One of the great pleasures
of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary were the interview sections with
Shirley Povich, the sportswriter for the Washington Post. (Yes, Povich was a
man but that didn’t stop him from being listed in ‘Who’s Who’s Among American
Women” Even though it made clear that at
the time he was a father of three.)
Povich started writing for
the Post in 1924, covered sports for half a century and was still alive to
write an article when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak in
1995. Throughout the documentary we got the pleasure of hearing Povich
read excerpts from some of the baseball articles he wrote over the years,
including his coverage of Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot Heard Around the World’ and his
article about the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series in 1955.
Povich was one of the most
famous sportswriters of sportswriter’s most famous eras. Damon Runyon and Ring
Lardner were the most famous writers from that period, as much for their
fiction as their sports-writing. Others like Ford Frick would move up in the
baseball establishment later on. But Povich remembered the players from the
1920s. And it has been hard to forget just how much esteem he held Walter
Johnson:
“He’s referred to as a
legend. A legend, according to Webster…is a bit mythical. There’s nothing
mythical about Walter Johnson. He existed, and he was probably the greatest
pitcher who ever lived.”
Here’s the thing. I know
this. I know that Walter Johnson lived. There’s photographic evidence, there’s
film footage. There are interviews of him, there are box scores of games he’s
played. There have been countless books written about him and one that I am
using a source material. I know Walter Johnson lived and played baseball. But
when you see what he accomplished as a pitcher…well, my brain does wonder if he
is some kind of mythic figure, like Paul Bunyan or John Henry were.
And it’s not just Johnson I
have the same cognitive dissonance. It’s with so many of the greatest
ballplayers of all time. Not the ones with the home run records like Babe Ruth
– that you can sort of process given all the slugging we see in the game. No,
it’s the .400 hitters and the pitchers of the first twenty to 30 years of the
century I can’t wrap my head around.
I mean seriously. Rogers
Hornsby averaged better than .400 over a five year period. Shoeless Joe
Jackson batted .408 his rookie year and lost the batting title to Ty Cobb? Cobb,
for the record, hit. 401 when he was thirty six and lost the battle title to
George Sisler who batting .420. That seems even more impossible. Men like Harry
Heilmann, who win four batting titles hitting .390 or higher each time, Napoleon Lajoie who hits .422 in 1902, Tris
Speaker hitting 793 doubles… you see their statistics, and you still can’t
comprehend it.
And the pitchers of the
first two decades of the twentieth century? I realize that we are not supposed
to look at things like wins and losses, or ERA, or all the other things but in
the case of men like Walter Johnson…I can see a pitching coach of the 1950s
berating a rookie for not saying he felt tired after seven innings. “When
Walter Johnson was your age, he shutout the Yankees three times in four days.” It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing any
human being could do at any point, and yet Johnson did it.
Walter Johnson had already
been signed by the Senators by the time Clark Griffith bought the team in 1912
but by then he was already the greatest player they’d ever have. With many
franchises there are debates as to who the greatest hitter and pitcher to wear
the uniform was. Many of the less successful expansion franchises – the Padres and
the Marlins the most obvious ones – have fewer contender. For the sixty years
the Senators were in D.C., there was never any debate. For all the nostalgia
factor which sportswriters are more than guilty of abusing, it is hard to argue
that Povich might actually be understating the case.
One has to acknowledge that
pitchers in the first twenty years of the twentieth century had advantages
their successors never would. A pitcher’s first job when he got the ball was to
dirty it up. The spitball was not only legal back then but was one of the least
of the tactics in the pitchers arsenal. It was rubbed with an emery board,
blackened with shoe polish, cut with rings. All of these things were completely
legal and understood by players of the era.
As a result when the ball
was hit, it didn’t travel far. Home runs were not only not prioritized, they
were incidental to strategy. ‘The inside game’
was what flourished and all players of that era had to use speed in a
way they just don’t these days. Almost all of the major stolen base leaders
occurred during the 1900s and 1910s as well. Ty Cobb was not just a brilliant
high average hitter, but he was also the most dominant baserunner. Most of the
great hitters of that era – Cobb, Lajoie, Speaker and Eddie Collins – all stole
over 700 bases in their careers. All ball players knew how to steal bases to
create runs. In 1911, the year Griffith bought the Senators the World Series
featured John McGraw’s Giants against Connie Mack’s A’s. The Giants had stolen
a record 341 bases that year while Mack’s A’s stole 228. In that series third
baseman Frank Baker, earned the nickname ‘Home Run’ because he hit two to win
consecutive World Series games not because he led the American League in homers
– with 11.
That year Walter Johnson
went 25-13, struck out 207, threw 6 shutouts and had a 1.89 ERA. By his
standards. He’d gone 25-17 the previous year with a 1.32 ERA, struck out 313
and threw 8 shutouts. These are gaudy statistics by today’s standards but it’s
clear they’re only half the story when you consider how microscopic his ERA was
– and yet he was in double digits in losses both years. This gets to the other
reason Povich thought Johnson was undervalued:
“New York sportswriters are
determined to make Christy Mathewson the greatest pitcher who ever lived and
they tend to ignore Johnson. They couldn’t do this because Johnson was superior
to Mathewson in every way. If Johnson had pitched for a team with the
winning percentage of Mathewson’s Giants, there’d be no comparison.”
And it is here why
Johnson’s statistics are half the story. Because he won 417 games in his long
career – by far the most in the 20th century and second only to Cy
Young. But despite having a lifetime earned run average of 2.17, he also lost 279 games, the fourth most
of all time. Another statistic drives the point home further. Johnson was
involved in 64 1-0 games and he lost 26 of them. That also strikes a
chord of myth: “He was the greatest pitcher whoever lived and he pitched for
the least offensive team that ever existed.”
And that’s before you get
to what may be the most astonishing thing. Walter Johnson accomplished what he
did with one pitch. He had no curveball to speak off, didn’t use trick pitches
and we don’t know whether the spitball was prominent. All he had was a
fastball. But that fastball…
In Donald Honig’s classic
book Baseball America he mentions several names of pitchers who had a
fastball at the level of Johnson’s. Lefty Grove, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax and
Nolan Ryan. In the forty years since that book was published, one might add two
more names: Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson.
Feller and Koufax spent
their early careers struggling with control issues and both of them had devastating
curveballs. Ryan, as anyone who observed him knows, never resolved his control
issues. Grove is the only pitcher who truly can be compared to Johnson and
there are many who consider him as great a pitcher as Johnson and possibly
better. But when Grove himself was interviewed by Honig, he made it very clear
that Johnson threw harder than him.
We will never know how fast
Johnson’s pitch was because, unlike his successors, he lived in an age where radar
guns did not exist. What evidence we have is anecdotal and that also sounds
like urban legend were it not from players who stood against him. Ray Chapman, shortstop
for Cleveland, once left the plate after Johnson had thrown two strikes. He was
told he had one swing left. “You can have the next one,” he told the umpire. “It
won’t do me any good.” He was declared out. Birdie Cree, a veteran outfielder once
said there was only one way to hit Johnson. “When you see the arm start forward,
swing.”
Ty Cobb thought Johnson was
the greatest pitcher who ever lived. The first time he saw him pitch in 1907
the future batting champion of the American League told his teammates that he
had the fastest pitch he’d ever seen. The two men would be almost exact
contemporaries in baseball, Johnson’s career would end the year before Cobbs.
Cobb told people the only way he’d been able to get hits off Johnson was by
essentially cheating. He knew that Johnson was afraid of killing a man with his
fastball, so he’d crowd the plate making sure Johnson pitched him wide. He got
83 hits off Johnson, 64 of them were singles and he never tried to get anything
bigger. “If you swung (against him) you were dead,” he said years later.
Mere mortals had no chance.
Walter Johnson’s major league record of 3508 strikeouts would stand for 56
years, until it was surpassed by Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Gaylord Perry in
1983. Many more have passed it since, but all pitched an era where the batters
swung more freely. Johnson would lead the league in strikeouts twelve times and
while Nolan Ryan tied him for that many, no one else has come close to
surpassing it. Of course players must have gotten hits against him – he gave up
more than 5000 – but aside from Cobb, few would openly claim it.
Outpitching him, though,
that was a feather in your cap than many of the greats were proud of – and not
all of them were pitchers by trade. George Sisler would hit .340 lifetime and bat
over .400 twice but when asked of his greatest accomplishment, it was that when
he came up as a pitcher for St. Louis he managed to defeat Johnson – twice. Babe
Ruth, in the course of his 1916 season with the Boston Red Sox, went 23-12 with
a 1.75 ERA and nine shutouts. That year he was the best pitcher in baseball and
that was including Walter Johnson. Johnson went 25-20 with a 1.89 ERA. Ruth pinned
five of those defeats on his record that season.
But the most famous rival
of Walter Johnson was a left-hander named Smoky Joe Wood. In 1912, Johnson went 32-12 with a 1.39 ERA, seven shutouts
and 303 strikeouts. It was one of the greatest seasons in baseball history –
and that year he was outpitched by Wood who went 34-5 with ten shutouts.
That year Johnson himself said no man alive threw harder than Smoky Joe Wood.
That year Johnson set an
American League record with 16 consecutive victories, all managed between July
3 and August 23. But on July 8th, Wood began his own streak and on September
6th, he was gunning for his fourteenth. The Senators were scheduled
to play at Fenway Park and according to legend, Johnson told Wood: “Joe, if you
want to beat my record, you will have to beat me. “ Wood wasn’t scheduled to
start for another day, but according to him he said: “All right, Walter. I’ll
see you tomorrow and we can settle it.”
There was no meanness, the
two men were amicable and genuinely respected each other. The Boston papers played
it up like a heavyweight fight, comparing their height, weight, and
measurements of their arms. More than 30,000 Bostonians filled the newly built
Fenway Park to see the match.
It was, as you’d expect, a
1-0 game, and Wood prevailed. Wood fanned 9, walked three and gave up just six
hits. Johnson struck out five, walked one and gave up five. The lone run was scored
in the sixth. With two out, Tris Speaker doubled to left. Duffy Lewis did the
same to right, with right fielder Danny Moeller leaping for ball and just
missing it. After the game Moeller approached Johnson in tears for his blunder.
Johnson didn’t blame him. “I should have struck him out,” he told Moeller.
Wood would go on to win
sixteen consecutive games himself. The mark would be tied by Lefty Grove in 1931
and Schoolboy Rowe in 1934. Wood capped his season with three wins over the
Giants in the World Series, including a relief stint in the final game that
gave the championship to the Red Sox. However, the next April he slipped while
fielding, and broke his thumb. While he pitched well when he could – he actually
led the league in ERA in 1915 – he was never the same. Still he remained a
legend, living well into his nineties – and insisting until the day he died
that Walter Johnson threw harder than him.
History consistently says
that the three greatest pitchers of all time were Johnson, Christy Mathewson
and Grover Cleveland Alexander. They are always talked of in the same breath,
but they rarely saw each other: Mathewson and Alexander both pitched their
entire careers in the National League and when Alexander began his career in
1911, Mathewson was on the slow descent of his.
But Alexander’s peak was
pretty much around the same time as Walter Johnson’s. In his first 7 seasons
from 1911 to 1917, the two men were pitching at a level that their rivals in each
league could not match. A comparison is more than fitting:
In Alexander’s first seven
years he went 190-88. He went 28-13 his rookie year with 260 strikeouts.
He had three consecutive seasons of thirty wins or more, from 1915-1917. In 1915,
he pitched four one-hitters. In 1916, he threw an incredible 16 shutouts.
During this same period,
Johnson went 197-99, which is close to the same winning percentage. In 1913, he
went 36-7 with a 1.09 earned run average and eleven shutouts.
Johnson led the American League in strikeouts
every year from 1912-1917. Alexander matched him every year except for 1913. Alexander
led the National League in wins five times during this period and in shutouts
five times. Johnson led the league in wins four times during this period and shutouts
four times. And just like Johnson, Alexander did not have much of an offense to
work with when he was pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies. They managed to
contend during this period almost entirely on his shoulders, winning the National
League Pennant in 1915 and finishing second in 1913, 1916 and 1917.
Johnson, however, didn’t
have the same luck. Johnson’s pitching was the key factor in the Senators being
in contention during the first years of Griffith’s ownership. They got to
second place in 1912 and 1913 and third in 1914. But after that, they began to
slide into the second division. And this was an agony to Johnson. Because while
Mathewson and Alexander were tasting the World Series at least once and some of
his great rivals such as Ed Walsh of the White Sox and Eddie Plank of the A’s
made multiple trips to the Series during this period the Senators never could.
During the peak of Johnson’s
career, the American League was dominated by dynasties: Cobb’s Tigers from
1907-1909, Connie Mack’s A’s from 1910-1914 and the Red Sox and White Sox
taking all the ones that were left. In 1920 The Indians won their first World
Championship. By 1921 the Yankees had won their first pennant and by 1923 their first World Championship.
By that point the hitters were
in full control and Johnson was clearly on the downside of his career. He was
still capable of pitching well, by the standards of a thirty-five and
thirty-six year old, leading the league in strikeouts in 1922 and 1923. But his
peak seemed behind him and by 1923 he was considering hanging it up. He had
decided before spring training began in 1924 that would be his final season as
a pitcher.
He had no reason to believe
– nor did anyone in Washington – know what glories were coming at the end of
the season.
In the next article I will
deal with the 1924 Season, the pennant race and the triumphs of Walter Johnson
that led to a glorious World Series.
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