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| Maddux gets win No. 350 as Padres end skid SAN DIEGO 3, COLORADO 2 |
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By Tim Powers PA SportsTicker Contributing Writer SAN DIEGO (Ticker) - Greg Maddux pitched six stellar innings Saturday en route to his 350th career win as the San Diego Padres snapped a five-game losing streak with a 3-2 victory over the Colorado Rockies. A four-time Cy Young Award winner, the 42-year-old Maddux became the ninth pitcher in major league history to join the 350-win club. He joins Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Christy Mathewson, Pud Galvin, Warren Spahn, Kid Nichols and Roger Clemens on the exclusive list. Maddux (2-3), who failed to reach the milestone in his previous four starts, yielded an unearned run and three hits with no walks and one strikeout. "I was never really too concerned with it, I was just trying to win," Maddux said. "I don't want to make it out to be nothing, but it is May, and we haven't been playing that good, and you really just want to win for the right reasons. We need to start winning as a team." The future Hall of Famer also become the third player, along with Johnson and Clemens, to post 350 wins and 3,000 strikeouts. The righthander now has 350 wins and 3,299 strikeouts in 23 seasons. Maddux's only blemish on the night came in the sixth. Willy Taveras laid down a bunt, and the 17-time Gold Glove winner skipped his throw to first into right field. Taveras advanced to third on the play and scored on Omar Quintanilla's groundout. After Cla Meredith pitched a perfect seventh, Heath Bell surrendered an RBI double by Taveras in the eighth. But Trevor Hoffman closed it out to collect his sixth save. "It's good to win, basically," Padres manager Bud Black said. "We need wins, and we need more of them. The guys are, every day, going about it the right way. We just need more games like this. We've got to win them." Adrian Gonzalez provided all the offense Maddux needed in the fourth inning, when he blasted a three-run homer off Rockies starter Ubaldo Jimenez (1-3) over the left-center field wall to give the Padres a 3-0 cushion. "I was just hoping the ball cleared (left fielder Matt Holliday's) head," Gonzalez said. "When you hit them low on a line here, they don't die the way they do when you hit them a little higher. That is pretty much all I had working to my advantage and I was able to reach the first row of the seats, which was nice." Colorado could do little else in support of Jimenez, who recorded a career-high 11 strikeouts over 6 2/3 innings. The 24-year-old righthander yielded three runs on five hits and three walks. "It was a bad inning," Jimenez said of the fourth. "I tried to get a ground ball, but he hit the ball really hard. The only thing is that we didn't win." Clint Barmes contributed a pair of singles for the Rockies, who had their three-game winning streak snapped. "(Maddux) is a master craftsman and he's going to go into the Hall of Fame," Rockies manager Clint Hurdle said. "He stayed away from the barrel, he changed speeds, and he got outs. He was very effective." San Diego recorded four stolen bases in the contest, the first time it swiped that many since August 10, 2007. |
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