During the last eight decades, 350-game winners have been just as common as 700-home-run hitters. The number 350 may not have the mythic resonance of 700, but the achievement it represents is just as rare, and perhaps more difficult.

Early this season, in May or even late April, San Diego’s Greg Maddux will, with his third win, become the ninth pitcher ever to win 350 major league games. Before Roger Clemens won his 350th game last year, no one had managed the feat since Warren Spahn in 1963; before him, no one had done it since Pete Alexander, in 1928.

Running up this win will be among the less impressive things Maddux does this year. At 42, he will, as he has every year since 1993, pitch for a contender, doubtless just as well as he has for the last five years. He’ll win 15 games, throw 200 innings with an earned run average of about 4.20, strike out a man every other inning, and allow few walks and fewer home runs. All of this will put him within reach of numbers that would give him a claim to be the best pitcher of all time.

Sometime this summer, for instance, Maddux will win his eighth game, the 355th of his career. With the win, he’ll not only pass Clemens, but tie Spahn for the most wins since integration. When he records the first out of his 103rd inning, Maddux will pass Clemens for 15th place on the all-time innings list. If he manages 185.7 innings, which he hasn’t failed to do since Ronald Reagan was in office, he’ll become the 13th man to pitch 5,000 innings. With his 70th strikeout, he’ll pass Phil Niekro for 10th-place all-time.

If he can manage one more season past this one, Maddux’s numbers will become still more rarefied. With 28 wins, he’ll pass Alexander and Christy Mathewson for the most wins in the modern era, and for the third-most ever. And if he can manage two years, he’ll do something nearly as unlikely. With 571.7 innings, he’ll pass Nolan Ryan for fifth all-time; with 590, he’ll pass Niekro, a knuckleballer who pitched until he was 48, for the lead in innings pitched since integration.

(Unbelievably, if he solidly committed to plunking a batter every third game for three years, Maddux could even pass both Ryan and Clemens on the way to moving into the top 10 in career hit batsmen. This won’t happen, but what could sum up the whole appeal of baseball quite so well as the idea of a wine-quaffing control artist, who barely hit 90 mph when he was young, out-plunking two of history’s more notorious barbers?)

By sheer weight, these numbers will argue strongly for Maddux as the best pitcher ever; if anything, they’ll understate his greatness. At the height of the offensive explosion, he kept his ERA below 2.36 in six of seven years, annually leading in innings and winning four straight Cy Young awards. He’s also one of only five pitchers to have racked up a full season’s worth of postseason starts, pitching 194 strong innings, albeit with a losing record. And he played against the fiercest competition in history. Alexander and Mathewson didn’t even have to play against black people.

In every way, Maddux represents everything good about the sport. He is a living demonstration of how creativity and skill can win out against mere force, and his longevity captures perfectly the patience and determination of every professional player at every level who wants to excel. If Clemens embodies baseball’s poisoned culture and essential blindness, Maddux embodies the chance it gives every sort of athlete to make the best use of whatever it is they do well.

As record after record falls, and as the magnitude of what he’s done becomes clear, Maddux will be recognized and rewarded. It may even happen that a tenth, or even a hundredth, of the time that’s been spent exposing the sordidness of Clemens’s life and career will be spent acknowledging that Maddux makes, in his own way, an equally compelling symbol.

More intriguing, though, will be the ultimate answer to the question of which pitcher was best. As impressive as Maddux’s records are, after all, Clemens’s are at least equally so, especially as they were earned mostly in the American League, pitching against designated hitters. Clemens, though, has been disgraced, some part of his achievement tainted; Maddux, barring absurdly improbable discoveries, is destined to rank along players such as Tony Gwynn and Derek Jeter as an iconic presence, a bit of living history, like Stan Musial and Yogi Berra.

Twenty years from now, the weight of the numbers could carry the argument alone, or we could decide to dwell on how they were achieved. And this is a problem. However overwrought anyone may get about it, a poison has seeped into baseball’s history. To judge Maddux against Clemens, you have to weigh everything we know, and then decide how to weigh things we don’t. Even the number 374, which may mark Maddux’s modern record for games won, won’t settle the matter at all.

tmarchman@nysun.com