Presented by POOL SCOUTS.
This Day In Sports…April 14, 1966:
The birthday of one of Major League Baseball’s great pitchers over the past 40 years. Greg Maddux spent most of his 23-year career with the Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves—he split his final three seasons between the L.A. Dodgers and San Diego Padres. Maddux’s accomplishments are many, but this is the topper: he was the first and only pitcher in big league history to win four consecutive Cy Young Awards (1992-95). Maddux was known as “Mad Dog,” which is not a coincidence for Boise State fans, as quarterback Maddux “Mad Dog” Madsen was indeed named after him. The 355-game winner was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008 in his first year of eligibility.
During that Cy Young run with Atlanta, Maddux went 75-29 with a 1.98 ERA, capped by numbers of 19-2 and 1.63 during the Braves’ World Series championship season in 1995. Maddux is also the only MLB pitcher ever to win at least 15 games for 17 straight seasons, and he’s the only 300-game winner to log 3,000 strikeouts while walking fewer than 1,000 batters. And no pitcher in history was awarded more Gold Gloves than Maddux, who had 18.
Maddux threw his 300th career victory on August 7, 2004, in an 8-4 Cubs win over the Giants in San Francisco. The 300-game winner is an endangered species in Major League Baseball—in fact, it might be extinct. The closest pitcher to 300 right now is Justin Verlander, who this season has rejoined his original team, the Detroit Tigers. Verlander has 266 victories and, at the age of 43, wants to pitch until he’s 45 in an effort to get the other 34 wins. In four starts for the Tigers, he is 0-1 with a 6.75 ERA. Verlander is not trending in the right direction.
Maddux had a very odd start to his big league career. He was called up by the Cubs on Labor Day weekend in 1986, and he was in the dugout for a September 2 game against the Houston Astros at Wrigley Field. The contest went into extra innings and was suspended due to darkness, as Wrigley wouldn’t have lights for another two years. It was resumed the following day. With the Cubs short on players, Maddux made his major league debut as a pinch-runner in the 17th inning. He then pitched the 18th inning—and took the loss.
But no pitcher in the past 60 years has notched more career victories than Maddux. In fact only one hurler has since 1924: Warren Spahn with 363 wins from 1942-65. The only players to reach 300 in the past 30 years are Roger Clemens (354), one-time Braves teammate Tom Glavine (305) and Randy Johnson (303). With starters rarely going more than five or six innings in the modern game, it will probably never happen again. Greg Maddux…60 years old today.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
