We graded Greg Maddux’s command. What we learned, and why it’s time we stop calling for everyone to pitch like him.

Many have heard the message shouted through the chain-link fence of a local amateur field or read the comments in response to a YouTube or TikTok video featuring a pitcher’s effort to build better stuff.

The message goes something like this: “Greg Maddux didn’t throw 100 mph, so you don’t need to either, kid.”

We often hear different iterations of the same message: Be more like Maddux.

Even though the velocity bar keeps being pushed higher at the professional and amateur levels, and even though breaking pitches become nastier every year, there is this idea that there is too much focus on stuff training. There remains a segment of the coaching world – a loud segment – citing Maddux as thee archetype to work toward.

There is just one problem with this logic: Maddux is an extreme, extreme outlier.

Every baseball fan who watched Maddux understands he was elite in terms of command. He finished with a miniscule 4.9% walk rate for his career. For reference, only six qualified pitchers this season have a lower walk rate than Maddux’s career average.

But Driveline wanted to dig deeper to understand just how good Maddux’s command was at a more granular level beyond walk rate. The game has changed. Was he elite by modern standards?

To do that Driveline collected 19 random, full games of Maddux pitching from the internet and sent them to Inside Edge. We commissioned the scouting service to employ the same command evaluation system it’s used for the last decade-plus on MLB pitchers to score those Maddux games.

To quantify command, Inside Edge considers the pitch type, the count, the handedness of the hitter, batter-pitcher history, the intended location of the pitch, and actual location.

What did Inside Edge find? That Maddux’s command was four standard deviations better than that of the median pitcher in its database.

To illustrate what that means in a different context, consider a batting average last season four standard deviations better than the MLB midpoint would have been a .362 mark.

Four-seam fastball velocity four standard deviations better than the league median this season? 105 mph heat.

Maddux’s command is also equivalent to a 503-foot homer.

As good as Maddux was, we did not expect to find this level of skill.

Our hypothesis entering into the study was Maddux’s command ability was likely to be overstated. But what we found is the underlying data supported the notion that he was a historical talent in terms of throwing a baseball where intended.

Two of the key metrics Inside Edge employs to quantify command are “Hit Spot %” – which captures how often a pitcher reaches his intended zone – and “Major Miss Spot %,” which quantifies how often pitchers’ misses are non-competitive, defined as two baseball-sized diameters away from the intended zone.

In the study, Inside Edge examined pitchers who tossed at least 1,000 pitches between 2014-23. That was a sample of 1,235 MLB hurlers. Of those, only one had a greater Hit Spot % than Major Miss %. That was Evan Scribner with a difference of just under 3%.

And then there is Maddux.

The difference between Maddux’s Hit and Major Miss rates? An astounding 11.4%.

He hit his spot 34.5% of the time within those 19 games and suffered a major miss at a 23.2% rate.

(Another takeaway? Perhaps the top command artist of all time, Maddux, still missed his target two-thirds of the time.)

In 10 of the 19 games Inside Edge cataloged, Maddux combined a “Hit Spot” rate above 15% (elite threshold) with a “Major Miss” rate below (5%), also elite. In all the games they charted, Zack Greinke had the most such games (22), but those were tallied over most of his career. Nearly 300 starts. This was a 19-game sample for Maddux.

Even if you believe we just happened to send the 19 best games of Maddux’s career to Inside Edge to chart by chance – the games selected were found on YouTube so they are generally notable starts – we can compare them with the 19 best games for every pitcher they have graded.

Even in comparing those 19 Maddux starts against the 19 best starts of any pitcher, Maddux still ranks in the 95th percentile of command.

Rob Friedman, the Pitching Ninja, often encounters the “be more like Maddux” crowd in response to the pitching GIFs of wicked stuff he shares.

His retort?

“This is my point that I make to people when they bring this up, and I think this pretty much shuts anybody up,” Friedman explains. “Pitchers retire, right? Every pitcher that’s ever pitched in baseball eventually retires. Command does not get worse with age. As a matter of fact, most pitchers, Hall of Fame guys, would still say ‘Oh, I can still dot a gnat’s ass if I wanted to.’

“So, why did they retire? They retired because they cannot get anyone out anymore. And they cannot get people out anymore not because their command got worse. If you are talking about why velocity is important, that sums it up right there.”

The total number of players to reach the majors stands at 23,538 entering play Friday.

If it were possible to collect everyone who ever played in a major-league game and seat them in, say, Wrigley Field, the ballpark would remain far from capacity. And if it were possible to gather the entire collection of 86 Hall of Fame pitchers, which includes Maddux, and seat them in Section 18 behind home plate, they would only fill about seven rows. Even among those elite of the elites, Maddux might very well be the top command artist. Perhaps Christy Mathewson or Walter Johnson is in his company, but we don’t have the YouTube video.

The issue with suggesting that someone pitches like Maddux is that only one human – Maddux himself – has done it. And problems associated with pointing to such an archetype extend beyond his outlier status.

It’s a different game

Tarik Skubals’ second-to-last pitch the Sunday before the All-Star break was a 100.8-mph fastball, his top velocity on a humid, sun-soaked afternoon in Cleveland. It was also his 91st pitch of the outing.

His final pitch that followed was a changeup that darted under the swing of Jonathan Rodriguez for his 10th strikeout over seven shutout innings. Skubal screamed something primal into the air as he spun around on the mound and smashed his left hand into his throwing glove. Somehow the reigning AL Cy Young winner is even better through the first half of the season, combining rare stuff from the left side with well above-average command.

After the game, I posed the following question to the best pitcher in the American League: What do you think about the advice to pitch like Maddux?

“I don’t think it’s fair for anyone to be compared to one of the game’s best pitchers, historically, one of the best pitchers of all time,” Skubal said. “You cannot tell a kid to be Greg Maddux because no one was Greg Maddux except Greg Maddux. You cannot tell a guy to be Randy Johnson. You cannot tell a guy to be Roger Clemens, or Pedro (Martínez). Those guys are the greatest of all time.”

It would be tough to tell anyone to pitch like the Detroit Tigers’ ace today, either.

He’s walking batters at a Maddux-like rate of 3.2% while striking out batters at a Randy Johnson-esque clip of 33.9%. Each of those rates rank first among qualified pitchers.

Skubal himself will tell you despite that Maddux-like walk number, he does not have Maddux-level command.

His walk rate keeps improving, he says, because he trusts throwing his stuff in the zone more.  And to succeed in today’s game, he says a pitcher must have the stuff to pitch within the confines of the zone, not its shadow-y edge.

“I am a little old school. I do think you need to throw strikes and get ahead. The game needs to be simple in terms of first-pitch strike, and getting to leverage,” Skubal said. “But at the same time, you have to have pretty good stuff to pitch in this game now, because the strike zone is the smallest it’s ever been, and with ABS coming, it’s only going to get smaller. You have to be able to get miss, and compete in that zone.

“Guys’ stuff now, just look at guys’ stuff around the league: average fastball velocity, spin, vertical and horizontal break – it’s the best the game has ever seen.”

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Miles Mikolas can still recall watching the Livan Hernandez Game growing up in Florida.

In that 1997 NLCS game versus the Maddux’s Braves, Hernandez benefitted from an absurdly wide Eric Gregg strike zone to strike out 15 Atlanta hitters.

 

Zones like Gregg’s were a key driver in bringing PITCHf/x pitch-tracking technology into MLB stadiums to create a tighter and more uniform zone.

Mikolas told me that not only is it impossible to pitch as accurately as Maddux, but even if one could enjoy command four standard deviations better than that of the average MLB pitcher, many of those same pitches located a few inches off the plate would no longer be strikes.

“A lot of his career was during a different kind of baseball,” Mikolas said. “The strike zones were bigger, and you could really pick at corners and throw pitches that were extremely unhittable. …

“You throw a backdoor on the white line to somebody today and it’s never a strike.”

Maddux was pitching a different game, in a different era.

Pitches called strikes in what is defined as the “shadow” zone at Baseball Savant – that murky area of a few inches on either side of the strike zone – have generally been on decline since 2018, and they’ve fallen off a cliff this year with the threat of robot umps looming.

This season, 42.3% of pitches that fall in the shadow zone – and that are not swung at – are called strikes. That’s down from 46.4% last season. The 2015-2024 average shadow zone strike share was 47.2%.

We can only imagine what it was like in 1997.

“It would be tougher these days to be on the extreme command side without having a little bit of that stuff or velocity,” Mikolas said. “You may snag a strike on the white lines every now and then in today’s game, but I think also with the advent of the challenge system coming into play at some point, you are not going to get a lot of those.”

Incentives are not changing

Here’s the other thing: Maddux did have stuff.

Friedman once stumbled upon an early game in Maddux’s career with radar gun readings and Harry Caray on the call.

“He threw a changeup 83 [mph] and they were like ‘Oh my God! He threw a changeup at 83!’ Like it was a high-velo pitch because they are used to guys throwing 85-87 [fastballs],” Friedman said. “(Maddux) said he was one of the hardest-throwing people on any team he was on. He said he topped out at 93-94 (mph) and people weren’t throwing that hard.”

One reason why the aforementioned Scribner had a forgettable career despite being the only pitcher we tracked that was in the same galaxy as Maddux in terms of command? He averaged 90 mph with his fastball in the mid 2010s.

Maddux had stuff. He even harnessed seam-shifted wake before anyone knew what it was.

Yes, if 1995 Greg Maddux hopped in the DeLorean time machine and arrived at the Truist Park mound to pitch for the Braves tomorrow, he would be below average in terms of his velocity.

But for his time, he was a pitcher with above-average stuff in terms of velocity, in terms of spin, in terms of the movement on his two-seamer that he would start at the hip of left-handed batters, who helplessly watched it dart back to the shadow zone.

Driveline director of youth baseball Deven Morgan hears the Maddux narrative often.

“There is just a weird amount of internal cognitive dissonance about the way his career is framed relative to velocity, command, and his having something like three or four plus pitches,” Morgan told me. “My anecdotal experience is that guys who prop up Maddux … treat it like a foregone conclusion that if you don’t focus on velocity development then all these Maddux-esque traits are just going to fall into your lap and, man, it just doesn’t work that way. …

“Logically, I think we’d all agree that outlier command is not a thing that just happens because you’re throwing slow, but that’s the suggestion.”

Maddux’s arm was not moving slowly.

And to enter the professional game, or play at Division I college, arms must move faster.

The incentives are only moving toward building better stuff.

Amateur pitchers are well aware they are unlikely to be drafted early unless they feature big stuff.

On a Perfect Game player page, fastball velocity is the metric featured in the largest font.

And employees of pro teams, of high-level college programs, know they can better justify an evaluation miss on an arm with stuff compared to one without.

“Velo sells,” Friedman said. “My thing is with every dating service, for men or women, they always think they can fix whatever as long as they are attractive to them. And velo is one of those things. You never get fired from your job by bringing in a guy throwing 100. If he doesn’t succeed, it’s on that player, ‘He just didn’t buy into my system.’ But if you bring in someone throwing 85 and, say, ‘Well, he’s a command guy. He has a great feel for pitching,’ and it doesn’t work out, it’s on you. It’s your judgment.”

Mikolas sees a shift to favoring stuff over command because it’s easier for teams to build and adjust from there.

“It’s easier to take a guy that throws 100 and ask him to dial it back a tad and throw some more strikes. It’s easier to do that, to have a big engine and tune it back, than to try to get the most out of a Honda Civic,” Mikolas said. “We can take a Porsche and tone it down so it runs great and the engine doesn’t overheat, and it still runs very fast. That’s the opposite of trying to get the same thing out of a Honda.”

Now there are some edge cases like the 2016 Cleveland Guardians draft in which the club targeted strike-throwing college arms – Honda Civic types – in Shane Bieber, Aaron Civale and Zach Plesac and added stuff to them. They all became MLB starting pitchers to varying degrees of success.

But teams are generally beginning with stuff and working from there, Mikolas said.

“I know there are a lot of orgs, a lot of teams, where they are just teaching – especially with guys that throw hard, that have stuff – they are just (having catchers) set up down the middle,” Mikolas said. “They tell the pitcher ‘Just aim down the middle,’ because, realistically, if the majority of pitchers aim down the middle, it’s not going to be down the middle. It’s going to be away. It’s going to be down. It’s going to be up.”

The average miss distance by an MLB pitcher from his intended target is about a foot.

In the spirit of objectivity, we should include an opposing viewpoint.

Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Chris Bassitt is something of an outlier as he’s averaged just under 3 fWAR per season since 2021 with slightly below-average stuff and slightly above-average command.

What he does have is a deep arsenal of pitches and the sneaky skill of owning a low vertical release point, allowing for a flatter approach angle.

Asked about the idea of pitching like Maddux, Bassitt likes it. He prefers the idea of preaching command over stuff.

“What is your goal? Is your goal to make the big leagues? OK, build up stuff,” Bassitt told me. “If your goal is to stay in the big leagues, building up stuff is pretty irrelevant. You are not able to out stuff the big leagues. Out of everyone to come up the next four, five years, only a handful of guys can out-stuff the league.”

Survival, as Bassitt sees it, is about learning to mix and match effectively, hone command, and be able to navigate a lineup two or three times. That’s what he thinks the game needs.

On one hand, it is difficult to out-stuff the majors at a time when the median maximum fastball velocity is 97 mph.

On the other hand, that means the stuff floor keeps rising.

Even Bassitt, thought of as something of a dependable innings eater, owns a 93.4 mph average fastball for his career. He’s generally hovered slightly above the average velo for a starter. While he doesn’t dominate with stuff, rather depends upon guile, he exhibits just how high the stuff bar has been raised.

Again, Maddux’s career didn’t end because he couldn’t command the baseball.

We are making gains in command training

All this is not to say pitchers should ignore command training.

No one is debating command as a critical skill. The best pitchers have excellent command and excellent stuff.

What is true is the understanding of command, the teaching of it, has lagged other aspects of development.  However, that is changing.

Command training is a core tenet of player improvement at Driveline, especially within our Training 2.0 roadmap.

At Driveline we have launched exciting tools like the Intended Zone Tracker. With the technology a pitcher or coach employs a touch screen to move the visible crosshairs of their intended target on the interactive screen placed near the plate of a bullpen setting. The location, velocity, movement of pitches, all parameters – including run values – are automatically recorded.

The tool informs a pitcher about the quality of their command on a given day, quantifying how close they are to their target. That also enables it to be an ideal training tool, too, measuring progress, allowing for gamification of practice.

For example, what happens to command after, say, adopting a regimen of overload/underload command balls? Now we can measure it.

While new command training tools and methods are still being experimented with and studied, there are already anecdotal examples of success with the Intended Zones Tracker, Driveline pitching coordinator Joel Condreay noted.

Consider the case of Miami Marlins breakout pitcher Janson Junk.

Junk owns a 100^th percentile walk rate this season, a massive gain from his 48^th percentile mark last season. His Location+ mark of 118 is nearly two standard deviations better than the MLB median.

What did Junk do between seasons? Skubal’s former Seattle University teammate focused on command training at Driveline.

“(Junk) is a guy who was on the Intended Zones tool twice a week basically the whole winter,” Condreay said.

We know even seemingly small gains in command can be a big deal. Condreay said an improvement of three inches in average command is worth 1 WAR in performance value.

And Condreay notes that even before considering new technologies and training regimens, big leaguers are exhibiting improved command over time as walk rates are decreasing despite a smaller strike zone, despite greater stuff.

“MLB is not getting wilder over time,” Condreay said. “Baseball is not trading velo for command. The answer is both. Command is getting better.”

Morgan believes the Intended Zones tool will have tremendous benefits, particularly at the amateur level.

“We’ve just recently been able to start using our (Intended Zones) system with kids. At its most basic layer, Intended Zones allow us to actually quantify command in a meaningful way,” Morgan said. “If you can do that, then you can quantify both the base level of command performance and improvement. Now we’re in a position to actually train and develop command with the same structure as we do with velocity: 1. Test. 2. Train. 3. Re-Test.”

There have also been gains in understanding in other areas like S.A.T.O principles (Speed Accuracy Trade-Offs), and proprioceptive development.

“Proprioception is all about how accurate you are at locating your body in space,” Morgan explained. “Throwing or pitching are tasks that depend heavily on the player’s proprioceptive development, which is a thing kids inherently lack, just like they lack the general coordination ability compared to how they’ll perform at the same tasks as adults….

“We believe that the research would suggest that it improves with variability – hence or overload-underload Plyocare and Command balls.”

There is an immense effort underway to understand command and how to train it at Driveline.

But that still doesn’t mean it should be at odds with stuff, and it doesn’t mean that pointing to an outlier like Maddux is reasonable.

“My reaction is it’s like saying to hit a golf ball like Tiger Woods. It’s silly,” Friedman said. “I talked to Greg Maddux about it, and he said that ‘I cannot teach anybody to have command like I did. I can teach them to have better command, but it’s not possible to make someone an outlier in terms of command.’

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“It’s a talent like anything else. You can improve on it, but you cannot make someone elite.”