Amazing! Thank you so much for posting all these classic maddux videos, he was my favorite athlete when I was growing up, and I find watching him pitch very inspiring. These videos you keep posting mean a lot to me, so thanks!
Exactly, I feel the same way you do about today’s game, it makes me very upset, I completely agree with you and I tell people all the time that the game started to die in the mid 2000’s. I consider 2004 the last great year, and the ensuing few seasons were ok, arguably worth watching, as that generation’s superstars wound down their careers and still had some magic left, but in my opinion it was all completely downhill from there, and the game is long dead, I merely wonder if they can ever resuscitate baseball. I miss the days when Major League Baseball featured great starting pitchers who pitched deep into games and wanted to finish what they started- maddux, pedro, randy johnson and many others were what made me fall in love with the game, it was beautiful to watch, and inspiring. I think nowadays there are no truly great starting pitchers anymore, and they mostly get injured because they are told to max out on every pitch and don’t pace themselves. It’s ironic and upsetting that teams now place an undue emphasis on the pitch count and defend this obsession by claiming that limiting pitch counts protects pitchers from injury when in reality, by maxing out every single pitch for “only” 90-100 pitches they are setting themselves up for injury. Pitchers should stop worrying so much about the pitch count and instead learn to pace themselves so they can pitch deep into the game and stay healthy, it worked for the first 100 years of the sport. If baseball wants to bring fans back I think they need to prioritize the role of the starting pitcher because the starting pitcher is baseball’s equivalent of the quarterback in football: he’s the protagonist of the game; and just as nobody wants to watch a football game that has no great quarterbacks nobody wants to watch baseball with unrecognizable personalities filling all the pitcher’s positions, there’s nothing inspiring, nothing to relate to. It pains me to consider how far baseball has fallen, it was once so great, it used to rightly be called our national pastime. In The Old Man and The Sea, the old man muses over and over about the great Dimaggio, and he draws inspiration from the great Dimaggio in his epic struggle to catch his fish. The old man had Dimaggio to look up to, i grew up watching Pedro and Maddux, but currently I see nobody in the game worth watching. But on a positive note, I believe that if there’s anyone who can fix this mess it is Theo Epstein; after all, he did end 2 curses, and he has said in an interview that he intends to try to legislate starting pitching back into the game by incentivizing teams to keep their starters in longer; so I remain hopeful, but I also presume it will be a long time till this is rectified, if at all, unfortunately. But when i watch these old games that you’re posting, these classic pitching performances, it connects me to some of the happiest moments of my childhood, and it’s exciting because I’ve never seen these particular games before so I can enjoy the suspense of not knowing what the outcome was as if I had watched it for the first time back in 1996; but I also like the benefit of hindsight and knowing that virtually any game maddux pitched during his run of dominance between 1992-1998 is probably yet another masterpiece of wit, strategy, execution and determination. So thanks for your work, I greatly appreciate these videos!
So many hall of famers in this game....rickey henderson...fred mcgriff...chipper jones...tony gwynn...greg maddux....bruce bochey....bobby cox...trevor hoffman
