Something I missed out on was witnessing the greatness of Greg Maddux pitch a baseball. The internet was not a thing when Maddux won the Cy Young Award for four years in a row. By the time I became a baseball fan in the early 2000’s, he was older and less effective.
Still, Maddux is a Hall of Famer and there’s no reason to dispute otherwise. Like most legends, Maddux has really awesome statistics that are worth sharing. When statistics are presented to talk about how really great Maddux was, the deserved response is “yep, he sure was great!”
There was a meme of Maddux floating around the internet for a hot second. It probably still is being shared like wildfire because it’s a lot of fun to hear people say “yep, he sure was great!” when they read these stats. Still, there was a meme that packages statistics of Maddux’s career that aren’t really talked about.
The problem with the meme is that it’s not totally correct.
“Greg Maddux faced 20,421 batters during his career and only 310 saw a 3-0 count. 177 of those were intentional walks,” the meme reads. When I read that, my eyebrows became erect. Yours too, I assume. That’s a small percentage of players to see a 3-0 count against Maddux.
The assumptions of Maddux being a great pitcher are absolutely correct. However, these statistics presented as facts are not correct.
Let’s start with the truth. Maddux did face 20,421 batters over the course of his 23-year career. It’s right there on the front page of his Baseball-reference.com page.
If you look five columns to the left of where I highlighted his total batters faced, you’ll see he intentionally walked 177 batters over the course of his career. This seems like a second truth from the meme, but it’s actually a half-truth.
Thanks to Baseball-reference.com’s Play Index (which is totally worth your subscription dollars), we can definitively see that of his 177 intentional walks, 153 of them came in 3-0 counts.
We don’t really know in what counts 20 of his intentional walks came in, but we know that at least four of them came with one strike against the batter. It could very well be only 153, it could actually be 173, but it wasn’t 177.
Lastly, the meme said that 310 saw 3-0 counts. That’s mostly true. There were 310 batters that faced Maddux in 3-0 counts, but the creator should’ve added at least two more.
According to Baseball-reference.com’s Play Index, 312 batters experienced 3-0 counts against Maddux, no less. Perhaps more, though. There are 1,165 unknown pitch counts, so there could actually be more than just this, but it’s still not 310.
With this extremely quick and easy debunking process of checking ourselves, we can see that the meme was wrong, but only by a numbers. Instead, the meme could’ve read “Greg Maddux faced 20,421 batters during his career. At least 312 saw a 3-0 count and at least 153 of those were intentional walks.” If that’s what the meme said, it’d still something I read and say “yep, he sure was great!” and would still be shared like crazy on social media.
Nit-picky? Maybe. Even if this were a harmless accident by the meme’s creator, that doesn’t mean we should just assume something is a fact because we already consider Maddux a great pitcher.
