4 ms·
Greg Maddux was one of my baseball heroes growing up!! I'm not sure if this is the article you're talking about, but it has a few paragraphs about what you're t
by hluska 10y ago
Greg Maddux was one of my baseball heroes growing up!! I'm not sure if this is the article you're talking about, but it has a few paragraphs about what you're talking about:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/greg-maddux-a-hall-of-fame-approach-that-carried-an-average-arm-to-cooperstown/2014/01/07/fdd7ae82-77d3-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/greg-maddux-...
(If you don't want to click, here are the relevant passages.)
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, change-up 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.