Maddux’s Dirty Secret: Chipper Jones Reveals Greg’s Disgusting Bacon Strip Trick
There are legends in baseball. And then there’s Greg Maddux — a wizard on the mound, a Hall of Fame craftsman, and, according to his former teammate Chipper Jones, a devious, prank-pulling mastermind.
On a recent episode of the Pitching Ninja podcast with host Rob Friedman, Jones pulled back the curtain on life behind the scenes with one of the greatest pitchers the game has ever known. But this wasn’t about Maddux’s pinpoint control or his 355 career wins. This was about what happened off the field — or more specifically, inside the Braves clubhouse.
“We need to straighten something out,” Jones said, setting the record straight with the kind of conviction that can only come from a man who lived through it. “We were talking about all these legendary pranks, and I was talking about some of the stuff he did back in the day. And [Maddux] said, ‘That’s all lies. None of that is true.’”
Jones didn’t hesitate.
“No. We’re telling the truth, and he’s a friggin’ liar.”
It’s not every day that a Hall of Famer calls another Hall of Famer a liar — even jokingly — but when it comes to Maddux, the stories are so outrageous they almost have to be true.
And Chipper had the receipts.
“There was one day,” Jones recalled, “he came in after playing golf. Didn’t take a shower. The sanitary sock bin was right there next to him. And he took out a sock and wiped his ass with it. Then he threw it back in the bin and waited for someone to pick it up.”
That “someone,” it turns out, was Jones himself.
“We used to wear these thin white socks under our stirrups. Sure enough, I came in one day, put the sock on… and I had a bacon strip all the way up my shin — from Greg Maddux.”
Let that sink in. One of the most cerebral pitchers in baseball history, a man who dissected hitters with surgical precision, also weaponized the clubhouse sock bin in a prank war only he could orchestrate.
