On Greg Maddux

Everyone is talking about Clemens and Maddux, so I thought I'd toss in a few more thoughts before the game. After all, unless these two meet up again, this could be the last time two 300-game winners meet up in this era. It seems like a good chance for a little bit of a personal narrative, because it isn't often that circumstances remind you of how important something like baseball was in your life. Baseball's deep history is unique in American sports not only because we can compare players across eras but because we can trace players across our lives.

I'm partial to pitchers. I have always been partial to pitchers. Baseball is at its best, I argue, when two pitchers are dueling it out for 9 innings in a close game rife with strategy and opportunities with a slim margin for error. My father prefers some action, which means some runs, but to me the blend of pageantry and competition of a baseball game is most intense when the game can be decided in a single moment, on the tiniest chance. It's these games that amplify -- at least for me -- the tiny moments that distinguish baseball as a sport.

I was lucky growing up, because my father brought me to baseball games before I was old enough to walk up steps, I think. Being the youngest, I think my dad was eager to start having all his children old enough to do the adult stuff that parents want to do with their kids, which for him amounts to sports. (He's driving with my older brother from Michigan to Indianapolis this weekend to see the Pacers / Celtics game. They're not Pacers fans, or Celtics fans, but that doesn't so much matter to him, because it could be a great game.) My dad has been to 37 or 38 baseball parks, and when I sat down to count the ones I've been to, I hardly remember a handful of the 19 I could come up with because I was too young when he brought me.

One of my first baseball memories is sorting 1987 Topps baseball cards. (The year with the wooden-art border.) At age 7, my older neighbor duped me into trading an '87 Bo Jackson rookie card for a Tim Pyznarski rookie card because they were both "Future Stars." I would sit there and sort cards by team, by Topps number, or by value according to Beckett, memorizing the ones I liked while my father watched sports on TV, keeping score and smoking his pipe. My mother made him quit smoking a pipe -- he just gave it up cold one day -- but it's a good thing she didn't try to excise the sports.

We lived in the far south suburbs of Chicago, which meant that it was easier to go to Sox games at Comiskey. We went to quite a few, always parking at IIT and walking over. I knew some guys in the Sox lineup because we used a set of White Sox player placemats for dinner. We also made it up to Wrigley a few times though, and those moments were special for a lot of reasons. It took longer to get there, which meant anticipation (and a long nap on the drive home.) It was hard finding parking in the neighborhood, even in those days long before the heavy parking restrictions. And Wrigley Field itself: I feel bad for anyone who never made it to Wrigley until they were an adult because its magic is at least a little bit wasted on you if you're old enough to get wasted.

There was Mark Grace, my older brother's favorite, and Ryne Sandberg, and Shawon Dunston (spelled correctly because we all pronounced it with two syllables, Sha-WAN), and Andre Dawson, and Rick Sutcliffe, and Rafael Palmeiro, (spelled correctly because Harry Caray couldn't pronounce it for the life of him. Come to think of it, listening to Harry try to pronounce Palmeiro isn't a bad way to invite kids into a broadcast if you think about it.) I could go on, because we went on baseball card day and I got a team set of oversized cards wrapped in cellophane sponsored by a hotdog company. I knew it was a sin to open a special cellophane pack, but someone in the crowd gave me an extra set that they didn't want, which I took as an invitation to open the set to study.

Looking back, maybe the one guy I'm particularly glad to remember with this team is Greg Maddux, because there's no better example of how good baseball is -- even today -- to someone like I was.

We moved to Minnesota when I was turning 10, the summer of 1990. We went to Twins games, which were great because in 1991 the trio of Scott Erickson, Jack Morris & Kevin Tapani were brilliant -- so brilliant, they won the World Series. (Do you remember that Scott Erickson wore black socks & shoes during that brilliant start of the season where he won 12 straight games and had a miniscule ERA before an injury kept him out of the all star game?) In fact, now that I think about it, this might have been the formative year when I began to emphasize or sympathize with pitching.

You see, when we moved to Minnesota, I decided not to play little league. It might not seem like a big deal, but it was. In a way, it was my rebellion against our family's moving.

I had been a little league all star first baseman at ages 8 & 9 in Richton Park, our suburb, but then again so were like a third of the players so don't think I'm trying to say I was all that great. It's just that I was good enough to look forward to ballgames because I knew I would start almost every game and never have to hear people cheer just because I tried hard and got the right cleats on the right foot. All my friends played baseball. I went to a private Lutheran school, so I got to make friends with the public school kids on the baseball team. I still remember being 7 on a team for 7 & 8 year olds, and I forgot my cup, but there was a rule that you couldn't play without a cup -- a good rule -- so when I realized this in the first inning I had to tell the coach and he had to pull me from the game and I sat there dejected, so the coach made his son (one of the 8 year olds) come over and tell me something about how it was OK because it could happen to anyone and I would be out there again next game. The kid never talked to me before but I still remember it because it made me feel like I was a part of a team, which could be like a support system. We lived across the street from a park with a baseball diamond, and my birthday parties were always baseball parties where my dad pitched underhand to all of us. I used to shag tennis balls for my older brother and our neighbors when they went over and hit them. There were the Bulls in the winter, but we all know that for kids, life is summer and summer is life and for us, summer was baseball.

In Minnesota, I stopped thinking about baseball like a player and started thinking about baseball as a fan. Even when we moved to Michigan after 2 years, I never returned to playing baseball. Sports were still everything to me, and I still went to a dozen games a year with my dad, but it was all a little bit different.

Lots of things are different. Now along with sports for recreation there is music and women and parties and bars. Now I understand that baseball isn't pure because it also exploits me. Baseball is cluttered with unfortunate chatter, just like the rest of life.

Except I get the sense that Greg Maddux doesn't approach it that way at all. When he pitches, it's balls and strikes. It's shading a hitter. It's setting him up, pitch to pitch, at bat to at bat.

Make no mistakes: anyone who talks about how you can never count out Atlanta because they play the game the right way is talking about Greg Maddux's legacy as much or more as they're talking about Bobby Cox. It is no coincidence that they won the division title every season he played there. Everyone took his cue from Maddux. At least from the outside, it seems that his blend of confidence with humility, his talent and intelligence, and his seasoned sense of humor are pervasive. I wish he was still young and filled with vitality, because he might have been able to do the same for the Cubs legacy as he did for the Braves.

You can't say the same for Roger Clemens. Clemens left when his team(s) wanted him to stay. Maddux never did this. He came up with the Cubs, who sort of betrayed him by not coming up with the money that the Yankees and the Braves did, but you have to respect that he took less than the Yankees offered to go to Atlanta. At least I have to respect that. When Atlanta decided it wasn't worth paying him for what he had done -- and only offered to pay him for what he would do in the future -- he returned to the Cubs. Now we get to admire him 32 times a season again instead of once or twice.

I'm not going to argue that Maddux is a better pitcher than Clemens. I hope he out-duels him tonight because the Cubs need this game for momentum, but Clemens is spectacular. What I am saying is that if I was picking teams at Pierce Park, across the street from my house in Richton Park, Illinois, I would probably pick Maddux first because I'd rather play with someone who played the right way. I would pick him because I liked him better. If I owned a team and money was no object, I would have signed him and I would pay him until he retired, not only for what he can do for me but for what he had done for me. For someone who prefers pitching it doesn't get much better than this, if Maddux can defeat Clemens tonight. To me, it will serve him -- each of them -- right.