Maddux' quest for 300 a rare commodity these days.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Kevin Baxter

MIAMI _ When Grover Cleveland Alexander won his 300th game in 1924, Chicago Tribune beat writer Irving Vaughan didn't consider the stat important enough to mention in his game story.

You can bet it will be mentioned on Sunday if the Chicago Cubs' Greg Maddux beats Philadelphia for his 300th career victory. Because not only will the win assure Maddux of a place in Cooperstown, but it may very well make him the last pitcher to achieve the milestone.

"The bar of excellence for pitching has gone from 300 wins to probably 275 or 250," says New York Mets left-hander Tom Glavine who, with 259 career wins, is the closest active pitcher other than Maddux to 300. "That's just a recognition by people that offense has been so enhanced over the last decade or so and it's harder and harder for pitchers to go out there and ... succeed at a high level."

But baseball's emphasis on offense is only one reason why 300-game winners have apparently gone the way of flannel uniforms and the spitball. Five-man rotations have reduced the number of starts a pitcher gets while pitch counts and relief specialists have reduced the number of innings they'll pitch once they get to the mound. Add in that lucrative contracts are making careers shorter and you wind up with a pitcher such as Boston's Curt Schilling, a six-time all-star and two-time runnerup for the Cy Young Award who has fewer career starts (359) than Alexander had wins.

"That's just an unconceivable number to me," Schilling says of 300 wins.

Which brings us back to Alexander, the only other pitcher to win his 300th game in a Cubs uniform. While 300-game winners hadn't become commonplace by the time Alexander became one in 1924, they weren't that unusual either. Alexander was the 11th ...