Off Target

In pitching, just like in real estate, the three most important factors are location, location and location. Live on the corners and a pitcher will thrive. Come in over the plate and the ball could wind up in the next zip code.

Pitchers, being smart guys, learn that formula early on. Applying it, however, is quite another matter.

Atlanta’s Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux have won six Cy Young awards between them this decade because of their success with that recipe. Neither of them blows batters away with high-octane stuff. Instead, they win with savvy and skill, a finesse style of pitching.

So, how come this season they’ve suddenly turned sour?

“I think for both of us, our location has not been good,” Glavine said, “Location is what separates good pitchers from mediocre pitchers.

“I’ve had good stuff but my mechanics have been off. I can sit here all day and tell you that I have to be on the edge. When I’ve been good, that’s the way I’ve pitched. It’s easy to say. Sometimes, it’s not easy to do.”

That’s what makes baseball such a compelling and confounding game.

In the introduction to his new book, “Baseball For Everybody,” Glavine writes of baseball, “No one fully understands it. Baseball is mystical and baseball is perfect.”

Maddux and Glavine, however, have been something short of that and their struggles have been alarming for Atlanta, especially now that John Smoltz is on the disabled list.

After opening the season at 4-0 for the first time in his career, Maddux got caught in a downward spiral. In his next three starts, he went 0-3 with an 8.66 ERA, giving up 17 runs and 36 hits. In 50 1-3 innings, he gave up a major league-high 79 hits and opponents were batting .356 against him, worst in the NL.

Glavine started 0-3 but then seemed to have straightened out, allowing only two earned runs in his next 20 1-3 innings. Then he got burned by the Chicago Cubs for five runs and seven hits in 5 2-3 innings.

Go figure.

All they could do was get ready for their next starts. The great thing about baseball is there’s always another chance, even if it takes pitchers five days to get to it.

Things seemed better for Glavine--in a recent game against Pittsburgh--seven innings, five hits and three earned runs.

“I’m not where I want to be yet,” he said. “Now, it’s just one bad inning or one bad hitter or one bad sequence. That’s a whole lot better than it was early on. I’m getting there.”

Was the changing strike zone a problem for the two struggling Braves?

“Not at all,” Glavine said. “If anything, I think we’re throwing too many strikes over the heart of the plate. You can’t live in that area. I’m missing over the plate. If you throw good pitches there, they get hit. If you throw bad ones there, they get hit really hard.”

Even in the puzzle this early season has been, Glavine managed that rarest of commodities, a complete game, one of only two the Braves’ staff had produced going into this week.

Nine-inning pitchers are becoming baseball dinosaurs. Through the season’s first 530 games, there were just 39 complete games. A year ago, at about the same time, there were 56. Ten years ago, major league pitchers completed 23% of their starts. Right now, they’re at about 7%.

The difference is the care and, some people claim, the coddling of young arms.

“Younger guys have restrictions on what they’re able to do in the minors,” Glavine said. “They’re limited on pitch counts. Then you have the specialization of bullpens. Everybody’s got a plan with long relievers and closers.

“You need to have inning-eaters. We’ve always had three starters who could eat 220 innings a year. If you’re going to the bullpen all the time, what is the bullpen going to be like in August?”

Atlanta’s relief corps suffered two major setbacks when closer Mark Wohlers suddenly lost the ability to throw strikes and his successor, Kerry Ligtenberg, went down with a season-ending injury.

Now the Braves depend on a staff of young relievers and older inning-eaters. They just have to get past the indigestion Maddux and Glavine have been experiencing lately.