Mad Dog 20-20, retirement edition (cont.)

Sixth Inning

Hard Hittin' Mark Whiten: Up and away (ball), patented (grounder to second).

Maddux wasn't going to get cute with Whiten again; this time he just threw his money pitch and Whiten kindly tried to pull it and grounded out to Mark Lemke.

Chad Curtis: Patented (strike), curveball (outside, ball), patented (foul back), cut fastball (strike three swinging).

A little power pitching for Maddux -- he blew Curtis away with that cut fastball that was probably five or six miles per hour faster than his usual pitching. This was another great thing about Maddux during his prime: He could change the sort of pitcher he was depending on the quality of batter and mood of the moment. This time, realizing that that he was facing Chad Curtis and that he had him down 1-2, Maddux decided to simply blow him away with a hard fastball that broke away from him, almost a hard slider. Curtis, who had to be looking for about 12 other pitches, had no chance, and whiffed helplessly.

Pat Kelly: Curveball (bounced back to pitcher).

Maddux had this beautiful disdain for bad hitters. He didn't want to make them look bad; he just wanted to get them out fast so he could move on to the part of the game that mattered. He used to look SO annoyed when bad hitters managed hits off him. Pat Kelly faced Maddux 10 times in his career ... and got just one hit. This time he graciously swung at the first curveball he saw and chopped it back to Maddux.

Seventh Inning

Derek Jeter: Patented (strike), patented (strike), down and away (ball), curveball (strikeout swinging).

Man, Jeter was frustrated. He had a right -- Hirschbeck did him no favors with those first two called strikes. Plus it was beginning to rain. Plus Maddux had that Mad Dog thing going now ... he was out on the mound warming up before the Yankees were completely off the field after the top of the inning. Maddux was just in that "let's go, come on, next batter, let's go" mode, like he had dinner plans after the game or a late-night flight to catch. The curveball he threw to strike out Jeter was probably his most dazzling pitch of the night, a 12-6 job that had Blyleven spin on it. Jeter swung about a foot over the top of it and grumbled back to the dugout.

Joe Girardi: Patented (foul), patented (strike), patented (strikeout looking).

Let's go, let's go, let's go. Places to go, people to see, come on, it's raining out here, who's the next batter? Girardi seemed to appreciate that Maddux was in his mode and he quietly went back to the dugout after three pitches.

Paul O'Neill: Patented (strike), fastball up (groundout to second).

Hirschbeck at this point is completely hypnotized. If a vender throws a hot dog anywhere in Yankee Stadium, Hirschbeck is calling it a strike. I don't blame him entirely, that's just what Maddux does to you. He shows you a patented fastball that's a strike, then shows you one that's one tenth of an inch outside that, and so that's a strike, and then goes four tenths of an inch outside, and dammit that looks like a strike too, and after a while he could throw balls to the dugout and those would look like strikes too. And the thing that makes Maddux so Maddux is that, as mentioned, he mixes it up so some of these pitches really ARE strikes. He isn't letting anybody rest.

After O'Neill fell behind 0-1 on a fastball that was probably outside, he was ready to swing at anything, and even though Maddux missed his spot, O'Neill still angrily yanked the pitch to second base for an easy out.

Eighth Inning

Cecil Fielder: Patented (strike), patented (strike), patented (strikeout looking).

Here is what I wrote in my notes:

Pitch one: Patented fastball outside, a touch slower, probably a legit strike.

Pitch two: Patented fastball, laughable, not even close, called a strike, worst call of the night.

Pitch three: Patented fastball, even slower, maybe a strike, maybe, probably not.

That second pitch was a laughably bad call, and it did something -- something that I think Maddux very clearly understood whenever he was the beneficiary of a bad call. Maddux had such amazing control that a bad call like that was good for TWO bad calls for him. Because he knew how to follow it up -- Maddux wasn't just pitching to a batter, he was also pitching to the umpire. After the awful call, he simply threw a patented fastball that was BETTER than the previous pitch. It may or may not have been a strike -- it probably wasn't, as I wrote -- but it was so much better that Hirschbeck really had no choice but to ring up Fielder. Maddux really was a master of human nature.

Tino Martinez: Patented (fouled back), up and in (ball), patented (ball 2), fastball up (fly ball to centerfield).

When Maddux was dominant like on this day it was a shocker to see a ball get hit in the air. The Braves announcer -- Skip Caray -- said, "That ball is well hit to center field" when Tino lifted the ball in the air. Only it really wasn't; it was an utterly routine fly ball. On this day, though, it looked like Josh Hamilton in the Home Run Derby.

Wade Boggs: Patented (strike), up and in (fly ball to short right field).

I mentioned the human nature thing ... one of the things that I have spent a lot of time talking about with Kansas City Royals pitcher Brian Bannister is this idea of knowing a hitter's mindset when he comes to the plate. Some hitters go up there ready to trigger on the first good thing they see, some go up there ready to look at a few pitches and work the count and so on. A pitcher sort of has to guess at the mindset; that's where the poker playing comes in. Boggs was always viewed as a patient hitter, but he would occasionally go up there hacking, and he was very successful when he swung at the first pitch. In the first inning, in fact, Boggs swung at the first pitch.

And yet, this time Maddux seemed to KNOW that Boggs was not swinging first pitch. He threw his outside fastball just where Boggs liked it, but Boggs did not swing and it was a quick strike. How did Maddux know? It's like that line from The Gambler: You paid to see the cards. Lessons are extra.

Ninth Inning

Hard Hittin' Mark Whiten: Patented (strike), change-up down (swinging strike), fastball in (strikeout looking).

That first patented fastball strike was probably the second worst call of the night -- it was low and away and not particularly close in latitude or longitude. It messed up Whiten for the rest of the at-bat. Maddux finished it off with his sneaky inside fastball, the one that tails back over the plate for strike three. I suspect that however many hundreds of times he struck out batters with that pitch, EVERY SINGLE ONE complained about it. Whiten was no exception.

Chad Curtis: Up and in (ball); patented (grounded up the middle for a single).

It's probably worth pointing out here that the Braves only led this game 2-0; so when Curtis singled, the tying run was coming to the plate. That was another thing Maddux did: He was so good that he managed to make close games feel like routs. Up until this point the game felt entirely out of reach. And then Curtis got the hit, and everyone realized "Hey, a homer ties it here." And this is when the Yankees pinch-hit Bernie Williams, and for the first time in about an hour and a half the Stadium crowd got loud.

The crowd played a role in Maddux games too. Nobody could kill the excitement of a home crowd more than than Maddux. I mean Clemens, Pedro, Unit, those guys would obviously frustrate the heck out of crowd, but they pitched with energy, they were in your face, they were challenging you, there was electricity when they pitched. Maddux -- and I say this with absolute admiration -- was like the guy at a party who sucked all the energy out of the room.

In fact, you know who Maddux was like? The boxer Bernard Hopkins. He is a boxer who was never out there to wow the crowd, never cared if he got a knockout, never particularly seemed to care if he earned his respect. No, he was just out there to win matches, out there to keep his championship (he defended his middleweight title a record 20 times). Every time Hopkins fought, it seemed, there were stories asking why he was not more popular, why he was not a huge star like Oscar De La Hoya or Roy Jones or whoever, and the inescapable conclusion seemed to be that he was boring and too workmanlike -- it was like watching a really skilled groundskeeper mow the outfield grass. Naturally, I loved Bernard Hopkins too.

Bernie Williams: Patented (fouled back), fastball away (ball), patented (fouled back), patented (fouled back), fastball away (ball 2), fastball in (strike three looking).

There was a lot of griping during the game ... but the only real umpire outburst came at the end of this at-bat, when Bernie let that inside tailing fastball go by for strike three. Bernie really turned on Hirschbeck and the crowd booed like crazy and the game was paused for a few seconds. But here, at the core, is the genius of Maddux: It was a good call. It was a very good call. The ball didn't just tail over the inside of the plate, it probably ended up crossing somewhere close to the middle of the plate. Hirschbeck probably called five to 10 strikes during the day that were borderline, and another three or four that were just CLEARLY balls. But -- and this was Maddux's style -- the one clear-cut strike that Maddux threw is the one that everyone freaked out about. Genius. That's all.

Derek Jeter: Fastball up (ball); patented (ground out to second, end of game).

So in all, Maddux threw 84 pitches. Sixty four of them were called strikes. He gave up one line drive -- that was to his old catcher, Girardi -- and a blooper to Whiten, and four fly balls. Other than that it was 14 grounders and eight strikeouts. He did not walk a batter, of course, and only got to one three-ball count -- that was to O'Neill back in the first inning.

It was a domination that the Yankees could not understand even after it was over. You know that expression: He never knew what hit him? That was Maddux. The Yankees griped afterward, about the umpiring, about their own impatience about their missed opportunities. And they did not appreciate that they had simply been Madduxed and there was no cure.

Greg Maddux will announce his retirement on Monday in Las Vegas, and I hope to be there for that announcement. It isn't that I expect him to have anything all that interesting to say -- that was never really his deal. And it isn't that I hope to talk individually with him about his career -- I imagine it will be a pretty involved scene. No, I just want to be there because an era ends, and it was an era that I loved. I feel pretty sure that in this case we really will never see another one quite like him.

Joe Posnanski is a columnist for the Kansas City Star and the author of joeposnanski.com.