Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #95: The Other Maddux

Last week on Sunday School, Forgotten Faces of Flushing, we met Mike Glavine, who spent a decade in the minor leagues to play six games for the Mets — the first of them pinch-hitting for his own brother. The Glavines remain the only brothers ever to play for the Mets together. The forgotten face got to stand in the famous one’s shadow at Shea, same uniform, same lineup.

This week the family/Braves Hall of Fame theme remains, but the symmetry goes out the window. This week’s forgotten face is the only member of his family who ever wore a Mets uniform at all. The famous brother never did. Mets fans spent a decade getting tormented by Greg Maddux. The Maddux the Mets employed was Mike.

Say the name Maddux to a baseball fan and you get the litany: 355 wins, four straight Cy Youngs, eighteen Gold Gloves, a first-ballot plaque in Cooperstown. Greg wasn’t just a great pitcher. He was an argument-ender — the name that closes debates in bars.

Now say Mike Maddux, and watch the fan’s face do the thing. The squint. The polite nod. “Oh, right. The brother.” Well, the brother pitched fifteen seasons in the major leagues. Fifteen. He worked 472 games for nine teams, won 39, saved 20, struck out 564 big-league hitters — then spent twenty more years as one of the most respected pitching coaches in the game. A wonderful baseball life. It just had the misfortune of sharing a last name, a house, and a gene pool with a Hall of Famer.

The Maddux boys were Air Force kids. Their father, Dave, was career Air Force; the family spent part of the boys’ childhood in Madrid before settling in Las Vegas, where Dave retired and dealt poker at the MGM Grand. He taught his sons the game in the backyard, drilling fundamentals the way military men drill everything — constantly, and with opinions.

Mike was older by five years, and no slouch. The Phillies drafted him in 1982, and the scouts came to Las Vegas to watch him throw. On one of those trips, Dave delivered the most prophetic scouting report in family history. Watching them watch Mike, he told them: “You will be back later for the little one.”

They were. For the next twenty-five years, they never stopped coming back for the little one. Mike saw it coming before anybody. Asked once about competing with Greg as a kid, he said: “If Greg couldn’t win, he didn’t want to play, plain and simple.” Spoken like a big brother who lost a lot of backyard games and read the future in them.

Both brothers made the majors in 1986, Mike with Philadelphia in June, Greg with the Cubs in September. On September 29, 1986, at Veterans Stadium — in the City of Brotherly Love, you can’t make this stuff up — two rookie brothers started against each other for the first time in major-league history.

Greg won, 8–3. Of course he did. Mike lasted three innings and took the loss; Greg pitched into the eighth. Somewhere there’s a Maddux family Thanksgiving where that game has been coming up for forty years. That’s the tax on losing to your little brother in a game that made the record books: it sits in the first paragraph of Greg’s story forever, with Mike as the other name in the sentence.

But here’s the thing about that sentence. Most of us aren’t in the first paragraph of anybody’s Hall of Fame story. Mike Maddux is. And he stayed in the book for fifteen years.

Greg became The Professor, painting corners like a man defusing bombs. Mike became something rarer, and in its way harder: necessary. The long man. The spot starter. The eighth-inning guy, the ninth-inning guy when the closer’s arm was barking. He once gave himself the best job title in baseball, telling the New York Times: “I call myself a utility pitcher. I did everything but play the infield.”

And he was good at it. His best year was 1991 with San Diego — 64 games, 7–2, a 2.46 ERA. Most relievers would trade their curveball for a season like that. Mike’s just happened to arrive while his brother was becoming GREG MADDUX, so it played to an empty theater.

Here’s the part that still gets me. That same December of 1992, the Braves signed Greg Maddux, the best pitcher on Earth. The Mets got a Maddux too. Ours came in a trade, for Roger Mason.

Mike arrived in time for the 1993 Mets, a team that lost 103 games and treated chaos as a hobby — firecrackers in parking lots, bleach in the clubhouse, a season that felt like a building fire in a clown car. In the middle of it stood the most professional man in the bullpen. Maddux took the ball 58 times, second-most on the staff, put up a 3.60 ERA, and saved five games for a team that rarely gave a pitcher anything worth saving.

He came back in 1994 for 27 more games, and then the strike ended the season and the Mets let him walk. Two summers, 85 appearances, no plaque, no bobblehead. The Maddux we actually had is remembered, when he’s remembered at all, as a trivia answer. Around here, that’s practically a knighting.

After Shea he kept going — Pittsburgh, Boston, Seattle, Montreal, Los Angeles, Houston — still taking the ball at 38. Fifteen seasons isn’t a cup of coffee. It’s a mortgage, a marriage, a kid’s whole childhood. It’s a career. It just happened to be the second-best pitching career in his family.

Then Mike Maddux did the thing that should have rewritten his whole story: he became a pitching coach, and a great one. Milwaukee first — his 2008 staff carried the Brewers to their first postseason in 26 years. Then Texas for seven seasons and back-to-back World Series in 2010 and 2011. And when the Rangers finally won it all in 2023, there he was, back in their dugout, running the pitching. Forty years after the backyard, the older brother got his ring.

Washington. St. Louis. Texas again. And in 2026, at 64, the Angels hired him to run their staff. Do the math on this family. Greg pitched 23 seasons and went to Cooperstown. Mike pitched 15 and has coached more than 20 more. The “other” Maddux has spent more years in a major-league uniform than the Hall of Famer.

That’s why this series exists. Baseball remembers the geniuses; it built them a whole building in Cooperstown. But the game is held together by the Mike Madduxes — the older brothers who taught the genius to compete in the backyard, took the loss in the famous game, called themselves utility pitchers, and kept showing up decade after decade, first taking the ball, then teaching other men’s sons how to hold it.

Which leaves the third member of Atlanta’s holy trinity, and a gap in the Flushing family album. We’ve now had a Glavine at Shea — two of them. We’ve had a Maddux — the other one. But so far, no relative of John Smoltz has played for the Mets.

At least, not that we know of.