Thumbnails | Next player Mound of Trouble: Greg Maddux, the once-metronomically consistent wizard with the weak fastball, struggles mightily. The master painter specialized in trompe l'oeil. You could scarcely believe your eyes the way Greg Maddux could make an innocent 88 mph fastball look unhittable and the way he could make the strike zone appear as wide as Peachtree Street. He was Roadrunner, painting tunnel entrance after tunnel entrance on the sides of mountains, and major league hitters kept crashing foolishly into them. But Maddux's latest handiwork is like nothing we have ever seen from him. It's so odd that we must lean forward and squint to make any sense of it, just as Maddux, without his glasses, must squint to decipher the glowing red numbers of the clock radio when he awakens each morning. Maddux, the Atlanta Braves' ace and the best pitcher of the 1990s, is getting hit like never before. Talk about your glowing red numbers: Through Sunday, National League batters were batting .351 against him (the highest average against any National League starter) as he suffered through the throes of the worst nine-game start of his 13-year career. -- Tom Verducci Issue date: May 31, 1999 Photograph by Al Tielemans Sports Illustrated on Baseball | Team-by-Team Reports Rookie of the Year Watch | SI's Inside Baseball Archive

Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines.