Yesterday was a bittersweet day for Cubs legends.  Ron Santo was denied entry into the Hall of Fame again, the fourth time his peers on the Veterans’ Committee have left him standing with the fat girls on the outside of the velvet rope.  Greg Maddux decided that 23 seasons as the best pitcher we ever saw was sufficient.

More ink and bloviate will be splattered over Santo than Maddux in and around Chicago the next few days.  Proof once again that when it comes to Chicago sports, we never fail to miss the real point.

Santo should have known the last time he was up for induction in 2006 that once and for all, the 60-some current Hall of Famers have no interest in letting him, or anybody else for that matter, join their little club in Cooperstown.  They’re in, they could give a shit if nobody else ever makes it.

I was completely foolish and thought that this time, with the ballot narrowed to only 10 names that they’d finally let Santo, or at least somebody, in.  But no.  At this point there is no reason for the Veterans’ Committee to exist.  Just shut it down.  If you don’t make it in during the 15 cracks you have at the writer’s ballot, you don’t get in.  It’ll save Ron some grief, and save us from having to her him be way too audible about it.

So we move on to the real story.  Our pal Greggie finally hung them up yesterday.  After 23 seasons, 355 wins (holy crap that’s a lot of wins) 3300 strikeouts in 5000 innings he’s decided he’s had enough.  The only pitcher in the Hall of Fame with 3000 strikeouts and less than 1000 walks is another former Cub, another guy who wore 31 and had more than on stint with the team.  Both of them liked grass, too.  Greg likes to play golf on it, Fergie Jenkins liked to try to smuggle it into Canada.

It appeared when Greg decided to pitch again in 2008 that he wouldn’t be able to avoid going over the 1,000 walk threshold.  He was sitting on 969 walks.  Ridiculous, right.  If he made 33 starts, his average for his career, he’d have to walk fewer than one guy a start, at 42 years old.

Guess how many he walked?

Oh, like you even have to guess.  So his career totals end up, 3,371 strikeouts and 999 walks.  Of course it did.  That competitive little bastard wasn’t going to give anybody the satisfaction of being his 1,000th walk.  Even in his 40s, with a little pot belly. His last walk was on September 8 to Brian Giles of the Padres.  He made three starts after that and faced 71 more batters, but didn’t walk a single one.

I’ve always been amused by the writers who say that Maddux won all those games without dominating stuff.  That’s bullshit.  He had dominating stuff.  Completely dominating stuff.  In his youth he threw regularly in the low ’90s, but he won in his later years pitching between 83-87 MPH.  But he was still dominant.  With Greg it was never about how hard he threw.  It was about three things.  His location, his ability to add or subtract speed from every one of his pitches, and most importantly, the movement on his pitches.  That’s what made him dominant.  It didn’t matter if he threw a fastball 84 or 92, if he made it break six or eight inches from the lefty batter’s box over the corner of the plate, you couldn’t hit it.

Over the years, Barry Rozner has written some excellent columns about his buddy, Greg Maddux.  Yesterday’s was not one of them.  It was ludicrous.  His premise was that Cubs fans didn’t know what they were going to be missing when he left after the 1992 season.  That of course, is just wrong.  We knew.  He’d just won a Cy Young at 26.  He’d already put together five seasons with 15 wins or more, including seasons of 18, 19 and 20 wins.  I distinctly remember how completely pissed I was at Larry Himes for fucking it up and letting him go.  If anybody looked a guarantee to be a great pitcher for a long time, it was Greg Maddux.

He will prove again that he’s smarter than those who believed he was nothing special when he left Chicago in 1992.

Who?  Who thought that?  I suppose it’s a veiled shot at Himes and Stanton Cook, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t he just write it?

You know a guy has had a great career when you go to pick his best season and there are too many to choose from.  This is unlike say, Jeff Pico, remember him, the first “next” Maddux?

So what was his best season?  Was it 1988 when he won 15 games by the All-Star break?  Probably not since he only won three afterward.

How about his Cubs Cy Young season in 1992?  He was 20-11 on a mediocre (78 wins) Cubs team surrounded by stars like Derrick May, Doug Dascenzo and Steve Buchele to name three.

But it’s hard to choose between his third and fourth Cy Young seasons.  Both were in seasons shortened by the strike.  In 1994 he was 16-6 with an absurd 1.52 ERA and allowed only four homers in 202 innings.  In 1995 he was 19-2 with a 1.63 ERA.

He led the National League in wins three times, he won four ERA titles.  Nine times he led the league in ratio of innings pitched to walks (including the last two seasons.)  Six times he finished in the top three in strikeouts.  He won 18 Gold Gloves.  He was the youngest player in baseball when he debuted in 1986 and he was the fourth oldest when last season ended.

But his legacy isn’t just one of greatness.  Greg always seemed like a regular guy.  His teammates loved him.  He just seemed to have a perspective that most athletes never achieve.

Oh, and we haven’t even mentioned his brilliant ability to recall situations and anticipate results.  A famous story was told by Todd Hollandsworth who played with Greg on the 2004 Cubs.  The Cubs were in Anaheim and Greg was pitching to Vladimir Guerrero and the umpire missed a call on a 1-2 fastball on the outer half.  It was clearly a strike.  Maddux, who rarely showed any emotion was visibly upset.  He snapped at the ball as it came back from Michael Barrett.  He paced around the mound.  Finally he got back up on the hill and Guerrero hit a sac fly to score Chone Figgins to tie the game.

In the dugout between innings, somebody asked Maddux why that pitch had made him so uncharacteristically angry.  His answer, “I’d been setting him up for that pitch for six years.”

And they all knew he meant it.

He once lost a shutout against the Astros in the late innings on a solo homer to Jeff Bagwell in a lopsided Braves win.  After the game a teammate told him it was too bad he gave up the one run.  Maddux said, “No.  I’m glad he hit it.”  When asked why he said, “Players only remember what they hit.  I threw him a pitch I’d never throw him if I needed to get him out.  From now on, he’ll always be looking for that pitch he hit the homer on tonight.”

Maddux always told other pitchers that the best outcome with less than two strikes was a long foul ball, because batters always thought they were right on the ball because they hit it hard, when in reality they’re already fooled by the speed of the pitch, all they did was hit a really impressive looking strike.

In Atlanta he once told a teammate to scoot over on the bench because, “If he throws another fastball here, the foul ball’s going to hit right there.”  The teammate moved over.  A few seconds later a foul ball smashed the back wall almost exactly where the guy had been sitting.

He didn’t pitch enough of his career in Chicago, but in his two stints, one thing was abundantly clear, “Greg Maddux was the balls.”

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The Cubs are trying to wrap up a deal as soon as today for Milton Bradley to play right field.  On the surface, MIlton is the perfect guy for the job.  A slightly above average defender, he’s a switch hitter, with power, and has demonstrated the ability to get on base.  He’s seeking a three-year deal probably around $10 per. So he’s actually chaper than Kosuke.

Of course, he’s also hurt.  A lot.  In nine big league seasons he’s played in 140 games or more once, more than 120 twice and more than 100 three times.  Three times in nine years?

Oh, and did I mention he’s completely fucking nuts?

Over on the four-letter message board one of their posters wrote about Milton:

He handled himself well enough in Los Angeles. The Chicago media can be a bit rough at times, but I can’t imagine it being a whole lot tougher than LA.

Two years ago, he torpedoed the Padres playoff chances, when with a week to go in the season he was called out on a close play at first, but didn’t agree with the call.

His manager tried to get him away from the umpire.

That didn’t go so well.

And ended with Milton tearing a ligament in his knee, missing the rest of the season and not being ready at the start of last season.

So if you do this.  If you go down this road and sign him, you do it with the knowledge that it’ll be a great signing if he can a) stay healthy and b) stay sane.  He didn’t apparently have any problems with the Rangers last year, so maybe he’s growing up.  He’s 30, so it’s about time.

But the fact remains that the Indians traded him because Eric Wedge didn’t want him around (and he had hit .321 the year before.)  The Dodgers got tired of his act and traded him to the A’s (for Andre Ethier..nice), the A’s traded him to the Padres and the Padres just let him go away.

So if you sign him, get ready for a lot of Kosuke in right field, and extra long pauses in Lou’s press conference answers all season long.