I’ve heard many such stories of Maddux’s effect on his teammates and it makes me wonder: taking this into account, would he be in the top 10 most valuable players of all time?
No, you’re right, he also made an unsupported value judgment (a third or better of the best six seasons of all the HOFers over the past 130 years?) that I can reject out of hand until he shows me why he thinks so, and how they are clearly better than other seasons. The fact is, he’s just guessing at their ranking among great seasons. They may be the two greatest years ever, or seasons I would rank 20 and 29, or whatever.
Besides, we’re getting off-topic here. This thread began with the OP claiming that Maddux is in the “top five for sure.” I think I’ve shown that wherever he ranks, it’s certainly not “for sure” in the top five. He may be in some people’s top five but that’s not what was claimed. He seems to be in fewer than half of the top fives cited in this thread.
ERA+, which as I said isn’t a perfect stat, has him as having the 4th and 5th best seasons ever. I wasn’t arguing he was a clearly one of the top 5 pitchers ever though. I was disputing this.
and your argument that he was never dominant. Even if you want to argue he 2 of the best 30 seasons that doesn’t change the premise.
Really? You think if you took a time machine back to 1993 and argued that McDowell and Johnson were better than Maddux, you’d be greeted with anything but scorn? (Outside of Chicago or Seattle, anyway).
And my point is that there really isn’t. There’s a superficial case to be made based on 60’s nostalgia, but if you look at the facts, Maddux’s peak was at least as good as Koufax’s, and then Maddux won another 200+ games on top of that.
45 posts and no “Lefty” Steve Carlton mentions. Sad
We’ll never know, will we?
This is an opinion
Actually, no, he won fewer than 200 games more than Koufax, but if he had won 600 more games than Koufax at a rate of 10 per year and had kept in shape until the age of 155, that still wouldn’t make him clearly better. Nice try, though.
Now, about those post-season numbers…
Some of Maddux’s best stats haven’t even been mentioned here yet.
17 consecutive seasons of at least 15 wins (most all time)
18 Gold Gloves (most all time)
7 seasons leading his league in starts (most all time)
18 seasons finishing in the top 10 in the league in wins (most all time)
It won’t happen for another 5 years, but I’m already annoyed that Maddux won’t be voted into the Hall Of Fame on every ballot. If I ruled the world, anyone who failed to vote for a guy that got at least 95% of the vote would lose his voting privileges. The morons who didn’t vote for Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn proved to me, at least, that they shouldn’t be involved in these kinds of decisions.
Randy Johnson should be in the conversation about All-Time greats, IMO, along with Clemens and Maddux. FTR, I am a Mariner fan, though.
I loved watching Maddux pitch. He will be missed.
While Maddux was a very fine fielder you have to admit this is kind of a sad joke. It’s more a commentary on how little the managers and coaches care about their Gold Glove ballots than it is on Greg Maddux’s fielding.
That’s probably true, but Maddux had to build up several years worth of momentum before he became the automatic choice. He really was a fantastic fielder of his position, which most pitchers never really care about.
GG awards are preposterous, little better than the coveted “RickJay thinks this dude fields well” award (which I personally would put much stock in). The odds are against anyone actually leading a league in ANYTHING quantifiable for 18 straight seasons is ludicrous, so GGs (in which it is not uncommon for someone to have five or ten year hold on an award) are sorta by definition just unreliable and lazy accounts of misinformed opinions (which are possible to sustain for decades.) As an ilustration, Bill James just examined closely Jim Kaat’s record (the one Maddux broke) for GGs by a pitcher, and revealed that there were seasons where Kaat led the league in errors, had an absymal fielding percentage, handled relatively few chances, etc while other (typical younger) pitchers had far better fielding records, yet Kaat won the GG easily.
The least impressive thing about Maddux to me is his ability to get the umpires to widen the strike zone for him, in that his whole game depended on control, and the strike zone in pre-Questec times could be gamed. I saw many, many games that he won not by pitching spectacularly well but simply by getting call after call that was highly questionable to say the least. Koufax didn’t need any such help, he simply blew batters away, and I think the difference showed up in the post-season where Maddux couldn’t rely on umpires to cut him any special slack, being so closely scrutinized, and where he was nothing special.
The second-least impressive thing about Maddux is his IP. At their peaks, when they were both winning games at a .700+ clip with under 2 ERAs, Koufax was pitching about 100 more innings per year. Madduz was famous for begging out of games --even close games–where he felt a tad peaked, while Koufax was famous for pitching World Series complete shutouts on short rest. The difference between them at their peaks was that K did everything that Maddux did, plus strike out twice the number of batters (the single most dominating, pitcher-centric thing a man can do), while putting in 100 excellent IPs that Maddux chose not to pitch.
Maddux was a great accumulator of records, very durable, and an excellent pitcher. But he was no Koufax.
Just comparing BFP by season, Maddux topped out at 1070 or so, Koufax had three years in 1200s. That mean that K essentially pitched Maddux’s load and then faced 200 extra batters at that caliber of play, or about what, six or seven starts? That ain’t hay.
In post-season play, Koufax pitched 8 WS games (7 starts) and threw 4 complete games. In 30 post-season starts, Maddux completed 2 games. Mddux had a losing record in the post-season (11-14) with an ERA slightly above his regular-season ERA (in post-season play, runs are scarcer, so the norm would be that his ERA should go slightly down), while K had a winning record (only 4-3, which is amazing in light of his WS ERA, sharply down from even his regular season ERA: facing the likes of Killebrew, Oliva, Mantle, Maris, Frank Robinson, et al K had an incredible ERA in the WS of 0.95 in 57 IP.) Maddux whose WS ERAs are the most impressive of his post-season play, had a 2.09 ERA in 38.2 IP, giving up 9 ER, In nearly 20 more IP, Koufax gave up only 6 earned runs. That means that, in addition his already good WS stats, if Maddux had pitched two more complete game shutouts in the World Series, his ERA would still be 50% higher than Koufax’s was. That ain’t hay, either.
Maddux was a very good fielder, hitter, and base-runner. There is no disputing that. He didn’t deserve 18 GG, but he did earn a few of them at least.
The game was NOT completely dependant upon control. It was also based on his phenominal abilities to change speeds and cause movement. If it was so easy to do, why couldn’t any other pitchers pull it off? Do you think Maddux was the only guy the umpires liked? And once again, Maddux post season stats aren’t really any different thea his regular season stats.
Maybe, and I know this is a strange concept, but Maddux thought it would be more valuable to throw 10 more years of 200 innings than a couple extra hundred innings at his peak. I know those extra innings don’t count for PRR, but they did help actual teams win baseball games. Would Maddux been better off throwing 300 innings a season and buring out at 30? Saying Koufak was better than Maddux, because he threw more innings a season is absurd.
Really? You’re talking about begging out of games early, about the guy who completed 5 or more games a season for 11 straight seasons? Please.
I could go on and on making a case as to why Maddux is one of the, if not the, greatest pitcher of all time, but I won’t since someone has already done it better than I can.
http://mlb.fanhouse.com/2008/12/09/from-the-windup-greg-maddux-retires-as-the-greatest-pitcher-in/
I was looking for a single part to quote here to make the point, but really, every single paragraph and every stat in the article is phenomenal. Just read the whole thing.
Well, as long as you’re asking so nicely, sure.
Five CG per year? Amazing. For Eleven straight years. Oh, My, God. That’s just unbelievable. That’s a total of 55 CGs. Incredible.
Of course Koufax completed 54 games in his two final seasons, so that may help get the comparison in perspective.
As to the begging out of games, let me ask you to Google it and see what you turn up. Maddux was renown for asking to be taken out of games, or simply refusing to go out after he felt himself to be tired.
It’s two different games, Koufax’s being the far more demanding one, and his performance the far more impressive one, at his peak. You can rattle on all you like about Maddux’s career numbers–I’m not arguing that Koufax was better or more valuable over the course of a career. I’m simply disputing the statement that Maddux had a better peak, which is simply absurd.
Part of it is the difference between how pitchers were used in the 1960s and the 1990s. They were asked to do much more, start more, stay later into games, and Koufax did that better than any of his contemporaries. If you want to say that Maddux was able to pitch longer, perhaps because those grueling demands weren’t made on his arm, that’s fine, I agree. He did. But he did NOT pitch under the same conditions Koufax did, was used less, was babied more, was taken out of games anytime his manager thought he might be tired (and sometimes when his manager didn’t think so), and Koufax deserves some credit for pitching as well as he did. Give it up.
There is an at least in there. He had well more than 5 some years.
Not Really. Pitchers era, pitcher park, more easy outs in the lineup, less patient hitters. Not really like comparisons here.
Because it is much better for a pitcher to go out when he doesn’t have anything left. That way he can blow the lead and get hurt.
There is a reason that pitchers though many more complete games in the 60’s than the 90’s, and it isn’t because they were tougher. Koufax’s complete games were a product of his environment. Switch them in history and MAddux would have completed many more, and Koufax many less.
Maddux did it better than his contemporaries too.
He said at least five per year. Maddux pitched 87 complete games over those 11 years, which works out to eight per year. It’s way lower than what you would’ve seen decades ago, for sure, but it doesn’t suggest he was babied more than any other current pitcher.
I’d never put myself in the top echelon of baseball posters here, but I’ve never heard this either. Maddux threw a pretty high number of innings in his best years and completed some games with amazingly low pitch counts. And you should probably cite your own claim rather than asking other people to do it.
Okay. I concede, I did not know that particular stat. 54 in 2 seasons is fucking insane. And I agree, pitching in the 60s and pitching in the 90s/08s are completely different animals. Sandy never had to deal with roided out, best of the world, players. Regardless, he is also one of my heroes and I really don’t want to be having this argument.
Suffice it to say, they’re both excellent pitchers, the best of their era and the elite in baseball history. I will definitely miss watching Maddux pitch. The guy was an artist on the mound.
It’s a well-known fact about Maddux. I’d be amazed if some of these Maddux fans here haven’t heard it many, many times. If I hear from some of them who claim never to have heard this complaint about Maddux, I will post a link to a source, but this is like me demanding someone to link to the claim that Maddux got a lot of strike-zone calls.
Maddux left some games after throwing not a ton of pitches late in his career. However since PRR is only talking peak, it is non-issue. In 1994 Maddux started 25 games. He completed 10 of them and average over 8 innings a game. That is insane for the 90’s. In 1995 he started 28 games and completed 10 of them, averaging just under 7.5 innings a game. If it wasn’t for the strike he would approached 300 innings. Going back a little earlier he threw 260+ innings from 1991-1993. Are we really arguing about his durability?