They remember young Greg Maddux in Peoria
It seems like every time you turn on public television, one of the guys from Ambrosia and some woman you’ve also never heard of are showing video clips of soft-rock pop bands from the 1970s and selling their repackaged hit(s) as part of a remastered collection.
But this is what public television looked like in the 1980s, at least if you lived in the Quad Cities or the part of Illinois where people wake up early to do farm chores.
It’s a 1985 baseball game between the Quad Cities Angels and the Peoria Chiefs.
Greg Maddux is pitching for Peoria.
Rafael Palmeiro is playing in the outfield. Almost of the Chiefs have high stirrups. This was the ’80s.
The giant graphic shows that Maddux was 11-4 with a 3.17 ERA. He was 19 years old then. He looks like he just came out of the Pony League.
The video shows him getting a called third strike on a pitch that looked just a tad outside. Vintage Maddux. Even as a 19-year-old he could hit his spots and get a call.
There is a second part of this video. Only the first part is shown here.
In the second part, Maddux gets cuffed around pretty good. He allows a homer and walks the next guy and then he gets spun around by a line drive and gets his cap knocked right off his head.
Not vintage Maddux.
You can find the second part of the video, the part where he gets his hat knocked off, on YouTube. If nothing else, it proves that even Greg Maddux was capable of a bad outing, at least when he was 19.
