He’s Grounded in Greatness

Maybe it’s time to tell the Yankees “Say good night, Gracie.” Tell the fat lady to warm up.

It was the whole book on pitching.

You know, anybody can get guys out with a 98 mph fastball or a hellacious curve, but to get them out on pitches you could catch with your teeth takes some doing.

Gregory Alan Maddux reminds you of a guy crawling through enemy territory under barbed wire with a screwdriver and a flashlight. The batter’s like a guy trying to figure out which shell the pea’s under.

It was masterful. A surgeon in his operating room. He should scrub up before taking the mound. A mechanic, not a pitcher. A gambler with his own deck. A magician with a mirror. The ball’s never where you think it is. Before the game, Yankee Manager Joe Torre knew what he was in for. “Maddux will make a ball look like a strike and a strike look like a ball,” he said. His hitters spent the night trying to hit pitches that looked like strikes and laying off pitches that were.

Many years ago, 1934 in fact, a pitcher named Carl Hubbell faced the flower of the American League in an All-Star game. After futilely trying to outguess him--he struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Dickey, Foxx and Al Simmons in a row--Gehrig returned to the dugout with a word of advice for his colleagues. “You might as well swing,” he said disgustedly, “it ain’t gonna get any higher.”

Greg Maddux is the Carl Hubbell of his day. Like Hubbell, his best pitch is the double-play ball. He threw 19 ground-ball outs out of the 24 outs the Yankees had against him Monday night. You can’t hit (safely) what you can’t get in the air. These guys looked like they had pool cues, not bats. They looked more like they were putting than batting. “A typical Maddux game,” said his manager, Bobby Cox, after the game. “Masterful,” echoed Torre.

He doesn’t rush it. He has the patience of an insurance salesman. A Bob Gibson may impatiently signal for his catcher to get the ball back to him quickly so he can throw it in a hurry past a hitter, a “Here, hit this, sucker!” pitcher. Maddux acts more as if he has all day.

It’s kind of unfair. A man who has won four consecutive Cy Young Awards, who is being mentioned in the same breath with the Christy Mathewsons, Grover Cleveland Alexanders and other hurlers whose forte was keeping batters off balance, he should look the part, act the part, swagger a little, refuse autographs, play the star.

Maddux looks like your basic cost accountant. Off the mound he wears these old-fashioned glasses a high school teacher might affect and not wraparound sunglasses. He lives in Las Vegas but don’t look for him in the casinos.

After the game, if you didn’t know better you would think he was a pitcher who got knocked out of the box in the third. He answers questions in a whisper. “I just try to keep the ball down. I try to throw pitches they will chase and hopefully hit weakly to the infield.”

In other words, merely another day at the lathe.

He doesn’t really get hitters out, he implies, he lets them get themselves out. “I’m not overpowering, you know that,” he says softly.

He has no margin for error. He admitted to only one mistake Monday night. “A pitch I threw to Jeter [He hit the Yankee shortstop with it]. I wasn’t ready to throw that pitch. I don’t throw pitches if I’m not ready.”

He’s like Jack Nicklaus over a four-foot putt to win the Masters. He doesn’t release until he has marshaled all his forces and has a definite strategy in mind.

He takes hits personally. Maddux’s eyes glitter, his mouth narrows and his forehead wrinkles on the rare occasions when a ball even goes to the outfield. He’s insulted.

It’s almost as if he were a computer out there. Of the 82 pitches he threw Monday night, 81 were as programmed as a missile launch. The hit batsman was the only one not downloaded.

Before the game, Cecil Fielder knew what to expect. “He’ll give you cutters, sliders away and down. He’ll keep the ball down.”

Maddux kept the hit balls down, too. In a World Series game last year, the Cleveland Indians got only four balls out of the infield.

He should have a blue-black beard, snarl a lot, boast. Instead, he comes in a locker room like a guy who is going to tie a smock on and take the cover off the drill press. He’s as matter-of-fact as a banker. He’s about as extroverted as Calvin Coolidge. And he’s as conscientious as a butler. You’d like to have someone like him working for you.

Pitching is serious business to Maddux. Life is serious business to Maddux. When a writer, alluding to the swarm of runaway trespassers who ran amok on the stadium infield, asked him “Don’t you find it surprising that the only ones reaching second base on you were fans?” Maddux didn’t even smile. “It’s kind of scary,” he said, missing the joke. “They should do something about fans running on the field.”

Maddux doesn’t like anybody getting to second base on him. He’s not too crazy about their even getting to first.