Today, my favorite major league pitcher of my lifetime, Greg Maddux, retired.  His career numbers are gaudy: 355 Wins, 4 Cy Young Awards (1992-1995), a record 18 Gold Gloves, and, for good measure, though he wasn\'t known as a strikeout artist, he has the tenth most Ks in MLB history (3371).  He will probably be most remembered for his 1994 and 1995 seasons, which, according to my estimation, are the third (1995) and seventh (1994) most dominant seasons in post-1900 baseball history.

It wasn\'t easy to like Maddux on the surface, just like it\'s not easy at first to like cats.  Everybody likes dogs because they are instantly friendly.  In Major League Baseball, pitching "dogs" over the last 30 years have included Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and, for a brief moment back in 1998, Kerry Wood.  These pitchers have overpowering stuff and good command.  Maddux didn\'t regularly throw the ball harder than 90 mph.  Yet he could out-think hitters.  There are numerous stories by players where he would predict where a pitch would go and it would indeed get hit where he said it would.  His pinpoint accuracy, knowledge of the strike-zone, and ridiculous movement on his pitches, made him more like a cat, and finicky animal you have to work hard just to get its attention.  Maddux was the pitcher for dedicated baseball fans, the kind who love the nuance of the game, not just home runs and 100 mph strikeouts.  Maddux was the thinking fan\'s pitcher.

Seeing Greg Maddux retire seems unnatural to me.  Ever since I started collecting baseball cards back in 1987 (I got his rookie card in a pack of Donruss cards that, today, is well worn), he\'s been there with me.  Then, he was scrawny and had a mustache just like Adam Morrison\'s.  Within a couple of years, he was the ace on my least favorite team, the Chicago Cubs.  It wasn\'t until his great run with the Braves (thanks in part to Superstation) where I got to see him make hitters look like fools (the only exception being Tony Gwynn, who I think hit over .400 against him -- but that\'s not surprising).  By the time he returned to the Cubs in 2004, the Maddux of old was, in general, a thing of the past, though occasional glimmers of his former self would emerge.

He is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, no doubt.  There are a few knocks on him.  He was solid in the postseason, but always got bested (it seems like there were plenty of 2-1 losses during that Braves run).  He never topped 21 wins in a season (he only had two 20 win seasons).  During his heyday, he was often accused of having an exaggerated strike zone and "working the Umps."  But these things cannot obscure his many milestones.

We\'ll miss you on the field, Greg Maddux.