Hats off to Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas!

by Ken

If you're thinking that the Mssrs Maddux, Glavine, and Thomas fall outside DWT's normal purview, I think I can explain why it seems to me important to celebrate them by means of a simple analogy to our more familiar political and journalistic spheres.

Take "Mo" Dowd -- please! (Ha ha!)

If you looked at the NYT e-roundup this morning, you saw this:


The sensible response would have been to mutter, "Oh, the horror!," and move quickly on. But let's say that instead you allowed yourself to wonder whether our Ms. Mo based this brilliant observation on actually having watched Downton Abbey or just heard about it. You could, of course, expend a free NYT click to take you to the column in question and then read it. But that would be crazy. I can say, though, that my own hope is that she hasn't seen the show. This would of course be more reprehensible journalistically. However, the thought that she might actually have watched some of it and come away with the idea that it's "a British soap opera of manners" is impossibly scary. It would mean she's even dumber than I thought she was, and I find it hard to imagine that anyone could be dumber than I thought she was.

The point I'm trying to get at is that I find myself even more impressed with the passage of time by people who do things well. I guess I should specify "things that are worth doing," which opens us up to a whole other discussion. I guess it's my position that writing a good NYT column, as opposed to the kind Ms. Mo does, would be worth doing. It's settled in my mind that being able to pitch the way Greg Maddux or Tom Glavine did, or to hit and field the way Frank Thomas did, is something eminently worth doing.

There was some thought that the amazing Mr. Maddux -- described by ESPN's Tim Kurkjian this afternoon as one of his six top pitchers of all time -- might outpoll Tom Seaver in his first year of Baseball Hall of Fame eligibliity, but when the results were announced today, it seems that no, he was only named on 97.2 percent of the ballots. ("Only"! The real wonder is those other 2.8 percent. I assume those are predominantly voters who fetishize never voting for players in their first year of eligibility. But a Hall of Fame that didn't include an eligible Greg Maddux would have been a travesty.)

Not far behind, at 91.9 percent, was his longtime pitching-staff mate Tom Glavine. Just saying those names together conjures visions of those awesome Atlanta Braves pitching staffs of the '90s. And going into the Hall with them, also in his first year of eligibility will the aptly nicknamed "Big Hurt," the Chicago White Sox' Frank Thomas, an outstanding first baseman who's no doubt better remembered as one of baseball's truly punishing hitters. Already chosen to enter the Hall this year are three legendary managers: Bobby Cox (who managed Maddux and Glavine with the Braves), Tony La Russa, and Joe Torre. That's going to be one huckuva day, July 27, when the baseball world gathered that weekend in Cooperstown witnesses their induction.

Now of course Glavine and Thomas belong in the Hall. But it's hard not to focus on Maddux, whom Washingont Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell describes in an extraordinary piece, "Greg Maddux: A Hall of Fame approach that carried an average arm to Cooperstown, as "an average-sized nondescript everyman who could pass for a math teacher, but a tenacious Mad Dog on the mound," who in the clubhouse was (here quoting former Braves president Stan Kasten) "funny," "totally nuts.”

I actually started writing a whole piece about how nice it was to read Boswell on his great love, baseball, as a reminder that back when that was what he did, he was one of the great baseball writers. I mostly threw that out, though, and merely want to commend the Maddux piece to you. Well, I'll share a chunk of it, perhaps the meatiest part of it.

Maddux should be one of the most-copied pitchers ever, yet few would even know where to begin, because he seldom opened up about what he believed about pitching and why.

First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed of a pitch with any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he pointed at a road a quarter-mile away and said it was impossible to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph unless there was another car nearby to offer a point of reference.

"You just can't do it," he said. Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are different releases points or if a curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher's hand. But if a pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.

"Except," Maddux said, "for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn."

Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters, Maddux's main goal was to "make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home plate." Every pitch should look as close to every other as possible, all part of that "column of milk." He honed the same release point, the same look, to all his pitches, so there was less way to know its speed -- like fastball 92 mph, slider 84, changeup 76.

One day I sat a dozen feet behind Maddux's catcher as three Braves pitchers, all in a row, did their throwing sessions side-by-side. Lefty Steve Avery made his catcher's glove explode with noise from his 95-mph fastball. His curve looked like it broke a foot-and-a-half. He was terrifying. Yet I could barely tell the difference between Greg's pitches. Was that a slider, a changeup, a two-seam or four-seam fastball? Maddux certainly looked better than most college pitchers, but not much. Nothing was scary.

Afterward, I asked him how it went, how he felt, everything except "Is your arm okay?" He picked up the tone. With a cocked grin, like a Mad Dog whose table scrap doesn't taste quite right, he said, "That's all I got."

Then he explained that I couldn't tell his pitches apart because his goal was late quick break, not big impressive break. The bigger the break, the sooner the ball must start to swerve and the more milliseconds the hitter has to react; the latter the break, the less reaction time. Deny the batter as much information -- speed or type of last-instant deviation -- until it is almost too late.

But not entirely too late: Maddux didn't want swings and misses for strikeouts, but preferred weak defensive contact and easy outs. He sought pitches that looked hittable and identical -- getting the hitter to commit to swing -- but weren't. Any pitch that didn't conform to this, even if it looked good, was scrapped as inefficient.

No, that's not a math teacher and his son, it's Greg and Chase Maddux watching the UNLV basketball team defeat Radford 81-62 last month in Las Vegas.

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