AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > May > 09
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Rare pitching matchup evokes rarer era gone by
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Smoltz versus Maddux. In the same season where we’ve had Smoltz against Glavine — twice! How great is it to see pitchers bound for the Hall of Fame oppose one another?
Not nearly as great as it was to watch those same exalted pitchers work three games of every five for nearly a decade.
Think about that. Think about a rotation that will soon send 60 percent of its membership to Cooperstown. Leo Mazzone thinks about it all the time. Speaking from Baltimore, his latest posting, he said Wednesday “there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind” that he coached the greatest rotation baseball has ever known, and he wasn’t blowing smoke.
Greg Maddux has won 335 games, Tom Glavine 294. John Smoltz won his 198th Wednesday night — the Braves rallied off Cla Meredith with four two-out hits after Smoltz had been lifted for a pinch hitter — to go with 154 saves. Said Mazzone: “Sometimes I’ll find myself thinking about all these big-bopping American League teams, and I’ll think, ‘I’d take my chances with those three sonofaguns every day of the week.’ “
From 1993, when Maddux joined the other two, through 1999, Smoltz’s last year as a full-time starter until he left the bullpen in 2004, those three pitchers authored a run of excellence unseen in the game’s long history. They weren’t, to be fair, the only ones doing rarefied business; Steve Avery and Kevin Millwood and Denny Neagle had big years, too. But those three were the pillars, three for Valhalla.
Said Bud Black, the San Diego manager and a former pitcher himself: “Those three epitomized pitching, and what’s most impressive is how they passed the test of time so dominantly.”
Glavine, Maddux, Smoltz: As a three-headed entry, they never pitched for a team that didn’t win its division. They each won at least one Cy Young. They fed off one another for seven full seasons until Smoltz hurt his elbow in the spring of 2000. Said Mazzone: “It’s the greatest pitching run in the history of baseball.”
Only two rotations have included three eventual Hall of Famers, and one — the 1966 Dodgers of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Sutton — had a shelf life of six months: It was Koufax’s last season and Sutton’s rookie year. The only staff that approximates the Braves’ for excellence fused with longevity was Cleveland’s of the late ’40s and early ’50s. Three staples of that rotation — Early Wynn, Bob Lemon and Bob Feller — are Cooperstown enshrinees. (Satchel Paige, another Hall of Famer, started 12 games for Cleveland in 1948 and ‘49, and Hal Newhouser, yet another, was in the Indians’ bullpen in 1953 and ‘54.)
But Feller was essentially a fourth starter by 1954, having been supplanted by the estimable Mike Garcia. And of Cleveland’s three Hall of Fame starters, only Wynn won 300 games. (Feller, who lost three years to World War II, won 266; Lemon won 207. ) As good as those Indians were, the three Braves were together for longer and for better.
Said Jerry Coleman, the San Diego broadcaster who played against that Cleveland rotation, speaking of Glavine, Maddux and Smoltz: “They’re all going to the Hall of Fame. How much better can you be? And Smoltz is the best of the bunch. He’s a freak of nature.”
Black again: “They all have to rank in the top 30 or 40 of all time.”
And now the three pitch against one another, not one after another. Even as we see them in their different uniforms, it only reminds us of those halcyon days when they wore the same garb. “For the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Braves, it was a privilege to watch them,” Mazzone said.
And here was the phlegmatic Maddux on a luminous night when his team didn’t win but he didn’t lose: “It was a privilege to go out there.”
Permalink | Comments (48) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
