Best Cards: Greg Maddux

(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)

Oddly, I think Greg Maddux has become underrated with the passing of time. It’s easy to forget now that he won four straight Cy Youngs, that he finished in the top five in seven straight years and nine total, that he won 18 Gold Gloves, that he had a 1.98 ERA over a four-year stretch 1992-1995, and led the National League in innings pitched all four years.

Why is it easy to forget? Because people like to say now that Maddux was this athletically inferior guy, a proto-Jamie Moyer who succeeded, such as it was, based on guile and intelligence. And painting a guy as an underdog like that, especially since he plied his trade at the same time as clear, more typical powerhouses like Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, and Pedro Martinez, ends up infecting the mind. We know Maddux was great. I’m not saying anyone has forgotten that. I just think sometimes we underrate just how great he was.

And the other thing? Maddux wasn’t Jamie Moyer. He wasn’t close to Moyer. Yes, by the end of his career, Maddux was more guile, less “pure stuff,” but that’s true of every pitcher ever. Young Maddux? He was hitting the low-to-mid 90s on the regular, at a time when “low-to-mid 90s” was actually saying something. We want to say, because late Maddux threw a little slower and because he kind of looked like a dweeb, that Maddux was just a regular guy with more brain and no athletic ability, and it’s so freaking stupid. He was so good, and so talented. Don’t deny the man’s talent just because he was genuinely smart.

(Also, just because I’m on the topic: Even being “Jamie Moyer” is a ridiculous athletic accomplishment. Sure, by big-leaguer standards, Moyer threw pretty slow. Compared to everyday people? He’s a freaking mutant who would make the rest of our fastballs just look sad. We forget how good pro athletes are in general.)

(Want to contribute to me doing this? Join the Patreon!)

Greg Maddux

Career: 1986-2008 (CHC, ATL, LAD, SDP)
WAR: 104.8
Hall of Fame: Goodness yes

The resume lines I quoted above all illustrate how freaking good Maddux was (with the possible exception of the Gold Gloves, which aren’t meaningful of much, but dude was a legitimately good fielder). You know what doesn’t? That silly “won 15 games for 17 straight years” stat. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that he did it, but that is at least as much a testament to his health as it is an example of him being that good. From 1988 (his second full big-league season) until his career ended in 2008, Maddux pitched at least 194.0 innings in every season. Yes, you have to be good to win 15-plus games that many times, but the ERA, the WAR, the all-the-other-stats show how good he was far more than “arbitrary win totals.”

Also, Greg Maddux made only eight All-Star teams, and none after age 34 despite playing nine more years. That feels impossible.

(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)

The worst Greg Maddux card

1998 Ultra #484

Everything I said about Maddux at the top is true. He was more naturally gifted than history would have you believe. With every single last bit of that said, there are fewer words more applicable for the man than “pizzazz.” He was not pizzazz. He was stupidly good, he was ridiculously impressive, he was the inspiration for a whole new descriptor (the “Maddux”). He was so many things. He was not pizzazz. He was as not-pizzazz as you can be. This would be like a Rickey Henderson card with “humble” scrawled across it in, like, 8-point Arial.

Honorable mention

These aren’t the best of his cards. Sometimes they aren’t even that good. But they need to be mentioned one way or another.

1996 Pinnacle Denny’s Instant Replay #1

This is less about the card here (this Denny’s set was wonderful and you could get them with Grand Slam meals and I wish they still did it), than the COMC listing. Seriously, someone got a Denny’s card professionally graded? I have so many questions.

1988 ProCards Peoria Chiefs #GRMA

So apparently Maddux snagged his “Mad Dog” nickname really early. And I have no issue with it being his nickname, especially give the “Mad” right there in his name. But I’m gonna say, a 22-year-old minor leaguer who looked like Greg Maddux did not warrant that nickname. I think, like “Perturbed Puppy” would have been a better name for him for a while there.

1987 Donruss The Rookies #52

The flip side of that last point is that rookie Greg Maddux looked … kinda badass? Maybe the nickname wasn’t so bad.

1996 Pizza Hut Foam Bat & Ball Insert Cards #KGGM (Ken Griffey Jr./Greg Maddux)

I love 1980s and 1990s cards where companies really wanted in on the baseball card market but didn’t want to pay for MLB licensing. The Panini sets of the last decade make far less sense (the market is smaller now, and if you’re gonna do it, just do it right), but man, when Pizza Hut or Milk-Bone or, I don’t know, Texas Instruments felt like slapping a few players on some pieces of cardboard and giving them away with whatever random thing they were selling 30 years ago? I was here for it.

I am curious, though, why Junior gets put in quotation marks but The Surgeon just stands alone.

2000 Topps Chrome Combos #TC2 (Tom Glavine/John Smoltz/Greg Maddux/Kevin Millwood)

Everyone in baseball wanted so badly for there to be a competent fourth member of that Atlanta pitching staff, from Steve Avery to Denny Neagle to Kevin Millwood. Those guys all had their moments, but really it was the Big Three and a fourth guy, the Spinal Tap drummer of a pitching staff. Still, this didn’t stop them from slapping a bunch of different foursomes on cards and declaring this one would be the one that made sense long-term.

1990 Bowman #27

This is the exact pose every Little League team uses for its 10-year-olds to have a picture for their parents. I have a little wooden statue-y thing of me in a Rockies uniform in this exact pose. I also have a mock-up magazine cover of me in this pose in a Rangers uniform. And why? Because they found a bajillion different ways to sell parents photos of their ugly kids in the ‘90s, and now that I have kids of my own, I want so badly to just ignore every picture day and just use Facebook as my photo album, because while that’s cliché and pitiful and a sign of the degradation of society, it’s also free.

1999 Topps Stadium Club #100

Card companies very badly wanted to find images of players not doing their typical things, and this definitely qualifies. Meanwhile, Polcovich played 165 games for the Pirates over two years in 1997-1998. He his .234/.307/.326 in his career with a -0.4 career WAR. He turns 50 later this year, and while his Wiki page contains no information on what he’s doing now, it does contain the sentence, “Polcovich only played one more year of major league baseball, but his Rocky-like rise from nowhere to help the upstart Pirates have their most competitive year in the past two decades (as of 2012) against overwhelming odds, remains part of recent Pirates lore.” The Pirates went 79-83 in 1997. I guess what I’m saying is, (a) Kevin Polcovich definitely wrote his own Wikipedia entry, and (b) “appeared on a Greg Maddux card” might be his career highlight.

2002 Donruss Diamond Kings #70
2003 Donruss Career Stat Line #4
2004 Donruss Stat Line Career #2
2004 Donruss Diamond Kings #113
2005 Donruss Diamond Kings – DK Challenge #50
2019 Topps Transcendent – Franchise Favorites Reproductions #FFR-GM

Mostly Donruss made a lifetime of using illustrations of players instead of pictures (or they used Photoshop to make pictures into illustrations? I don’t know how things work), and they were almost uniformly terrible. Maddux’s illustrations cards were particularly bad, with a whole host of “bad police sketch artist” aesthetic to his cards. If you’re gonna do the cards this way, couldn’t you, you know, not do a horrible job of it?

2005 Topps Turkey Red #38
2006 Topps Turkey Red #394

Of course, “bad police sketch artist” is better than “holy crap, what?” The Topps Turkeys (particularly the 2005) were awful drawings and so small that you couldn’t tell who they were without context clues anyway.

1998 Pacific Omega #23

My dad was a critic of some very esoteric things in his life. One thing that always raised his hackles was when there was an illustration of a baseball, generally by little kids, that included the stitching on both sides of the sweet spot both going in the same direction. This despite the fact that my dad was functionally blind for the last 20 years of his life. He once spent 10 minutes waiting for a truck to turn out in front of him before realizing it was actually a mailbox, but he could identify a mis-stitched baseball drawing (or a crookedly hung picture frame) from a distance of 500 meters. He’d see it, scowl, and say “Do you know what kind of break they could get on their pitches with a ball stitched like that?” But those were little kid drawings. This was a halfassed baseball card. Wherever my dad is now, he’s reacting negatively to the 1998 Pacific Omega set, I can tell you that.

1996 Select Certified Edition #137

“I’m being haunted, doc. Every time I turn around, there’s this … figure. Ghost, I guess. He looks like me, but, like, a less nerdy version? I don’t know what he wants. He just lurks in the shadows. I like who I am, doc, but it’s like this ghost is going to take over and make me do things. I don’t know what he wants. But he won’t leave.”

And now, the top four Greg Maddux cards of all time.

4. 1996 Donruss #394

Maddux was famously an excellent fielding pitcher. It was his fundamentals, his mechanics putting him in position, but it was also because he put in the work to be excellent at a thing a lot of pitchers don’t care about at all. And while it’s not a baseball card’s responsibility to highlight that sort of skill, it does provide for a nice change of pace when you have a card that can show a pitcher making a nice play instead of “here’s another shot of him mid-throw.” This one’s largely a testament to a photographer getting a picture at the right moment, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

3. 2014 Topps Stadium Club – Field Access #FA-11

Even for a pitcher, the best you could say about Maddux as a hitter was that he wasn’t a total loss. He was far from good, but a .171 career average over 1,812 plate appearances is at least in the neighborhood of respectable. Still, for the most part, he was bad. Maddux-as-a-hitter is remembered almost entirely because of the “Chicks dig the long ball” commercial (and for good reason, because that commercial was great). But that’s why, six years after he retired, the Topps company decided to use an old pitcher of this all-time great pitcher holding a bat, like he’s lurking, waiting to crack some extra-base hit. He wasn’t doing that. He probably read somewhere that holding a bat like that would, like, improve the control on his changeup or something.

2. 1987 Donruss #36

It’s fun doing this project and seeing players grow into their look as they got older. Because young Greg Maddux looked more like a vagabond than an all-time pitcher. (To be fair, old Greg Maddux looked more like a literature professor than an all-time pitcher, but at least he was who he was.) But man, to be in the late ‘80s, with that hair and that ‘stache, mid-pitch, it’s a hell of a look. And the 1987 Donruss set was a gorgeous one in itself, with the crisp black edges and all.

1. 2002 Topps Heritage #147

Blatant manipulation alert! The Heritage set was entirely a “hey, look, new guys with old-looking cards, ain’t it cool?” set, and it was shameless, but it very much worked. And it probably never worked any better than on a pitcher who looked like he was plucked from 1963 to begin with in Maddux. From a distance, I could easily convince you this was Warren Spahn or Johnny Sain or Lew Burdette. So maybe it’s shameless to put out a “you’re gonna love this because of blatant nostalgia” set, but Hallmark and Lifetime have made an entire bajillion-dollar industry out of blatant nostalgia, so you gotta give me this one. So pretty.