Hall of Famer Maddux shares pitching expertise at UNLV
Hall of Famer Maddux spreads his collected wisdom
Greg Maddux learned discipline early in his life. ¶ His father was in the Air Force, which meant not only a structured lifestyle but a childhood moving around from Texas to Spain. ¶ It was that upbringing that molded a Hall of Famer.
Maddux, who graduated from Valley High School in Las Vegas and still calls Las Vegas home, developed into one of baseball’s all-time best pitchers. He won 355 games and four Cy Young Awards and was elected into the Hall of Fame in 2014. He was also part of a trio of pitchers and teammates in the Hall of Fame alongside Tom Glavine and John Smoltz.
Now a special assistant to Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, Maddux
:• travels within the organization at times to help younger players. He’ll also join the UNLV baseball team as an assistant coach this fall.
During a recent stop in Oklahoma City to meet with the Dodgers Triple-A team, he talked about his childhood, his remarkable career with the Cubs, Braves, Padres and Dodgers, and more:
We moved Around A lot. I remember changing schools a lot, and maybe it was good. Maybe the fact that in baseball you move around a lot, you change teams, you change cities, you travel every 10 days, so that part was not really an adjustment for me.
There was some discipline. You had to hold yourself accountable. Probably the biggest thing — I didn’t realize it then — but I think being in Spain there was no TV — well, there was in Spanish, but we didn’t speak Spanish — and there were no video games. So we entertained ourselves outside and we used sports to do that. We played all of the sports. All of the kids in the neighborhood were in the same boat.
We would show up at the neighborhood park and we’d get a game going. We’d play and actually have fun playing. We didn’t realize we were competing because there was competition going on. We were just playing because that’s what we did in our spare time.
I had weight issues where I didn’t weigh enough to play
football at the time. I probably enjoyed basketball more, but I was just better at baseball. Mr. (Ralph) Meder (a former scout) said I was pretty good in baseball and good enough to get drafted and I might want to take it a little more serious, and I did. It’s not about size. It’s real
ly about speed. You don’t have to be big to have speed. If you have arm speed, bat speed, foot speed, that’s going to allow you to play past high school. That’s something that all of these players you see around here, they all possess one of the three of those things, if not all three.
(With the Cubs in 1989) was the first taste of winning, even though we lost in the playoffs. As a player, it was the first time I experienced winning from a team standpoint at that level.
I remember when we won in ‘89 (Cubs manager Don Zimmer) was so excited he jumped up on the table in the clubhouse and it broke. We thought he might have hurt himself — he slammed down and landed on his
back. Now he’s laying on his back and he’s like “I don’t (care). I’m so happy.”
The expectations and the confidence we had (in Atlanta) were we were going to win the division. Even in spring training it was just a mindset that over 162 games our pitching was going to be good enough to win our division, it was going to be good enough to get to postseason. That’s what I remember the most, especially the first month I was over there.
Coming from Chicago where there were years over there if we played .500 it was
a great year. Over there .500 was out of the question. It was, “Let’s win the division early so we can set the rotation for the postseason.” It was a totally different mindset. I think Bobby (Cox, Braves manager) and John Schuerholz (general manager) and the players all understood we’re here to win, we’re going to have fun when we’re not on the field, but when we walk on the field it’s business and we’re going to try to beat you.
Bobby was awesome, he was very supportive, had your back. As long as you prepared correctly and did your job, you could do whatever you wanted. You had to hold yourself accountable for when it was time to have fun and when it was time to work, and Bobby gave us that freedom.
The one thing that he said — and it sounds weird coming from him — was you don’t have to win to have fun. Well, it’s like that’s easy at the time with seven or eight in a row. But he’s right. Obviously, you want to win, you want to do everything you can to win, the game’s about winning but the bottom line is there’s some unwritten rule if you don’t win you can’t have fun, and that’s not the case. Bobby is the first manager that said it. Honesty with him is what we appreciated
as players.
I’ll say this: Probably Barry Bonds and Tony Gwynn … were the first hitters that taught me you beat lineups and not hitters. You have to find where your 24-27 outs are in the lineup, and it might not be with that guy. Maybe you’ve got to get these three guys out three times.
Tony Gwynn was probably the best hitter. Barry Bonds was probably the most dan
gerous hitter. Then there were always guys who scared you, scared the (daylights) out of you. Gary Sheffield, (Mike) Piazza, Jeff Bagwell. There were a lot of guys that didn’t scare you but hit you good, maybe Mickey Morandini, Hal Morris. There were guys in a lineup that I’d rather pitch to this guy than that guy. If I have to pitch to this guy, I will, but I’m never pitching to that guy. You picked your battles and hope your guys scored more runs than they did.
You hear things in baseball, you experience things in baseball and you try to pass them down to whatever fits that situation. You ask questions anticipating what’s going to happen down the road and you try to prepare yourself for that.
See, these players have this opportunity to do something that they’ve loved doing since they were 5 years old. Anytime you can find a job that you enjoy doing, that’s awesome. Good for you. You’re ahead of the world. All of these guys have that opportunity, and if they do it well and they commit and try to get the most out of their ability and don’t leave anything on the table they’ll be fine. That was my thinking. I better take full advantage of this opportunity in front of me or I’m going to have to go back to Vegas and I’m going to end up dealing poker, Blackjack, a job I didn’t want to do when I was 5 years old.