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1 hour ago, WBT said:

Rickey Henderson has the modern single-season stolen base record with 130 in 1972.  He was also caught stealing 42 times that season.  >1 attempt per game.

*1982

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JoePos on Maddux:

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OK, so let’s start out with some Greg Maddux basics. He pitched from 1986, when he was 20 years old (he was the youngest player in baseball that year and the youngest Chicago Cubs pitcher in 25 years to get a win), to 2008, when he was 42 (and threw six very Maddux-like innings for the Dodgers against the Giants).

In that span, Maddux:

  • Won 355 games, second behind only Warren Spahn since Deadball.

  • Won 15-plus games 17 years in a row, and this included two strike-affected seasons. That is the record.

  • Struck out 3,371 batters, despite never caring much about strikeouts.

  • Walked fewer than 1,000 batters in more than 5,000 innings

  • Became the first pitcher to win four consecutive Cy Youngs.

  • Became the first pitcher since Walter Johnson to have back-to-back sub-1.75 ERA seasons.

  • Won 18 Gold Gloves.

  • Set the National League record by going 72⅓ innings without issuing a walk (and he did this in 2001, when offense was, you know, out of control).

You could go on and on like this. I mean, just take the “walked fewer than 1,000 batters” fact. There have been seven pitchers since Deadball who threw 5,000 innings in a career. Here are their walk totals:

  1. Nolan Ryan, 2,795

  2. Steve Carlton, 1,833

  3. Phil Niekro, 1,809

  4. Warren Spahn, 1,434

  5. Gaylord Perry, 1,379

  6. Don Sutton, 1,343

  7. Greg Maddux, 999

Or you can compare his walks-per-nine against the Hall of Fame-caliber starters of his time:

  1. Randy Johnson, 3.3

  2. Tom Glavine, 3.1

  3. Roger Clemens, 2.9

  4. John Smoltz, 2.6

  5. Pedro Martinez, 2.4

  6. Mike Mussina, 2.0

  7. Greg Maddux, 1.8

He did it his way. That was the thing that kept coming back to me, again and again, as I thought about what more I can say about Maddux. He didn’t pitch like anybody else. I mean, you look at virtually just about any other pitcher, and there’s a template, a model. John Smoltz seemed like Jack Morris and Clayton Kershaw seemed like Sandy Koufax and Pedro Martinez seemed like a blend of Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal, and Mike Mussina seemed like Fergie Jenkins.

 

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Maddux was focused on one goal: getting 27 outs. (Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Maybe some of those comparisons are very surface-level, but there aren’t even surface-level comparisons for Maddux. You might know the story: When Maddux was young in Las Vegas, he was coached by a longtime baseball guy named Ralph Meder. And Meder had the most unusual advice for Maddux: He basically said, “When you get in trouble, you should throw softer, not harder.” It’s exactly the opposite of what young pitchers believed then, and it’s certainly the opposite of what young pitchers believe now. But Maddux believed him. And throughout his career, in the biggest moments, when the moment was tight, Maddux would pull out some version of his changeup, because he was sure that it was movement that mattered, not the velocity.

“For me,” he told me once, “it all comes down to the last 10 feet.”

The last 10 feet. He didn’t care how fast the pitch came out of his hand. He didn’t care about the first 50 feet, 6 inches of the baseball’s journey. What he cared about was that when the ball was 10 feet away from the hitter, the pitch had to look like something it was not. The whole thing was an elaborate magic trick. I uncovered this wonderful quote from Reggie Sanders.

“If it looks like a ball, it will be a strike. And if it looks like a strike, it will be a ball.”

There’s something else he told me years and years ago that I had forgotten: He didn’t care at all about strike one. I mean, that’s an exaggeration, he obviously cared some—but he was pretty dismissive of the whole idea that an at-bat is determined by first-pitch strikes. He said, “To me, a 1-0 count vs. an 0-1 count is really not much of a difference.”

Instead, he said the THIRD pitch of the bat is usually the key pitch. More often than not, see, the third pitch will determine whether or not you can get two strikes on the hitter. And if Maddux got two strikes on you, honestly, you were done. In his long career—so this includes the last five or so years when Maddux was pretty average—batters hit just .160 and slugged just .202 against him with two strikes, no matter how many balls in the count.

Slash numbers vs. Maddux with two strikes:

0-2: .136/.152/.188
1-2: .151/.157/.202
2-2: .175/.179/.242
3-2: .187/.376/.279

You were not going to do anything against Maddux with two strikes unless he chose to walk you—which he would sometimes do. He has said the secret to facing Barry Bonds was to never, ever let him beat you in the critical moments. He walked Bonds 23 times, almost double the number that he walked anyone else. He would walk Tony Gwynn, too, when the moment was wrong; Gwynn hit .429 against Maddux and never once struck out. He also didn’t hit a home run, and he drove in just nine runs in 103 plate appearances.

Maddux liked to talk about how he had to get 27 outs. That was his job. It didn’t matter to him WHICH 27 outs he got. Knowing that Tony Gwynn and Barry Bonds were unlikely outs, he often preferred looking elsewhere. He is surely the greatest pitcher to never even come close to throwing a no-hitter.* and I think that was, in part, a mindset.

*I guess he came SORT OF close against Houston in 1995; he threw seven no-hit innings before giving up a home run to Jeff Bagwell. But that’s not all that close. Other great pitchers who never threw an official no-hitter: Roger Clemens (kind of shocking), Pedro Martinez (his nine perfect innings against the Padres in 1995 were wrecked in the 10th) and Steve Carlton (he threw SIX one-hitters).

By mindset, I mean this: I don’t think Maddux saw a no-hitter as his ideal game. Nolan Ryan, yeah, every game he was trying for a no-hitter. Every single batter was an important battle for Nolan. But for Maddux? The ideal game was one where he took all risk out of the game, and found the surest 27 outs.

And so, a one-out single to Tony Gwynn with nobody on base was perfectly fine with him. In fact, he was happy to get it out of the way. Maddux and Gwynn had very few long battles—only one of their 103 battles went seven pitches. Thirty-three of them—about one-third of the plate appearances—were over within two pitches.

This brings us to Jason Lukehart’s fine invention: the “Maddux.” As you might know, a Maddux is a nine-plus inning shutout in fewer than 100 pitches. I say, “nine plus,” but there has only been one extra-inning Maddux… and it actually wasn’t thrown by Maddux. It was thrown by Roy Halladay in 2003 against Detroit—10 innings, 3 hits, one walk, 99 pitches.

Maddux, of course, has the most Madduxes on record with 13. The pitch-count numbers are sketchy when you go back, but the Baseball-Reference list of most Madduxes is very interesting:

Most Madduxes:

  1. Greg Maddux, 13

  2. Zane Smith, 7

  3. Don Newcombe and Bob Tewksbury, 6

  4. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Tom Glavine and Roy Halladay, 5

  5. Preacher Roe, Chris Bosio, Jamie Moyer, Bartolo Colon, James Shields and Henderson Alvarez III, 4

The fact that there are so many old Dodgers on the list—Newk, Koufax, Drysdale, Roe—tells me that there must be access to old Dodger pitch counts. Maybe this has been written about and I just missed it. In any case, we definitely have pitch counts since the mid-to-late 1980s, and Maddux is far and away the leader in Madduxes since then. I’ve always found that interesting, but as I went back to explore Maddux’s career, it took on additional meaning. That is to say, I think the stat has helped define him.

“That is cool,” Maddux said when I introduced him to the Maddux stat (yeah, I got to do that!). “But I wasn’t concerned with pitch counts and all that. I generally wasn’t going to have high pitch counts because I wasn’t overpowering. I’d throw fastballs, and guys would hit them fair. John Smoltz would throw the same fastball, and they’d foul it off. You look at the really overpowering pitchers, they are more likely to have high pitch counts because it’s a lot harder for batters to hit the ball fair against them.”

Obviously, I had not thought of it that way—there has never been a time when I talked with Greg Maddux and didn’t come away thinking, “Wow, I never thought of it that way.” But Maddux self-scouted better than any pitcher in baseball history, I think. He KNEW his strengths and weaknesses better than any hitter ever could. So, even though he might not have thought about pitch counts a lot, he did think about how to get those 27 outs in the most efficient way possible, and for him that meant shorter plate appearances, and making sure that when the batter put the ball in play, he did so on Maddux’s terms. Such things may not lead to no-hitters. But they can lead to magical performances.

Here are the leaders in complete games—shutouts or not—with 99 or fewer pitches:

  1. Greg Maddux, 26

  2. Don Newcombe, 18

  3. Bob Tewksbury, and Roy Halladay, 13

  4. Tom Glavine, 8

  5. Preacher Roe, Chris Bosio and Zane Smith, 7

The guy was just doing stuff that nobody else could do.

One final thought: In 1995, when I was a columnist in Cincinnati, I wrote a 12-step plan for beating Greg Maddux. I forgot about that column until I went back and reread it. My 12 steps were as follows:

Step 1: Be aggressive. “Players who wait for walks against Maddux might as well just stay in the dugout.”

Step 2: Don’t be aggressive. “As they say in youth league, wait for your pitch.”

Step 3: Don’t wait for your pitch. “It’s never coming. “If you get a hit off him,” Reds catcher Eddie Taubensee says, “you will never see that pitch again.”

Step 4: Go up there thinking. “If you go up to the plate without a plan, you’re done.”

Step 5: Bunt. “You have to find a way to create havoc. Bunting could be that way.”

Step 6: Don’t bunt. “What are you, crazy? Maddux has won five straight Gold Gloves… he gets off the mound faster than anyone.”

Step 7: Try to intimidate. “Make him think out there. Step out of the box. Glare. Taunt him on the bases.”

Step 8: Don’t try to intimidate. “What are you, crazy? His father is a poker dealer at a casino. You think you’re going to get to him?”

Step 9: Run the bases hard. “You need to force mistakes.”

Step 10: Don’t run the bases hard. “Mistakes? Maddux has thrown one wild pitch all year? He doesn’t balk. He’s fast to the plate. Forget about it.”

Step 11: Get him in the late innings. “Don’t lose your cool if Maddux overwhelms you early, there’s always a chance he will tire.”

Step 12. Don’t wait for the late innings. “He won’t get tired. Get him early or he will get on a roll and the game will be over.”

Quote

OK, so let’s start out with some Greg Maddux basics. He pitched from 1986, when he was 20 years old (he was the youngest player in baseball that year and the youngest Chicago Cubs pitcher in 25 years to get a win), to 2008, when he was 42 (and threw six very Maddux-like innings for the Dodgers against the Giants).

In that span, Maddux:

Won 355 games, second behind only Warren Spahn since Deadball.

Won 15-plus games 17 years in a row, and this included two strike-affected seasons. That is the record.

Struck out 3,371 batters, despite never caring much about strikeouts.

Walked fewer than 1,000 batters in more than 5,000 innings

Became the first pitcher to win four consecutive Cy Youngs.

Became the first pitcher since Walter Johnson to have back-to-back sub-1.75 ERA seasons.

Won 18 Gold Gloves.

Set the National League record by going 72⅓ innings without issuing a walk (and he did this in 2001, when offense was, you know, out of control).

You could go on and on like this. I mean, just take the “walked fewer than 1,000 batters” fact. There have been seven pitchers since Deadball who threw 5,000 innings in a career. Here are their walk totals:

Nolan Ryan, 2,795

Steve Carlton, 1,833

Phil Niekro, 1,809

Warren Spahn, 1,434

Gaylord Perry, 1,379

Don Sutton, 1,343

Greg Maddux, 999

Or you can compare his walks-per-nine against the Hall of Fame-caliber starters of his time:

Randy Johnson, 3.3

Tom Glavine, 3.1

Roger Clemens, 2.9

John Smoltz, 2.6

Pedro Martinez, 2.4

Mike Mussina, 2.0

Greg Maddux, 1.8

He did it his way. That was the thing that kept coming back to me, again and again, as I thought about what more I can say about Maddux. He didn’t pitch like anybody else. I mean, you look at virtually just about any other pitcher, and there’s a template, a model. John Smoltz seemed like Jack Morris and Clayton Kershaw seemed like Sandy Koufax and Pedro Martinez seemed like a blend of Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal, and Mike Mussina seemed like Fergie Jenkins.


Maddux was focused on one goal: getting 27 outs. (Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
Maybe some of those comparisons are very surface-level, but there aren’t even surface-level comparisons for Maddux. You might know the story: When Maddux was young in Las Vegas, he was coached by a longtime baseball guy named Ralph Meder. And Meder had the most unusual advice for Maddux: He basically said, “When you get in trouble, you should throw softer, not harder.” It’s exactly the opposite of what young pitchers believed then, and it’s certainly the opposite of what young pitchers believe now. But Maddux believed him. And throughout his career, in the biggest moments, when the moment was tight, Maddux would pull out some version of his changeup, because he was sure that it was movement that mattered, not the velocity.

“For me,” he told me once, “it all comes down to the last 10 feet.”

The last 10 feet. He didn’t care how fast the pitch came out of his hand. He didn’t care about the first 50 feet, 6 inches of the baseball’s journey. What he cared about was that when the ball was 10 feet away from the hitter, the pitch had to look like something it was not. The whole thing was an elaborate magic trick. I uncovered this wonderful quote from Reggie Sanders.

“If it looks like a ball, it will be a strike. And if it looks like a strike, it will be a ball.”

There’s something else he told me years and years ago that I had forgotten: He didn’t care at all about strike one. I mean, that’s an exaggeration, he obviously cared some—but he was pretty dismissive of the whole idea that an at-bat is determined by first-pitch strikes. He said, “To me, a 1-0 count vs. an 0-1 count is really not much of a difference.”

Instead, he said the THIRD pitch of the bat is usually the key pitch. More often than not, see, the third pitch will determine whether or not you can get two strikes on the hitter. And if Maddux got two strikes on you, honestly, you were done. In his long career—so this includes the last five or so years when Maddux was pretty average—batters hit just .160 and slugged just .202 against him with two strikes, no matter how many balls in the count.

Slash numbers vs. Maddux with two strikes:

0-2: .136/.152/.188
1-2: .151/.157/.202
2-2: .175/.179/.242
3-2: .187/.376/.279

You were not going to do anything against Maddux with two strikes unless he chose to walk you—which he would sometimes do. He has said the secret to facing Barry Bonds was to never, ever let him beat you in the critical moments. He walked Bonds 23 times, almost double the number that he walked anyone else. He would walk Tony Gwynn, too, when the moment was wrong; Gwynn hit .429 against Maddux and never once struck out. He also didn’t hit a home run, and he drove in just nine runs in 103 plate appearances.

Maddux liked to talk about how he had to get 27 outs. That was his job. It didn’t matter to him WHICH 27 outs he got. Knowing that Tony Gwynn and Barry Bonds were unlikely outs, he often preferred looking elsewhere. He is surely the greatest pitcher to never even come close to throwing a no-hitter.* and I think that was, in part, a mindset.

*I guess he came SORT OF close against Houston in 1995; he threw seven no-hit innings before giving up a home run to Jeff Bagwell. But that’s not all that close. Other great pitchers who never threw an official no-hitter: Roger Clemens (kind of shocking), Pedro Martinez (his nine perfect innings against the Padres in 1995 were wrecked in the 10th) and Steve Carlton (he threw SIX one-hitters).

By mindset, I mean this: I don’t think Maddux saw a no-hitter as his ideal game. Nolan Ryan, yeah, every game he was trying for a no-hitter. Every single batter was an important battle for Nolan. But for Maddux? The ideal game was one where he took all risk out of the game, and found the surest 27 outs.

And so, a one-out single to Tony Gwynn with nobody on base was perfectly fine with him. In fact, he was happy to get it out of the way. Maddux and Gwynn had very few long battles—only one of their 103 battles went seven pitches. Thirty-three of them—about one-third of the plate appearances—were over within two pitches.

This brings us to Jason Lukehart’s fine invention: the “Maddux.” As you might know, a Maddux is a nine-plus inning shutout in fewer than 100 pitches. I say, “nine plus,” but there has only been one extra-inning Maddux… and it actually wasn’t thrown by Maddux. It was thrown by Roy Halladay in 2003 against Detroit—10 innings, 3 hits, one walk, 99 pitches.

Maddux, of course, has the most Madduxes on record with 13. The pitch-count numbers are sketchy when you go back, but the Baseball-Reference list of most Madduxes is very interesting:

Most Madduxes:

Greg Maddux, 13

Zane Smith, 7

Don Newcombe and Bob Tewksbury, 6

Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Tom Glavine and Roy Halladay, 5

Preacher Roe, Chris Bosio, Jamie Moyer, Bartolo Colon, James Shields and Henderson Alvarez III, 4

The fact that there are so many old Dodgers on the list—Newk, Koufax, Drysdale, Roe—tells me that there must be access to old Dodger pitch counts. Maybe this has been written about and I just missed it. In any case, we definitely have pitch counts since the mid-to-late 1980s, and Maddux is far and away the leader in Madduxes since then. I’ve always found that interesting, but as I went back to explore Maddux’s career, it took on additional meaning. That is to say, I think the stat has helped define him.

“That is cool,” Maddux said when I introduced him to the Maddux stat (yeah, I got to do that!). “But I wasn’t concerned with pitch counts and all that. I generally wasn’t going to have high pitch counts because I wasn’t overpowering. I’d throw fastballs, and guys would hit them fair. John Smoltz would throw the same fastball, and they’d foul it off. You look at the really overpowering pitchers, they are more likely to have high pitch counts because it’s a lot harder for batters to hit the ball fair against them.”

Obviously, I had not thought of it that way—there has never been a time when I talked with Greg Maddux and didn’t come away thinking, “Wow, I never thought of it that way.” But Maddux self-scouted better than any pitcher in baseball history, I think. He KNEW his strengths and weaknesses better than any hitter ever could. So, even though he might not have thought about pitch counts a lot, he did think about how to get those 27 outs in the most efficient way possible, and for him that meant shorter plate appearances, and making sure that when the batter put the ball in play, he did so on Maddux’s terms. Such things may not lead to no-hitters. But they can lead to magical performances.

Here are the leaders in complete games—shutouts or not—with 99 or fewer pitches:

Greg Maddux, 26

Don Newcombe, 18

Bob Tewksbury, and Roy Halladay, 13

Tom Glavine, 8

Preacher Roe, Chris Bosio and Zane Smith, 7

The guy was just doing stuff that nobody else could do.

One final thought: In 1995, when I was a columnist in Cincinnati, I wrote a 12-step plan for beating Greg Maddux. I forgot about that column until I went back and reread it. My 12 steps were as follows:

Step 1: Be aggressive. “Players who wait for walks against Maddux might as well just stay in the dugout.”

Step 2: Don’t be aggressive. “As they say in youth league, wait for your pitch.”

Step 3: Don’t wait for your pitch. “It’s never coming. “If you get a hit off him,” Reds catcher Eddie Taubensee says, “you will never see that pitch again.”

Step 4: Go up there thinking. “If you go up to the plate without a plan, you’re done.”

Step 5: Bunt. “You have to find a way to create havoc. Bunting could be that way.”

Step 6: Don’t bunt. “What are you, crazy? Maddux has won five straight Gold Gloves… he gets off the mound faster than anyone.”

Step 7: Try to intimidate. “Make him think out there. Step out of the box. Glare. Taunt him on the bases.”

Step 8: Don’t try to intimidate. “What are you, crazy? His father is a poker dealer at a casino. You think you’re going to get to him?”

Step 9: Run the bases hard. “You need to force mistakes.”

Step 10: Don’t run the bases hard. “Mistakes? Maddux has thrown one wild pitch all year? He doesn’t balk. He’s fast to the plate. Forget about it.”

Step 11: Get him in the late innings. “Don’t lose your cool if Maddux overwhelms you early, there’s always a chance he will tire.”

Step 12. Don’t wait for the late innings. “He won’t get tired. Get him early or he will get on a roll and the game will be over.”

 

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