Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (32 page)

MADDUX’S OLDER brother Mike, now the pitching coach for the Brewers, pitched with modest success for 15 seasons, the last in 2000. “I remember my brother telling me in his last year or two, ‘You don’t know how good I have to pitch just to get out of an inning,’” Greg says. “I’m thinking, What’s he talking about? I’m starting to understand more and more what he meant by that.”

At his very best, Maddux won four consecutive Cy Young Awards (1992 to ’95) and had the lowest ERA (2.14) in any six-year span since World War II (1992 to ’97), lower than the sublime six-year prime of Sandy Koufax (2.19) in a pitcher’s era. Such was Maddux’s sleight of hand with a baseball that future Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs called him “the David Copperfield of pitchers” after he shut out the Yankees over eight innings in Game 2 of the 1996 World Series.

Maddux, however, never did get enough credit for just how nasty his stuff was. He threw his fastball 90 or 91 mph with the sudden movement of a jackrabbit flushed from the brush. The ball naturally sank and ran away from lefthanders. A slight twist of the wrist, and it cut toward their hands. “I pulled out tapes from 10 years ago, back when I was throwing up those really good years,” Maddux says. “I made more mistakes then than I do now! It’s just that I got away with them. My movement was better because my velocity was better.”

Maddux typically throws at about 85 mph now. “I may not have the same success as I did earlier when I was doing it at faster speeds, but I can still have success,” he says. “My bad games may be worse, though. I think I have to pitch better now than 10 years ago. I have to locate better because my stuff is not as good. It’s still good enough to win, but not good enough to make mistakes. I don’t throw hard enough for the ball to break as much as it used to.”

Brewers outfielder Geoff Jenkins says of Maddux, “He still keeps the ball down in the zone. I try to be aggressive against him and attack early in the count because the deeper you get in the count against him the more he seems to mess with you and outthink you. It just seems like he hits his spots and all of a sudden it’s the end of the night and you have a comfortable 0-fer.”

The more Maddux’s physical skills decline, the deeper he must tap his mental well to stay sharp—and at that he is unrivaled. He is, for instance, a voracious observer. He often can tell what a hitter is thinking by where he stands in the batter’s box, how he takes practice swings, how he fouls off a pitch or takes a pitch. “It’s like kids at school—some pay more attention than others,” Pole says. “He’s on a different level from everybody else when it comes to attention.”

Says Mets lefthander Tom Glavine, Maddux’s rotation mate with the Braves for 10 years, “That’s the biggest part of what sets him apart. It helped me. I never really paid attention to any of that stuff until Greg came to Atlanta [in 1993]. It opened up a whole new world I had never seen before. He was way ahead of everybody else in that regard.”

Once while seated in the Braves’ dugout as third baseman Jose Hernandez batted for the Dodgers, Maddux blurted out, “Watch this. The first base coach may be going to the hospital.” On the next pitch Hernandez drilled a line drive off the chest of the first base coach.

Another time Atlanta manager Bobby Cox visited Maddux on the mound with runners on second and third and two outs. Cox suggested an intentional walk.

“Don’t worry,” said Maddux, who then spelled out to Cox the sequence of his next three pitches: “And on the last pitch I’m going to get him to pop up foul to third base.” Maddux proceeded to escape the jam on his third pitch—getting a pop-up to third base that was a foot or two from being foul.

Cubs ace Mark Prior, a 23-year-old power pitcher, says he likes to sit next to Maddux in the dugout on days when neither is pitching. “He’s helped me tremendously,” Prior says. “I’ve always gone harder whenever I’ve been in trouble. He’s got me thinking, Go softer when I’m in trouble. I never thought that way before, and it’s helped me develop confidence in my changeup. As we watch games, he’ll talk about what I might throw in certain situations.”

Maddux prefers to downplay his reputation as a mound savant. He has told teammates, “People think I’m smart? You know what makes you smart? Locate that fastball down and away. That makes you smart.

“I don’t surprise anybody with what I throw anymore,” Maddux says. “You just have to mix your pitches up. And even if the hitter is guessing right, if you locate it, you won’t get hurt. You might give up a single or a double, but it’s not the end of the world. Yeah, the hitters are stronger, the balls are harder, some parks are smaller and the strike zone’s smaller. Still, for me, it’s all about movement and location. If you have those, you’re going to have success.”

Episodes of Maddux’s clairvoyance, however, still abound. Last week before his start in Milwaukee, he shouted to Pole in the clubhouse, “Hey, what’s Brady Clark hitting with runners in scoring position?”

“How the hell do I know?” Pole replied.

“Well, find out for me, will you?” Maddux said.

Pole tracked down and passed along the information: The outfielder was hitting .226 with runners in scoring position. That night Maddux pitched around slugging first baseman Lyle Overbay with a runner on second and Clark on deck, then whiffed Clark on a changeup. “He knew which hitter he wanted to face if that very situation came up,” Cubs lefthander Kent Mercker said afterward. “He doesn’t miss anything.”

Maddux lives for such moments, like a chess grandmaster who has specific killer moves cataloged in his head and finds utter joy when the board suddenly presents the perfect opening to employ one. Three hundred wins? It is just a number to him right now. That is not why he pitches. He pitches for the intellectual and physical challenges, the small moments that go unseen by most.

Asked to explain the best part of pitching, Maddux says, “I enjoy watching the other guys, talking on Monday [about a game plan] and trying to do it on Tuesday. Guys who just show up on Tuesday and pitch, I don’t understand that.

“The best part? The best part is knowing on Monday you’re going to do something and then actually doing it on Tuesday. You know what? It might be just a strike. It might be a foul ball, [telling yourself,] If I throw this guy this pitch, he’s going to hit it foul right over there. And then to go out there and do it, that’s pretty cool. To me, that’s fun.

“You’re only talking about 10 pitches a game where that may happen. The other 80 or 90 pitches you’re trusting what you see and what you feel. It’s still just fun playing the game.”

It’s still so much fun that he cannot yet imagine it ending. “Who knows?” he says, when asked how long he will pitch. “As long as I can do it. I don’t want to embarrass myself, by any means. But I’d rather pitch bad than not pitch at all.”

“THERE’S ONE thing I’ve learned about Greg Maddux,” Cubs manager Dusty Baker says. “He shags better than anybody I’ve ever seen. I don’t see him out there running foul poles, but I see him out there getting his running in shagging.”

It’s not uncommon for a pitcher, especially a veteran, to loathe workouts, but two or three times on his off days between starts Maddux chases fly balls during batting practice like an eager teenager hauled out of the stands. “I like to stay in shape, baseball shape, by playing baseball,” Maddux says. “And it’s fun. It’s a lot more fun running around the outfield pretending you’re Andruw Jones than running on a treadmill watching
Jerry Springer
reruns. To me, even the four days in between starts are fun.”

Maddux makes certain that every throw he makes, even when shagging flies, is delivered from the same arm angle as one of his pitches, and never off-balance. He lifts light weights for his arm and shoulders from December through April, then, he says simply, “I trust my arm.” At week’s end he had thrown 4,110
¹
/
₃
innings in his career and had never been placed on the disabled list with an arm injury of any sort.

There are model Rockets all around baseball, tall power pitchers in the mold of Clemens with here-it-comes fastballs. The next Maddux, however, may be a long time coming. “Now,” says Maddux, who stands six feet tall and weighs 185 pounds, “if you don’t throw 95, you’re a wimp. If you’re not 6′4″ with a 90-plus fastball, you’ll never get drafted.”

Says Glavine, “It’s such a game of power pitching and power hitting now. Every pitcher throws flat-out gas with maximum effort. I don’t know if we’ll ever see anyone like Greg.”

Here is the next Maddux. He is throwing a baseball against a dugout fence at Miller Park. Chase Maddux, Greg’s son, is seven years old. He throws a pitch submarine-style. “Like the guy from Oakland,” he says, referring to reliever Chad Bradford.

“Stay on top, kid. Stay on top,” Greg says.

The father raises his right arm in a classic L shape, his elbow slightly above the height of his shoulder. “Look,” he says. “Like this.”

That voice is a familiar one. Medar, who died in 1983 at age 69, never lived to see one of Maddux’s 300 wins, never lived even to see him selected by the Cubs in the second round of the 1984 draft.

Chase winds up and, with a still head and properly raised elbow, lets fly a perfect strike.

“That’s better,” the sage says. “That’s much better.”

Postscript: I’ve never known a smarter ballplayer than Maddux—I learn something about baseball during every conversation with him. His humility, however, is just as impressive as his genius. His achievements have exceeded his own expectations—and just about everyone else’s. And even as he was racking up Cy Young awards, he would marvel at that recognition, as if he were a schoolkid who’d just received extra credit.

OCTOBER 11, 2004

In the 2003 playoffs the Cubs and Red Sox each came
that close
to the World
Series, only to see it all blow up in eerily similar—and all-too-familiar—fashion

I
N THE CAVITY OF THE CATHEDRAL, HISTORY SOUNDS LIKE A
freight train rumbling through a concrete tunnel. Roger Clemens recognized the rumble. Clemens, his retirement plans not yet amended, had spent the last seven innings of Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series in the home clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, nervously wondering if his career and the Yankees’ season were about to be extinguished by the Red Sox. It was 12:16 a.m. on Oct. 17 when he heard the answer from above.

The Yankees clubhouse is carved out among the catacombs and narrow hallways beneath the first base stands. When a moment of excitement—such as the solid thwack of a Louisville Slugger upon a benign knuckleball—brings the fans to their feet, the clatter of thousands of blue plastic seat bottoms snapping upright reverberates through the clubhouse below.

The noise sent Clemens to his feet and then to the door and finally toward the ramp to the field as the pennant-winning home run by Aaron Boone was floating into the leftfield seats.

“I knew that sound,” Clemens would later say.

This kind of history sounded familiar. The home run ensured that Boston’s 1918 World Series championship would remain its most recent, a streak of futility so long and chock-full of so many absurd near misses that it feels organic and as immutable as a law of nature. Boston is 0 for 85 since Babe Ruth pitched them to the ’18 title, including four seasons that ended with defeats in Game 7 of the World Series.

Red Sox seasons die the deaths of spaghetti western cowboys: never graceful, but rather writhing, painful and melodramatic. This ending, at the hands of Boone and the Yankees, was true to form. Five outs from the World Series with a three-run lead, no one on base and their best starting pitcher on the mound, the Red Sox lost the lead without ever using their bullpen. Nobody but the Sox could lose a game so spectacularly.

Nobody, that is, except the Chicago Cubs, Boston’s fraternal twin in despair.

The Cubs’ institutional losing dates to 1908, when they last won the World Series. After that they are 0 for 96. Since 1945 they have played six games in which a victory would have sent them to the Series—and lost all of them. That agony includes the preposterous Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series against the Marlins. Like the Red Sox, the Cubs were five outs away from the World Series with a three-run lead, no one on base and their best starting pitcher on the mound.