Maddux Defies Odds, Earns Job

Spring training had started and all through Las Vegas

Tourists were busily losing their wages

One man sat back as life passed him by

He wanted to pitch,

but who’d let him try? Mike Maddux was like a kid on Christmas morning who came downstairs to empty stockings, or maybe more like a kid in a Halloween costume who could find no one home.

You know, he had a tux but not a date.

This was a baseball player who had cleats and a glove and, most importantly, an arm. The arm was most important because Maddux was a pitcher who did not want “was” to be the operative verb.

Yet February, a short month to everybody, was passing at what seemed like a frightening speed to a man looking to continue his career in professional baseball.

Sitting at home in Las Vegas, Mike Maddux read daily of pitchers and catchers reporting to one training camp or another and he was feeling forgotten. In the most frustratingly literal sense, he had nowhere to go.

“Once spring training started,” he said, “I was beginning to get nervous.”

Maddux had had arthroscopic surgery on his pitching elbow after each of the past two seasons and baseball was reacting like he was trying to come back from the first arm transplant. It was as if someone had drawn a circle around a picture of his right arm, added a slash through the middle and faxed it to all of organized baseball.

Bad arm.

Avoid.

Do not return calls.

Maddux’s attorney did place calls to every major league organization. The response was not much cause for optimism.

“There was interest . . . without room,” Maddux said. “Maybe that was just a nice way to say no.”

Just say no.

It had to be bewildering to Maddux, because he had gone about his off-season like it was business as usual. He was playing a little (or a lot) of golf and taking his turns on the mound at the Las Vegas Baseball Academy.

“I approached everything as though I’d be pitching,” he said. “I never thought I wouldn’t be pitching because there’s never too much pitching. I was confident I’d have an opportunity.”

He had worked so long on a career that really did not seem like a career yet. Signing out of Texas El Paso, he had been playing professional baseball since 1982. Unfortunately, only about 2 1/2 of those years had been spent in the major leagues. He was 10-14 with a 4.68 earned-run average in 248 innings pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies and Dodgers.

In his case, he was not attempting a comeback as much as he was attempting to keep going in a quest to establish himself.

And now it seemed that no one was going to give him the opportunity he was confident he would get.

So he went to a luncheon.

Mind you that most professional athletes would rather go to the dentist than to a luncheon. However, Maddux wanted to have a word with Joe McIlvaine, the Padres’ general manager. He wanted to ask him for a chance.

Understand also that general managers are always getting sales pitches when they venture out in public. They always encounter someone who has a grandson in Birmingham or a nephew in Salem who might be worth a tryout. And here was a pitcher making a pitch for himself.

McIlvaine, playing a conservative hand in Las Vegas, told Maddux to come on down to Yuma and put on a minor league uniform in the minor league clubhouse of the minor league camp. He could not have known it at the time, but this turned out to be like putting a nickel into a slot machine and needing an armored truck to haul away the loot when the bells stopped ringing.

Maddux was right. No one can ever have too much pitching, and the Padres turned out to have much too little. He was “imported” from the minor league clubhouse. Manager Greg Riddoch called upon him to pitch against the Chicago Cubs.

“When he gave me the ball,” Maddux said, “I knew it might be advantageous to throw well.”

He did. And he has since.

In the early part of the 1991 season, when the Padres have gotten the jump on the National League West, this supposedly washed-up and wrung-out right-hander has been a major factor. For a team to come from nowhere to do well, some of its players must as well.

Maddux, 29, has been just such a guy.

Through the first week of the season, Maddux had either won or saved half of the Padres’ six victories.

Mike Maddux, an obliging sort who looks a little like Dennis Weaver, took a few minutes from a hectic pregame routine and sat in the Padre dugout. Writers and broadcasters have been quite demanding of his time, but he has been understanding.

“Glad to help,” he said. “It is a good story.”

The ending is yet to be written, but it is a nice beginning.