Mound Of Trouble

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.

Do you believe your eyes? Braves catcher Eddie Perez doesn't believe his. He had been behind the plate for all but four of Maddux's past 76 starts when, last Thursday night, he saw something he'd never before seen among the previous 7,000 or so Maddux pitches he'd caught. With two outs in the top of the first inning, nobody on base and a 1-and-2 count on righthanded-hitting Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa, Perez shifted his body and target to his left in anticipation of an inside fastball from Maddux. The baseball, though, didn't come close to its intended destination. It darted low and away, whence Sosa spanked it over the wall in rightfield for a home run. "I was shocked," said Perez afterward, bearing the look of a nighttime sky watcher in Roswell, N.Mex. "I can tell you that he'd never missed by that much before. If Sosa hadn't hit the ball, I don't think I could've caught it. That's how far it missed. I couldn't believe it."

That pitch is a good place to start in trying to understand what has gone wrong for the most reliable pitcher since Sandy Koufax. A mutant strike zone and a purportedly turbocharged baseball may be conspiring against Maddux—and every other pitiable pitcher in what's shaping up to be a season of unprecedented offense. But what has undermined him most has been the errant location of his pitches. "In golf they say it's not the club, it's the golfer swinging the club," says Maddux, a seven handicapper. "I feel fine. I'm just getting hit. I don't have excuses. It's execution. That's all there is to it."

The pitch to Sosa wasn't an anomaly, only the most exaggerated of Maddux's recent misfirings. Indeed, Maddux had missed badly on the 0-and-2 pitch before that one, and he missed with his three ensuing pitches to Mark Grace. The last of that trio was a fat 2-and-0 fastball that Grace walloped for another home run. It marked only the second time in his career that Maddux had allowed back-to-back dingers. You would expect to hear Pavarotti miss five straight notes before you saw Maddux miss with five straight pitches.

"I feel like I'm making 20 mistakes a game instead of 12 to 15," Maddux said last Friday. "My mistakes are mostly up [in the strike zone], and I'm not getting away with them. But I still trust myself and my pitch selection. That's why I'm not frustrated. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. I've had four rough games."

Actually Maddux's troubles began late last season, when he was bothered by minor aches and pains in his right elbow, back, knee and neck. Until last Aug. 12, Maddux had amassed an incredible record, beginning with his final two starts of the 1991 season, that eerily mirrored the legendary '61 to '66 performance of Koufax. Maddux was 126-49 with a 2.05 ERA over 1,636 innings; Koufax was 129-47 with a 2.19 ERA over 1,632⅔ innings. Maddux's run may be finished, seeing that over his last 18 regular-season starts through Sunday he was 7-7 with a 4.79 ERA. "You've got to remember, he's older," Cubs infielder and former Braves teammate Jeff Blauser says of Maddux, who turned 33 last month. "He came in human, then he pushed the envelope to superhuman, and maybe now he's a little more human again. I still think when all is said and done, he'll have another great year."

Last Thursday night Maddux (4-3) escaped a fourth straight defeat only because Atlanta, which through Sunday led the National League East by VA games over the New York Mets, rallied from a 5-0 deficit for a tie before losing in the 12th inning, 6-5. Maddux did retire, in vintage fashion, 11 of the last 12 batters he faced, but the five runs he allowed in seven innings swelled his ERA to 5.02. For the first time in this decade (other than after his first start of a season) his ERA was more than 5.00, and it was that high after more than four starts for the first time in any season since 1987, his first full year in the majors, spent with the Cubs. Among the other submissions for Ripley's were that Maddux had allowed:

•at least 10 hits in five consecutive starts. Before that ugly stretch began, he had made 351 starts since the only time in his career that he'd given up 10 hits in even two straight games;

•at least five runs in each of his past four starts—two more starts than his previous worst streak;