Just got my copy of The 2006
Baseball Research Journal from SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research), and it includes an article by Cyril Morong of San Antonio College entitled, "Has Greg Maddux Employed the 'Bagwell Gambit' in His Career?
The article starts out with a pull-quote from George Will, writing in "The Artistry of Mr. Maddux," in Newsweek, April 25, 2005, p. 84:
Leading 8-0 in a regular season game against the Astros, Maddux threw what he had said he would never throw to Jeff Bagwell -- a fastball in. Bagwell did what Maddux wanted him to do: he homered. So two weeks later, when Maddux was facing Bagwell in a close game, Bagwell was looking for a fastball in, and Maddux fanned him on a change-up away.
To cut to the chase. this never happened. Will either made it up or is guilty of incredibly poor sports journalism. More below.
Will writes admiringly in the article of the great artistry of Greg Maddux, and I am not one to disagree with him on this point. But he was asserting that Maddux deliberately let a bad pitch by Bagwell, so that in a close and tight situation in the future, he could fool him in the same situation by throwing a different pitch. This is a questionable tactic at best, if you know anything about baseball, both in efficacy and baseball ethics. The article by Mr. Morong does a rather nice statistical survey of the top pitchers in the league to see if a practice of giving up homers "on purpose" is apparent. His conclusion is that it is not.
However, more to the point at hand: as part of his research, Mr. Morong looked up every instance where Greg Maddux had given up a homer to Jeff Bagwell and found "there is no case that fits exactly what Will described." In short, Will is guilty at best of shoddy research, and may simply have fabricated the incident to make his point.
The closest of the seven homers that Bagwell hit against Maddux to the situation Will describes is a 6-0 game on September 18, 1996. Bagwell hit a homer when the Astros were losing 6-0 to Maddux, and the final score was 6-1. The next meeting between the teams was the following April, not two weeks later.
Maddux did strike out Bagwell twice on June 3, 1995, to Bagwell, six days after having given up a homer to Bagpipes in a game Atlanta won by the close score (not a blow-out) of 3-1. But unfortunately for Mr. Will's thesis, the Astros won that game 2-1 -- on a Jeff Bagwell homer off Maddux.
The broader statistical survey looked at how batters fared close-and-late against star pitchers (Maddux included) vs. in non-close-and-late situations. There isn't even a correlation, so cause and effect is impossible to prove. Mr. Morong's conclusion: "...the evidence does not seem to support the idea that Maddux emplys the 'Bagwell gambit." He continues:
If so, we would see unsual improvement in his performance in close and late situations and in NL playoff games. But we do not. Every manager would certainly have loved to have Maddux pitching when it was close and late or in the playoffs. But not because he has the hitters expecting a certain pitch that they hit before. They would have loved to have him because he was a great pitcher in general.
So to recap:
- Will got his facts wrong.
- There was no situation even similar to the one that Will describes, so one is left to ponder what part of the ether Mr. Will pulled the story from.
- Will's thesis has no factual basis.
In this mysterious hubub about the whole James Frey thing, it would seem to me that a columnist of Will's stature resorting to what appears to be a fabricated story, or at worst an incredibly sloppy piece of journalism, would be a bit more relevant to the common discourse.