off. He wanted to throw a change-up. You’ve got to have a lot of guts to throw a 3-2 changeup with the bases loaded in a tie game, but he threw it and he struck Martinez out.”
Maddux is one of two surefire Hall of Famers in the current generation of pitchers, and Girardi caught both of them-he was Roger Clemens’ batterymate with the Yankees in 1999. Whereas Clemens was a pure power pitcher with overwhelming “stuff,” Maddux relies on guile, control and steely temperament.
“I’ve seen guys with comparable movement on the ball, but no one who combines movement with his command, and no one who’s been able to sustain it as long,” Girardi says.
“You can never foretell a guy winning 300 games because so much can happen. But when he won 20 games for the first time, I knew he’d do it again, and when he won his first Cy Young Award I knew he’d do that again because he has a competitive nature that matches his talent-he’s competitive in anything.”
SMARTS
Greg Maddux’s head is as responsible for his 300-plus career victories as his magical right arm.
“It’s not just talent that makes him successful,” veteran Arizona infielder Craig Counsell says. “He’s just smarter than everybody else.”
Indeed, Maddux is one of baseball’s best pitchers because he’s one of the smartest. He understands what each hitter is trying to do and reacts accordingly.
“He’s extremely well-prepared,” longtime Atlanta teammate Chipper Jones says. “He can carve up a lineup better than anybody I’ve ever seen because he’s got a game plan for each hitter he faces. The book on him is, don’t try to out-think him because you’re not going to.”
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Dick Pole, the Cubs’ bench coach, was their pitching coach when Maddux reached the big leagues in 1986, as a 20-year-old who threw “deceptively hard for a guy who weighed about 165 pounds,” Pole recalls.
“He doesn’t throw that hard now, but he still has that movement that God gave him, plus amazing control, and he’s learned to change speeds,” Pole says. “I had to laugh when the Cardinals kept asking the umpire to check the ball during his last start in St. Louis. I’ve known Greg for 20 years, and he doesn’t cheat. With his movement, and the way he controls it, he doesn’t need to.”
Ned Yost, a longtime coach with the Braves before taking over as Milwaukee Brewers manager, says Maddux has a kind of voodoo. “He can get in a batter’s head,” Yost says. “You’ve got to forget it’s Greg Maddux out there.”
Cubs rookie Sean Marshall makes it a point to sit next to Maddux in the dugout during games. “He’s great at pointing me in the right direction on things like preparation,” Marshall says. “He’s a great guy all around, and a great resource as a pitcher.”
Says Pole of Maddux: “He’s just a special guy. If I knew what it was that he had, I’d bottle it and give it to all the others.”
HOW TO BEAT HIM
Odd, wasn’t it, that the Arizona Diamondbacks-77-85 last season, 51-111 in 2004-were the first team to beat Greg Maddux after he had opened the 2006 season by going 5-0 for the first time in his career?
Nope. Maddux was an inexplicable 1-9 lifetime against Arizona after the Diamondbacks’ 6-1 victory on May 3. They’re the only National League team with a winning record against him.
“Just don’t pitch well here,” Maddux said after his record at Phoenix’s Chase Field (formerly Bank One Ballpark) sagged to 0-5.
With Cubs TV analyst Bob Brenly as their manager from 2001 through July of 2004, the Diamondbacks were 5-1 against Maddux.
“We just made up our minds that we were going to attack him, run on him at every opportunity, even if it was the pitcher on base,” Brenly recalls. “The one thing he doesn’t do well-the only thing, really-is hold runners on, so you should get a decent jump. And you know he’s going to throw a lot of ground balls, so you might as well increase your chances of those ground balls finding some holes.”
Brenly says he urged D-backs hitters to be aggressive against Maddux and take a whack at the first good pitch they saw. “Otherwise it’s 0-and-2 and then he’s really got you,” he says.
Among current players, Milwaukee outfielder Geoff Jenkins is uncommonly successful against Maddux with 18 hits in 41 at-bats, a .439 average. Jenkins, a left-handed hitter, can’t explain why his average against a Hall of Fame pitcher is 158 points higher than his overall career average (.281).
“You know what he does. Everybody knows what he does-he changes speeds, moves the ball around, throws that little cutter,” Jenkins says. “He gets guys to hit the ball on the ground, and at Wrigley Field it’s not going anywhere with that grass.
“You try to be patient and get a pitch to hit. If you get one, you’d better not miss it because you’re not going to get another one.”