In appreciation of excellence

Gregg Maddux just goes out, year after year, and unassumingly does his job. He's been doing that for 20 years now. Yesterday, Maddux won his 350th career game, just the ninth pitcher in Baseball history to do that: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/gameflash/2008/05/10/20003_recap.html. I doubt that we'll ever see another pitcher approach that total, and I don't know that people appreciate how difficult it is to be that good for that long. Maddux will likely end this season with somewhere around 355 wins, and I suspect that he'll hang it up at that point. Never the most physically gifted of pitchers, he relied on cunning and pinpoint pitch location in order to get people out, a task at which he excelled for years. My hat is off to him, one of the smartest and most capable pitchers of modern times.