luv baseball posted:It probably doesn't hurt to get 15 starts a year for a decade against what might have been the worst division in the history of baseball....the 90's Mets, Expos, Phils and Marlins (one really good season and then blown up) not to mention another 12 against lousy teams throughout the league in that time... Cubs, Reds, Astros, D-backs, and Pirates after Bonds left.
On top of that he had one of the leagues best lineups. There was a reason those teams only won one time...they weren't that great. I have contended for some time that Maddox is the most overrated pitcher in history. He had average stuff and excellent command. But against good teams he was very mediocre.
In truth it was his durability that made him great, he started 25 or more games 19 years in a row and over 30 in 17 of those. The thing he SHOULD have been telling those players was - join the best team in the league and start 33 games a year and throw 200 innings for 20 years and you will be a great pitcher too. In this facet he was exceptional and a total outlier.
Try to tell me with a straight face that a guy who got 30 starts in the post season with a 11-14 record, 3.27 ERA with a 1.24 WHIP for the Analytics guys is an all-time great. He wasn't.
Smoltz by comparison started 27 games with a 15-4 record, 2.67 ERA and a 1.14 WHIP in pretty much the same post seasons. He had the killer stuff that works against good hitters consistently... Maddox did not.
Maddox won 355 games but 250+ of them might have been against teams with losing records that were actually terrible teams. Full marks for getting on the hill and doing his job but as for his actual stuff - I could probably name 40/50 pitchers that I would start against him in a Game 7 and feel like I had the upper hand.
I'm all for proverbial barstool arguments, but... You are talking about a pitcher with 355 MLB wins, 4 Cy Young Awards, and a 106+ WAR. Part of the case for any Hall of Famer is longevity--a couple of great seasons aren't enough. And recall that Maddux pitched during the steroids era, when offense looked quite a bit different than today.
The dude got the 10th-highest percentage of HOF votes all-time (97.2%). The baseball writers get a lot of things wrong in their voting (like the insistence of some that no HOF candidate should ever be unanimous), but Maddux was a Hall of Famer by acclamation.