Gentle Tamer Of The Brutes

By John Cloud

If you think baseball is boring, you'll hate the games Greg Maddux pitches. At a time when hitters like Ken Griffey Jr. are thrilling teen fans bloated by a media diet of MTV and asteroid explosions, watching Maddux throw for the Atlanta Braves is like flipping to PBS. His fastball isn't fast (nearly 90 m.p.h. on his best day, vs. around 100 for a Nolan Ryan). His curveball barely curves. He has never pitched a no-hitter. All he does is win games. How? He finds a batter's weak spot and throws right at it nearly every time, which is why he will probably win an unprecedented fifth Cy Young pitching award this year. Still, the folks in Major League Baseball's promotion department must dread him. He doesn't even look like an athlete. His 175 lbs. are a little doughy, and when he's not on the mound in contact lenses, the guy wears nerdy glasses.

It's the baseball connoisseurs who worship him. Listen to this encomium by Serious Baseball Person and Washington Post writer Thomas Boswell: "Mark McGwire, Griffey and the rest are fabulous, but there have been others like them throughout history. It's possible, and becoming more probable with each amazing season of legerdemain, that there has never really been anybody like Greg Maddux." Indeed, Boswell said Maddux may be "the most remarkable and historically important player in baseball." Ever? Yes, ever.

Boswell has a case. Consider the stats: On average, the opposing team gets about two earned runs a game on Maddux--2.03, to be exact, since 1992, which is the lowest mark over such a long period in the postwar era. In 1994 his earned-run average was just 1.56. So far this year, it's 1.57. Sandy Koufax never had such a good year. Nor did Nolan Ryan. In fact, only two pitchers in modern baseball have: Bob Gibson (1.12 in 1968) and Dwight Gooden (1.53 in 1985).

So what makes Maddux so good, and why haven't you heard as much about him as about the sluggers? The two questions are related. Off the field, Maddux doesn't cavort with celebrities or even do endorsements. "I could be more Hollywood," he told TIME before a game last week, "but that ain't me." His family, golf and Nintendo are more him.

He's similarly unshowy on the mound. Maddux doesn't get tons of strikeouts (not even 200 in a year; the record is 383). He doesn't pitch a lot of shutouts. In other words, he doesn't starve batters--he just serves them table scraps, stuff they can't really smack. Lots of his pitches dribble into the infield. Almost none fly out of the park (only five this year and none in his five face-offs against McGwire). Jim Palmer, a Hall of Fame pitcher, calls Maddux "a master at late movement," a baseballese way of saying his pitches dance away at the end, eluding the bat when it's already flying forward. He connives to throw, from the same unhurried motion, at a wide variety of speeds. Wade Boggs once called Maddux "the David Copperfield of pitchers"--and he was thinking magic, not Dickens.

In an unscientific survey at a Braves game last week, TIME asked about a dozen teenage boys--baseball's bread and butter now as always--whom they liked better, Maddux or McGwire. McGwire won hands down (and the Maddux kids were, well, the dorks). Maddux himself loves home runs. "Hey, they make it exciting for me too," he says. He wants none of Boswell's superlatives. "I've given up thousands of hits, lost hundreds of games. I know how to fail." Would that we could all fail so well.

--By John Cloud