BASEBALL’S BEST PITCHER IS TOUGH TO FIGURE

Greg Maddux hummed a baseball a few inches from Eddie Murray’s sideburn. It was Game 5 of the 1995 World Series, and he did it on purpose. Albert Belle had just hit a first-inning home run off him. Murray happened to be the next man up.

After the pitch whizzed past his whiskers, Murray did a burn. He wagged a finger at Maddux. Menacingly, he took a step toward the pitching mound. Cleveland Indian players sprang from the dugout and bullpen, to give Murray some backup. Atlanta Brave players did likewise, in case anyone laid a hand on Maddux.

During the ruckus, Maddux and the opposing pitcher, Orel Hershiser, stood off to the side.

“I was just moving Eddie off the plate,” Maddux said.

“Oh, you’ve got better control than that,” Hershiser replied.

Maddux turned mum.

“Well, just don’t forget,” Hershiser told him, before leaving the diamond. “I’m going to have the ball too.”

*

In his eyeglasses and mufti, a golf shirt with the collar askew, Greg Maddux looks neither fearless nor fearsome. He wouldn’t strike an average person on the street as a guy who plays hardball. He looks like a nutty professor. An egghead, a pretty boy but not vain, in a Cary Grant-as-scientist, “Bringing Up Baby” kind of way, Maddux seems harmless enough. At face value, he might as well be Orel Hershiser, with a tan.

“Bulldog” Hershiser was the one, however, who once advised against generalizing a baby-faced, Bible-quoting, easygoing individual as a wimp. Maddux feels much the same. And when the Brave and the Indian were the opposing pitchers for Games 1 and 5 of that 1995 World Series, each man had a chance to prove his point.

It began at Fulton County Stadium--a property now condemned, right across the road from Turner Field, where the Braves will pitch Maddux in tonight’s opener of their National League championship series against the Florida Marlins.

Maddux had never pitched in a World Series before.

He threw a two-hit shutout.

Cleveland was clueless. Maddux walked nobody. He hit nobody. He retired 25 consecutive Indians, in one stretch. He gave up two runs, both unearned. Kenny Lofton got a single. Jim Thome got a single. End of story. Game 1 went to the Braves, 3-2, even though Hershiser and the Indians gave up a mere three hits themselves.

Then came Game 5, and the brawl.

Same pitchers, different diamond. At the new Jacobs Field in downtown Cleveland, the home team jumped on Maddux right off the bat. Belle, the cleanup batter--who has been called many things, but never a wimp--jacked a ball over the Jake’s right-field fence. First blood to the Indians, 2-0. And up to the plate came Cleveland’s designated hitter, Murray.

The only victory of this series for Cleveland, at this point, had been in Game 3. An 11th-inning single by Murray won it.

Maddux has no reputation as a headhunter. On the contrary, his pinpoint control is legendary. All pitchers make mistakes, usually by grooving one that was intended for a corner of home plate. Charlie O’Brien, who caught Maddux in those ’95 World Series games, observed of his pitcher after the two-hitter, “When he misses, he misses out of the strike zone.”

It is something that became evident to Eddie Murray, a few nights later.

Sandy Koufax once said, “Pitching is the art of instilling fear, by making a man flinch.”

On the mound, the best pitcher in baseball today knows exactly where the baseball is going.

Even if he doesn’t wear his glasses.

*

“I didn’t like myself,” Maddux said in an interview, speaking of his early days in the major leagues.

He pitched in P towns in the minors, Pikeville, then Peoria, then Pittsfield, looking for an edge. He wasn’t very big--6 feet. He wasn’t very fast--mid-80s. He did have winning records at all those stops, but even after Maddux got to the Cubs’ triple-A farm club in Iowa and rang up a record of 10-1, he felt something was missing.

Next thing he knew, in midseason, 1987, the Cubs called him up.

And he went 6-14.

“You didn’t like yourself?”

“Well,” Maddux said, “I don’t mean I didn’t like my self. I didn’t like myself as a pitcher. I didn’t seem to have the right state of mind. My stuff was good enough to win, but I wasn’t winning.”

Becoming a top pitcher means doing whatever it takes.

Brush back a superstar.

Throw a slow one to a fastball crusher.

Get some help.

Maddux consulted a psychologist. No lightbulbs went on above his head. No miracles were worked. He simply found his self-confidence. He said of the 1988 season, “I went out to the mound with a whole new attitude.”

And he went 18-8.

Abruptly, a man with a mediocre fastball, 10 mph slower than Roger Clemens’, 10 inches shorter than Randy Johnson, nearly 10 years younger than Orel Hershiser, changed from a caterpillar to a butterfly. He developed a change-of-pace pitch that made batters flail. A “circle change,” it is known as in the trade. Without hesitation, he threw it with the bases full, on full counts.

Sandy Koufax had a hook. Nolan Ryan had a heater.

Maddux’s out pitch was a changeup.

“When the other guys get you out,” Houston Astro third baseman Sean Berry said, during a divisional series last week dominated by the pitching of the Braves, “you shake your head, wondering why. You think, ‘How did Maddux get me out on a 40-mph pitch?’ You wonder if he put a little hypnotism on you.

“At least when [John] Smoltz gets you out, you walk back saying, ’90 miles an hour, right on the black,’ or, ‘He froze me with a 95-mph fastball.’ You have a better idea about what’s happening to you.”

A batter has two choices.

According to that other ace of diamonds, Smoltz, if someone steps in against Maddux, the choices are: “You can swing at everything, figuring it’s going to be a strike anyway. Or, you can try to outguess him.

“Neither of them works.”

*

This was why Atlanta had gone after Maddux in the first place.

For several seasons, the right-hander had labored for the Cubs, who go to the World Series about as often as Orel Hershiser goes to Gold’s Gym. From 1988 through 1992, Maddux’s records with the humble Cubbies were 18-8, 19-12, 15-15, 15-11, 20-11.

Thus began his current run of 10 seasons in succession with 15 victories or more.

And his run of four consecutive Cy Young Awards

How is a mystery to many. Maddux offers few clues. He has no unorthodox delivery, no Juan Marichal leg kick, no Luis Tiant or Hideo Nomo twist. He has a slider, a splitter, no spitter, no slurve. He doesn’t even need to do his homework. Roger Angell, a distinguished writer and baseball historian for the New Yorker, once wrote: “Maddux, who has a glazed, pallid stare, studies hitters and hitting styles so obsessively that he confessed, after his [World Series] masterpiece, that he hadn’t found it necessary to look at most of the dossier compiled by the Atlanta scouts.”

Maddux makes no explanations.

“I just make pitches,” is his mantra.

You will hear this same statement from him, again and again. Not unbeatable by any means--Maddux is 8-6 in postseason play, compared to Smoltz’s 10-2--he remains remarkably difficult to hit. For example, in winning Game 2 of last year’s World Series from the New York Yankees, 4-0, of the 82 pitches Maddux threw over eight innings, a staggering 62 of them were strikes. He just makes pitches?

Even he said after that one, “This is a game I’ll probably take to the grave with me.”

This season, Maddux won 19 games and walked 20 batters.

Maddux is only 31. Koufax was that age, when he retired. Koufax won 165 games. Maddux has already won 184. Twenty-five years ago, Koufax was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. As long as Maddux’s arm remains sound, and as long as he works for an organization as sound as Atlanta’s, he could be the only active pitcher with a legitimate shot at winning 300 games.

As a Brave, Maddux’s record is 89-33.

“It’s a privilege to catch him,” says Eddie Perez, his personal catcher now that O’Brien is elsewhere.

Over a six-year span, Maddux’s earned-run average is 2.14.

No pitcher since World War II has had a stretch such as this, Atlanta’s statisticians boast. They claim that Koufax’s ERA was 2.19, during a select six-season period (1961-66) with the Dodgers.

Maddux makes big money pitching baseballs.

He recently signed the richest contract of any pitcher in history.

Maddux makes little money pitching products.

“Every time you turn on a TV, you see Ken Griffey or Cal Ripken selling something,” says Atlanta’s manager, Bobby Cox. “They deserve it. But how about a guy who wins the pennant, year after year?”

Maddux makes few mistakes.

In that Game 1 World Series two-hitter of 1995, Cleveland’s hitters hit four balls out of the infield. Asked afterward what preparation he had made, Maddux said he got a couple of tips on the Indians from his brother, Mike, who at the time was pitching for the Boston Red Sox. Aside from that . . .

Yes?

“You just make pitches,” Maddux said. “You know?”

Yes.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Destination Cooperstown

Is Greg Maddux one of the greatest pitchers of all time? His numbers say yes. A look at where Maddux ranks among the 56 pitchers in the Hall of Fame:

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CATEGORY STATISTICS RANK LEADER STATISTICS Winning Pct.: .630* 13th Whitey Ford .690 ERA 2.81 18th Ed Walsh 1.82 Hits Per 9 IP 7.97 18th Sandy Koufax 6.79 BB Per 9 IP 2.11 12th Addie Joss 1.41 Strikeouts Per 9 IP 6.30 11th Sandy Koufax 9.28

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* 184-108 record

Research: Houston Mitchell / Los Angeles Times