The Baseball 100: No. 31, Greg Maddux

Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy. 

On May 17, 1988, Greg Maddux threw 10 shutout innings at Wrigley Field against the St. Louis Cardinals. This may sound pretty typical for Maddux in his heyday — the guy threw a lot of shutout innings wherever he happened to be pitching — but at that point in his life and career, it was still a somewhat new sensation for him.

Maddux had only just turned 22. And he was coming off what can only be described as a disastrous season. In 1987, Maddux finished with the worst ERA (5.61) and highest WHIP (1.638) in the National League. He had some nice moments — a four-hit shutout in Montreal, for example — but all in all, it was so bad that the Cubs sent him back to Des Moines for a few days in the middle of the season just to get his head on straight.

He was terrific in Des Moines, but was even worse when they called him back. In the last month and half of the season, batters hit .347 against Maddux, he walked 19 batters in 27 1/3 innings and the Cubs lost all seven games he appeared in.

Then he got off to such a bad start at spring training in 1988 that he couldn’t even sleep at night. In Maddux’s mind — and this is important to know when looking at his career — the words “pitching” and “confidence” were practically synonyms. He never felt like he was throwing baseballs out there. He was throwing confidence. Each pitch in his mind was measured not so much by movement and location as by conviction.

He worked through things in spring training, and by Opening Day he did feel more positive and self-assured. He threw a three-hit shutout to kick things off in Atlanta.

“I’m just more confident out there,” he told the press after that one.

Then he went to St. Louis and pitched well again. And yet again, he felt better about himself. During the offseason, he’d gone down to pitch in Venezuela and he had worked with pitching coach Dick Pole on a more devastating curveball. He had grown to like that pitch a lot.

“Last year, if I threw 100 pitches, I’d throw five curveballs,” he said after the St. Louis game. “This year, if I throw 100 pitches, I’m throwing between 20 and 30 curveballs. I just have so much more confidence in that pitch.”

He kept going — he got a complete-game victory against the Expos.

“I feel like I can be more aggressive,” he said. “I’m more confident with all of my pitches.”

He and the Cubs beat the Giants 3-2.

“I have a lot of confidence now,” he said. “But I’m not overconfident.”

And on May 11, he pitched the best game of his life — a 10-inning, three-hit shutout against the Padres. He so blinded the Padres with his barrage of pitches and audacity that San Diego manager Larry Bowa went off: “Hopefully,” he said of his own team, “one day they’ll come out there and start hitting. They’re professional athletes and they’re paid to hit.”

Bowa’s quote, as you will see, foreshadows what would make Greg Maddux unlike any other pitcher in the history of baseball.

But finally, we get to the game that changed everything, May 17 against the Cardinals. Here’s what happened: He pitched 10 scoreless innings, just like he had against the Padres. But in this case, the Cardinals pitchers — led by John Tudor — matched him and the game was scoreless going into the 11th.

Maddux was undoubtedly spent. He’d already thrown about 150 pitches, but nobody cared about pitch counts in those days, least of all Maddux. He wanted to stay in. After getting Ozzie Smith to line out and Willie McGee to hit a harmless bouncer to first, though, he allowed a ground-ball single to Tom Brunansky, a line-drive single to Bob Horner and an infield single to Tony Peña. That loaded the bases for Luis Alicea.

The men battled back and forth until the count was full. And that’s when Maddux threw a fastball that sunk just so and prompted Alicea to ground the ball to second baseman Ryne Sandberg. “I couldn’t ask for a more routine ball,” Sandberg would say.

But it turned out the ball was not routine at all. On the way toward Sandberg, the ball hit something. What? Nobody could tell. There were no rocks out there. Sandberg thought the ball might have hit the lip where the grass and the infield dirt meet, but reporters didn’t think so. Alicea thought the ball hit a hole of some kind. Maddux thought it hit a ghost.

Whatever it hit, the ball jumped impossibly high, grasshopper style, over an outstretched Sandberg. That was a single. Two runs scored. And Maddux lost the game.

“It was like someone letting the air out of your balloon,” Maddux would say.

Now, you will ask, what is the lesson to take from that? I mean, it wasn’t Maddux’s fault, he’d gotten the groundout. It wasn’t Sandberg’s fault that the ball took an absurd and unpredictable hop. Lesson? Is there even a lesson? Maybe it’s that baseball isn’t always fair? That sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good? That sometimes, even when you get everything just right, things don’t work out? Maybe the lesson is that you shouldn’t leave a pitcher in after throwing 160 pitches?

No. There was a lesson — one only Greg Maddux could understand.

And it was this: He should have thrown his changeup that inning.

What? He knew it in his heart as he stood on the mound — the changeup was the pitch. But he heard conflicting voices in his head. What if he hung the changeup? How would he feel then? What is it that pitching coaches always say? “If you are going to get beat, get beat with your best pitch.” His best pitch was the fastball. Maddux heard all of that stuff and he didn’t throw the changeup when his instincts told him that was the pitch to throw.

Maddux left that game disgusted with himself. He’d had a brief crisis of confidence.

And he would never, ever make that mistake again.

Greg Maddux is my favorite pitcher of all time. It wasn’t a voluntary choice. I don’t have any special love for any of the teams Maddux played for. I don’t have any personal connections to Maddux. I wouldn’t even say that I am partial to pitchers of Maddux’s particular style; I’ve always preferred power pitchers.

But Maddux utterly enthralled me. I used to circle his start dates on my calendar; I never did that for another pitcher, not even Pedro Martínez in his prime, not even Dwight Gooden in 1985, not even Max Scherzer when he was throwing near no-hitters and perfect games every other start. I loved those guys and so many others, but Maddux was a breed apart for reasons that, even now, I’m not entirely sure I can put into words.

Maybe it’s this: I love baseball, and I love sleight-of-hand magic, and Maddux was the closest thing I’ve seen to a bridge between the two.

Most stories about Maddux through the years have made a big deal of how average (or below average) his stuff was, particularly his fastball. Analysts continually said his fastball topped out at 84 or 85 mph, for instance. This is no doubt exaggerated. Even in his last year in the big leagues, his slider would get into the upper-80s. At his peak, he threw in the low-90s with regularity.

But while the stories may have overstated things for effect, it is certainly true that Maddux did not work with those one or two death-defying pitches that have marked the greatest pitchers ever. Take a look at the 10 or so greatest pitchers since 1950 — we’ll list them in order of WAR:

1. Roger Clemens: High-90s fastball, death-defying split-fingered fastball
2. Tom Seaver: Rising high-90s fastball that leaped over bats
3. Maddux
4. Randy Johnson: High-90s fastball and one of the greatest sliders in baseball history
5. Phil Niekro: A knuckleball that danced
6. Bert Blyleven: One of the greatest curveballs in baseball history
7. Gaylord Perry: His daughter called it a hard slider
8. Pedro Martínez: High-90s fastball and a change-up that would break your heart
9. Steve Carlton: High-90s fastball and one of the greatest sliders in baseball history
10. Nolan Ryan: 100-mph fastball, optical illusion curveball

If you want to add Sandy Koufax, you think high-90s fastball and back-breaking curve. If you want to add Bob Gibson, you think high-90s fastball and a slider that buckled the senses. You don’t want to oversimplify things — these pitchers were not great simply because of one or two sensational pitches. But they had them.

And Maddux? He never had a pitch that you would rank among the greatest of all time — if you were ranking the top 20 or top 50 fastballs or sliders or curveballs or change-ups, you probably wouldn’t put Maddux on any of those lists.

But this was part of the magic — he wasn’t trying to make any of those lists. He didn’t measure his fastball with velocity or his circle-change with deception or his curveball with the sharpness of the break. No, everything Maddux threw was defined by two words: Late movement. 

“The last 10 feet,” he says. “That’s what worked for me. It was not so much the whole 60 feet, 6 inches. It was what the ball did in the last 10 feet that mattered. And if your ball’s doing something in that last 10 feet, that can be just as impressive as how fast it goes over 60 feet.”

One of the greatest sporting events I’ve ever covered was Maddux’s absurd eight scoreless innings against the New York Yankees in Game 2 of the 1996 World Series. Yes, the Yankees ended up winning that series — they touched up Maddux for three runs in Game 6 to win it all — but there was something extraordinary about that earlier game. Maddux was a maestro — 82 pitches, 62 strikes, two strikeouts, no walks, a ground-ball symphony.

1st inning: Two groundouts and one lineout to left
2nd inning: Three groundouts
3rd inning: Two groundouts and a caught stealing
4th inning: Two groundouts and one infield lineout
5th inning: Three groundouts
6th inning: Two groundouts, one a double play
7th inning: One groundout, two strikeouts
8th inning: Three groundouts

It was incredible to see but what I remember most was the Yankees clubhouse after the game. They were not awed by what had just happened like players I’ve seen after getting shut down by Martínez or Roy Halladay or Clayton Kershaw. No, quite the opposite: They were mad. Player after player talked about how they should have crushed Maddux. The pitches were right there! The chances were right there! Yes, Maddux is good but really they just beat themselves.

“The pitches were nothing special,” Bernie Williams insisted.

“You feel so comfortable against him,” Joe Girardi said.

“It looks so easy,” Paul O’Neill said.

“The ball was there for us,” Williams said. “The ball was there for us!”

Understand, it wasn’t disrespect — they all respected Maddux. It was more like they had the reaction people have when they see a particularly awe-inspiring magic trick. You will see people wandering out of a David Copperfield show in Las Vegas, and they are a little bit dazed, a little bit confused, a little bit angry at themselves that they couldn’t quite figure out how that car appeared or how he knew the exact numbers that people in the audience would choose.

“The Gibsons, the Koufaxes and Drysdales did it with power and intimidation,” a befuddled Yankees manager Joe Torre said. “He does it with (pause, think, pause) a lot of finesse.”

“Finesse” is just not a word you often hear to describe mythical beasts like Maddux.

How did he do it? From 1992-1998, seven seasons, Maddux went 127-53 with a 2.15 ERA, he won four consecutive Cy Young Awards, he led the league in ERA four times, in WHIP four times, in Fielding Independent Pitching four times, in fewest homers per nine four times, in fewest walks per nine three times, in strikeout-to-walk ratio three times … it’s like he ascended the mountaintop and became a pitching flash of light as he connected with the universe.

OK, let’s get to the legends. I mean, obviously, this is a big reason I loved the guy, a big reason you loved the guy — his entire career overflows with these legendary stories that are particularly his. You tell a legendary story about Ryan and it will involve speed and force. You tell a legendary story about Gibson, and it will involve violence or the threat of it. You tell a legendary story about Koufax, and it will involve a game, surely a World Series game, when he was utterly invincible.

But Maddux legends? They’re a whole other thing.

There is a legend that once Maddux was sitting in the dugout watching the game closely. And then, suddenly, he turned to a teammate sitting next to him and said, “Watch out.” The next pitch was lined foul directly at the teammate’s head, and he ducked out of the way just in time.

There is a legend that in 2006, his Dodgers teammate Brad Penny, who was coming off a game where he got badly roughed up by the Mets, asked Maddux if he would call the pitches for him from the dugout the next time out. Maddux did. The game was against the Cubs. Penny threw seven shutout innings, striking out six and walking nobody.

There is a legend that, while watching José Hernández batting, Maddux noticed a slight shift in the batting stance. “We might have to call an ambulance for their first base coach,” he told a teammate. The next pitch, blam, a line drive smashed into the chest of Dodgers first base coach John Shelby.

There is a legend that once, when asked to intentionally walk a batter, Maddux told manager Bobby Cox, “Why would I do that?” He then explained that he would throw three pitches, and on the third one, he would get the batter to hit a pop-foul to third.

Do I even need to tell you what happened?

There’s a legend that once when he was with the Cubs, Maddux just started screaming at Atlanta’s David Justice for no apparent reason. After Justice struck out, he was enraged. He never forgot it. Later, when they were teammates, Justice asked Maddux why he did that. “Why do you think?” Maddux said. “To get in your head. And it worked.”

There’s a legend — my favorite legend, not least because it’s definitely true — that after he won his 17th Gold Glove, breaking Jim Kaat’s record, he got a congratulatory message from Kaat. But, Kaat pointed out that he still held the record for oldest modern pitcher to ever steal a base. Kaat was 41 in 1980 when he swiped a base against the Pirates.

In July that year, when playing for the Padres against the Braves, Maddux knocked a single off Charlie Morton and then, yep, stole second base. He was 42 years old.

I mean, I have no idea how Maddux isn’t everybody’s favorite pitcher ever.

Do I even need to tell you what a thrill it is to sit down with Greg Maddux and talk pitching? I did this not too long ago while writing the movie “Generations of the Game,” which plays multiple times daily at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

“My favorite part of pitching,” Maddux said, “well, there are lots of favorite parts, really. The best part of pitching was that you got to hit and, if you got a hit, well, that was the best part. But for the most part, for pitching, I think my favorite part was being able to sit in the video room and figure out how to steal a strike.”

Stealing strikes. It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. I’m not sure if Maddux invented it or if he simply took it to a different level from anyone before him. But it perfectly suited Maddux’s personality. You remember the glasses. You remember that people called him The Professor. In addition, Maddux lives in Las Vegas, and he thinks like a gambler. His father Dave — after a career in the Air Force — became a poker dealer and Greg himself is reputedly someone you wouldn’t want to see at your poker table.

So, yes, stealing strikes sounds exactly like a Maddux thing.

“It comes down to understanding the game,” he said. “Understanding the situations of the game. There are several times every game where the hitter will just give you a strike. And as a pitcher, strikes are incredibly valuable.”

So what does it mean to steal a strike? Maddux gives an example: Let’s say he faces a batter early in the game and gets him out on the first pitch. He files all that information away. And the next time that batter comes up, Maddux would know that the hitter almost certainly will take the first pitch. So, fastball, over the plate, and that’s a stolen strike.

And it would matter a lot. That would make the count 0-1 and do you know what batters hit against Maddux in their careers when behind 0-1? Right: .215/.242/.302.

“Most hitters will take that strike,” Maddux said. “Some don’t. You take that chance.”

Another example: Let’s say Maddux started a hitter off with a ball. He didn’t do that much, particularly in his prime. For instance, in 1995, he started off hitters with strikes more than 63 percent of the time. But on those times when he fell behind in the count 1-0, he often knew that the hitter would be looking middle-in. “I know,” he would say, “that he’s not going to swing at a breaking ball for the first strike. So, I throw a breaking ball for a strike on the outside half, he’s not swinging, I’ve evened up the count.

“To me, that was what I got the biggest kick out of — being prepared to maybe steal four or five pitches a game. I always felt like you can’t win the game on seven or eight pitches, but you sure can lose it. So I was always looking to eliminate as many of those pitches as I could.”

This is second-level stuff, right? I mean, you start thinking about the number of pitches you throw in a game and work backward to eliminate the small handful of pitches that end up beating you … mind-blowing. The magician Teller offered one of my favorite magic quotes to Esquire’s Chris Jones when he said: “Sometimes magic is just spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Maddux’s magic, at least part of it, came from thinking about pitching at such depths that it went beyond what even hitters might reasonably expect.

“What’s interesting,” Maddux said, “is that it seems like the better the hitter, the easier it is to get them to take a strike. It’s the guys that kind of go up there and kind of just see the ball and react, it’s a little tougher to steal a strike off those guys.”

He smiled: “You get them out in a different way.”

If we are going to talk about stealing pitches, we do need to talk about the Maddux strike zone. If you go back and look at Greg Maddux clips on YouTube — and by all means, you should do that right now because it’s really fun — you will see a whole lot of called strikes that are not, by today’s baseball definition, actually strikes. Many of these are pitches are not even all that close — they are two, three, four inches off the plate, sometimes more.

Even in his time, Maddux — along with his Hall of Fame teammate Tom Glavine — was pretty famous for getting pitches off the plate. After that Yankees World Series game, for instance, Joe Torre said, “he gets a lot of calls,” though he quickly added, “and he deserves to get them.”

Did he “deserve” to get them? What does that even mean? Why would Maddux deserve to get strike calls that other pitchers do not get?

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I went to see a show featuring a hypnotist. The hypnotist called a dozen or so people up on the stage, including a friend of mine, and then proceeded to hypnotize them and have them do various absurd but harmless things — act like a chicken, sing a song out loud, etc. My friend, who was normally shy and reserved, did these things as enthusiastically as everyone else. It was quite funny.

When he came down, I asked him how it felt to be hypnotized. And he said that he wasn’t. He said that he felt relaxed and at ease and strangely confident, but that he didn’t feel compelled to do any of the things the hypnotist asked. No, he wanted to do them because he thought it was fun and silly and, anyway, he didn’t want to wreck the show.

And I can’t help but think that Maddux’s pitching had that sort of hypnotic effect on umpires. He could do anything he wanted with a baseball. He could make the ball jump and dive and side-step, and he threw it exactly where he intended just about every time. It was mesmerizing. Who doesn’t want to be part of that? Think about it: It’s a big moment, bases loaded maybe, game on the line maybe, and he throws a pitch exactly where he wants it, one that buckles the hitter, one that sends the crowd into a frenzy, a pitch that may or may not be one inch off the plate. And he’s Greg Maddux.

Who wants to be the party pooper to wreck the show?

(Photo: Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

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