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Interesting read about Maddux

Greg Maddux: A Hall of Fame Approach That Carried An Average Arm to Cooperstown
2014-01-08 16:40:36.565 GMT
Jan. 8 (Washington Post) -- When Greg Maddux was in his
pitching prime, I spent several days in spring training talking
with him about pitching and watching his baseball habits. Almost
everything he said was new to me. On Wednesday, he stands on the
brink of election to the Hall of Fame, yet I have never heard any
other pitcher mention his basic insights about pitching. What he
did and why his keen mind had chosen to do it that way are
largely unexplored.
This week, many will celebrate Maddux's 355 wins, the
second-highest total in the last 100 years. His dual personality
will get a knowing nod from friends: an average-sized nondescript
everyman who could pass for a math teacher, but a tenacious Mad
Dog on the mound. In a clubhouse ex-Braves president Stan Kasten
said, "He's funny; he's totally nuts." We'll never know the
frat-house anecdotes that caused the most laughs or head shakes.
Maddux should be one of the most-copied pitchers ever, yet
few would even know where to begin, because he seldom opened up
about what he believed about pitching and why.
[More from Thomas Boswell on the Hall of Fame]
First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed
of a pitch with any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he
pointed at a road a quarter-mile away and said it was impossible
to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph unless there was
another car nearby to offer a point of reference.
"You just can't do it," he said. Sometimes hitters can pick
up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are
different releases points or if a curveball starts with an upward
hump as it leaves the pitcher's hand. But if a pitcher can change
speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.
"Except," Maddux said, "for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn."
Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters,
Maddux's main goal was to "make all of my pitches look like a
column of milk coming toward home plate." Every pitch should look
as close to every other as possible, all part of that "column of
milk." He honed the same release point, the same look, to all his
pitches, so there was less way to know its speed — like fastball
92 mph, slider 84, changeup 76.
One day I sat a dozen feet behind Maddux's catcher as three
Braves pitchers, all in a row, did their throwing sessions
side-by-side. Lefty Steve Avery made his catcher's glove explode
with noise from his 95-mph fastball. His curve looked like it
broke a foot-and-a-half. He was terrifying. Yet I could barely
tell the difference between Greg's pitches. Was that a slider, a
changeup, a two-seam or four-seam fastball? Maddux certainly
looked better than most college pitchers, but not much. Nothing
was scary.
Afterward, I asked him how it went, how he felt, everything
except "Is your arm okay?" He picked up the tone. With a cocked
grin, like a Mad Dog whose table scrap doesn't taste quite right,
he said, "That's all I got."
Then he explained that I couldn't tell his pitches apart
because his goal was late quick break, not big impressive break.
The bigger the break, the sooner the ball must start to swerve
and the more milliseconds the hitter has to react; the latter the
break, the less reaction time. Deny the batter as much
information — speed or type of last-instant deviation — until it
is almost too late.
But not entirely too late: Maddux didn't want swings and
misses for strikeouts, but preferred weak defensive contact and
easy outs. He sought pitches that looked hittable and identical —
getting the hitter to commit to swing — but weren't. Any pitch
that didn't conform to this, even if it looked good, was scrapped
as inefficient.
When available, Maddux studied tape of every home run hit in
the big leagues the previous day. That's all: homers. Where were
the danger zones — location, location? Though he didn't try to
maximize velocity or break, just late movement, Maddux did
believe that almost perfect control of every pitch was the one
essential gift for him. And he was a fanatic on command.
One day he pitched alone on an empty field except for his
catcher. I've never seen a pitcher use an entire empty field for
practice. And I have never seen one show much emotion in a
supposedly meaningless practice period.
With no one to distract him, Maddux concentrated like an
actual game. He might throw a dozen pitches and show nothing. But
on the next, if he missed his spot badly, he would rip the air
with a curse, his head snapping with the violence of his yell.
Always the same word, like a gunshot; perhaps it hurt his throat,
like self-punishment. But in a second, he was calm.
The final pitching product was one of the most elegant,
intelligent and fierce self-creations in American sports. Maddux
left hitters with an "I-am-stupid, kick-me" sign on their backs.
He pitched complete games in much less than two hours without
ever throwing one eye-popping pitch. Hundreds of pitchers could
do it — in theory. No one else ever has. The sequence, the mind,
the command, the intuition, the hauteur was all.
Few pitchers ever worked so quickly or showed such
understated arrogance, like his dismissive snag of a shot back
through the box or a third-out strut-off third strike — called —
on a changeup or swing-back fastball.
From ages 26 to 32, he started 226 games, walked just 222
unintentionally with a 2.15 ERA and a 127-53 record (.706). How
could he always seem so certain?
After retiring from the military, Maddux's father moved his
family to Las Vegas, where he became a casino blackjack dealer.
Growing up, Greg asked his dad if he worried about the large sums
of money he might lose for his boss if someone got hot and went
on a run. Might it cost him his job?
His father explained there were basic rules for a dealer:
when to take a hit and when to hold. He simply had to do what
he'd been taught. The odds were in favor of the casino, "the
house." Dad might have a bad night or bad week, but he told his
son "in the end, the house always wins."
Greg Maddux figured out early, and never forgot, that his
next pitch was actually the next turn of the (baseball) card.
With several pitches, four strike zone quadrants and many changes
of speed, the variations were vast. Know their strengths; avoid
them. The rest belonged to you — a stacked deck.
But behind every Maddux success was his utter confidence
that, with a selection of masterfully controlled pitches that
looked identical until the last second, hitters were
fundamentally and forever at such a basic disadvantage that he
was in complete command of his long-term fate.
"My dad never worried. He was 'the house,'" Maddux said.
After a nice little pause, a slight change of speeds, his
sly hole-card grin snuck out.
"I am the house," he said.