High Heat (6 page)

It wasn't long before the local team came calling. Johnson saw his first action for the Oil Wells on July 24, 1904. The local newspaper reported that he struck out six in three innings. Although Johnson pitched a few high school games, including an epic 0–0 tie with Santa Ana that lasted 15 innings, his primary team was the Oil Wells. He pitched and played right field and first base for them. In fact, he excelled in most aspects of the game except fielding. Still an awkward adolescent, Johnson often bungled bunts near the mound. There was no questioning his arm or the velocity of his fastball, however.

In the spring of 1906, Johnson traveled by train north to Tacoma, Washington. At the time, he seemed assured of a roster spot for the local team, the Tigers. But only days before Johnson arrived in Tacoma, one of the worst natural disasters in American history struck San Francisco. The earthquake and fire of April 18–20 impacted life up and down the West Coast. For several weeks, it appeared that the only way the Pacific Coast League would be able to play the new season was by merging with the Northwestern League. As a result, the Tacoma manager released Johnson. He figured better players would soon be coming his way. His parting advice to Johnson? Forget about pitching and focus on the outfield.

Disappointed, Johnson was on the verge of returning home, back to helping his father and pitching for his old team, the Oil Wells. That's when a former Olinda teammate wired him. Clair Head, once the Oil Wells' shortstop, was in someplace called Weiser, Idaho. The team there needed pitching. Was Johnson interested? You bet he was.

Located in southwest Idaho, near the border with Oregon, Weiser was a mining and farming community. For $75 a month, Johnson pitched for the local team, which played on the weekends in the sixteam Southern Idaho League. The rest of the time he dug postholes
for the Weiser Telephone Company. He was there until the following June, when Cliff Blankenship, a reluctant scout for the Washington Senators, signed him to a big-league contract.

“Looking back on it, playing in Weiser, Idaho, allowed Walter to kind of get his legs back under him again,” Thomas tells me. “The situation in Tacoma hadn't been the best. He was looking for a place where he could just pitch, make his mark. But you have to think that with the fastball Walter had that somebody would have noticed, sooner or later. Anybody who saw him pitch in those days, who was intelligent enough to look past that sidearm business, soon recognized he had one of the best fastballs ever in the game.”

I love how Thomas refers to Johnson simply as Walter. At first blush, it would seem to be a curious convention. But Thomas, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, is more than Johnson's biographer. He's also his grandson and was born in the same year that the legendary fireballer died.

When Thomas's grandfather arrived in the nation's capital to pitch for the hometown Senators, he was already being labeled as a phenom. At first, opponents and even his new teammates were dismissive of the 19-year-old's sidearm delivery. Such concerns disappeared when they stepped into the batter's box. The Senators' Jim Delahanty was said to be the first guy Johnson threw to in a team batting practice soon after arriving in D.C.

“The big raw rookie just took a short windup and let go with the ball. I never had a chance to take a swing,” Delahanty later said. “It was in the catcher's hands before I knew it had left Johnson's. And, when he came back with another just like it, I just lay my bat down and talked to [manager] Joe Cantillon and said, ‘I'm through.'”

Cantillon asked if Johnson truly had “a fast one.”

“Has he got a fast one?” replied Delahanty. “No human being ever threw one as fast before.”

That prompted the Senators' manager to ask if Johnson had a curve.

“I don't know and I don't care,” Delahanty said. “What's more, I'm not going back to bat against that guy until I learn how good his control is. From now on, he can pitch for me but not to me.”

In fact, the young phenom was also afraid of what would happen if he hit a batter, teammate or otherwise. Only a few, notably Ty Cobb, ever figured that out and used it to their advantage. To the rest of baseball, Johnson soon became known as a plainspoken kid from somewhere out west, who threw a fastball that nobody could touch.

His first big-league start was against the Detroit Tigers, and even though Johnson lost, 3–2, he certainly made an impression. “The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup—and then something went past me that made me flinch,” Cobb recounted in his autobiography. “I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. The thing just hissed with danger. Every one of us knew he'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”

J. Ed Grillo, covering the game for the
Washington Post
, wrote, “Walter Johnson, the Idaho phenom, who made his debut in fast company yesterday, showed conclusively that he is perhaps the most promising young pitcher who has broken into a major league in recent years.... He had terrific speed, and the hard-hitting Detroit batsmen found him about as troublesome as any pitcher they have gone against on this present trip.”

The Senators were simply grateful to have something go their way for once. The ballclub had finished 55–95 the year before, second to last in the American League. “He's the best raw pitcher I've ever seen,” Cantillon said after Johnson's debut. “Give him two years and he'll be a greater pitcher than Mathewson.”

After going 5–9 his first big-league season, a dazzling stretch over Labor Day weekend the next season forever put Johnson on the map. The Senators were in New York to play the Yankees. The Yankees weren't the heavy-spending contenders that they are now. In fact, they were also-rans at the time, much like Washington. That didn't stop Cantillon from trying to play mind games with his young phenom.

At the team hotel, the manager showed Johnson a New York newspaper story that detailed the young pitcher's lack of success against the Yankees. No matter that Johnson hadn't pitched many games against New York. A bit fired up, Johnson went out and shut out the Yankees, 3–0.

The next day's paper read that Johnson had gotten lucky. That didn't sit well with the phenom and he asked Cantillon to pitch him again that day. Of course, this was well before pitch counts and preordained days of rest. The Senators' manager liked how worked up his young starter was and let him have another go. This time Johnson won in another shutout, 6–0.

While that should have been the end of the story, the next day Johnson got talking with several of his veteran teammates in the hotel lobby. They teased that the newspaper writer still didn't think much of him. Johnson, not realizing that they were egging him on, asked Cantillon if he could pitch again against the Yankees in the doubleheader slated for Labor Day Monday. (Sunday was an off day.) Johnson started the first game and pitched his third shutout in four days.

After a disappointing third season, in which his fastball seemed to lose velocity, Johnson bounced back to lead the league for the first time in ERA (1.39) while posting a 33–12 record. From then on Johnson was a force to forever be reckoned with, leading the league in strikeouts 9 of 10 seasons, starting in 1910, and in victories 5 of 6 seasons, from 1913 to 1918. In addition, he pitched 56 shutout innings from April 10 to May 14, 1913, and three years later he pitched 369 ⅔ innings without allowing a home run.

Numbers in baseball give a degree creditability to what we've actually witnessed. Most fans know that the Triple Crown goes to the hitter who leads the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in in the same season. After the earned run average, or ERA, became an official statistic in 1912 in the National League and a year later in the American League, a similar high standard was available for pitchers.

“Earned run average can be analogous to batting average, since it is not affected too much by what teammates do,” Leonard Koppett wrote in the
Sporting News
. “Won-lost percentage is like runs batted in, to the extent that it will reflect membership on a stronger team. And strikeouts are like home runs, in that they are an entirely individual feat.”

In 1913, Johnson was the first to win pitching's equivalent of the Triple Crown, posting a 36–7 record, a minuscule 1.14 ERA, and 243 strikeouts.

Not only were the statistics there, but the personal testimonies and tall tales that began to surround Johnson were pretty amazing, too. The Cleveland Indians once loaded the bases on him with none out in the first inning. Johnson proceeded to strike out Tris Speaker, Chick Gandil, and Braggo Roth on ten pitches. Only Roth was able to even foul one off.

Another time the Detroit Tigers loaded the bases on Johnson thanks to three Senators errors.

“Don't worry, Big Fella,” called out one of Johnson's infielders.

“I'm not worrying,” he replied. “Just give me the ball and I'll get the next three guys.”

Johnson did just that, striking out Cobb, Germany Schaefer, and Claude Rossman.

That he did all this with meager support borders upon the unbelievable. In the first five years Johnson was with the Senators, the ballclub never finished above seventh place. Still, the hard thrower managed to win 82 games.

With such accomplishments came the nicknames. He was called “the Big Swede,” even though he had little Scandinavian ancestry, and “Barney,” a play on Barney Oldfield, a top-notch auto driver of the time. But it was left to Grantland Rice to come up with the best moniker for the right-handed fireballer. He dubbed Johnson “the Big Train” after the fastest means of travel at the time.

 

 

B
orn on November 3, 1918, in Van Meter, Iowa, Bob Feller heard many of the stories about the Big Train growing up. And the more he heard, the more Feller couldn't help thinking that the two of them had more in common than a blazing fastball. After all, they were both country boys, for the most part. Johnson grew up on the Kansas prairie, with the finishing touches in southern California. Feller was another hayseed—raised in a three-bedroom farmhouse
with a trap door that led from the kitchen to the fruit cellar in case of tornadoes. Feller's father was a farmer, growing corn and wheat, and from early on the old man was sold on his son's ability to throw a baseball very, very fast. A belief that would spur Feller on to become one of the best teenage prodigies in sports history.

When young Bobby was 5 years old, he would fire a rubber ball back to his father with such velocity that Mr. Feller had to employ a couch pillow for protection. Errant throws also loosened the plaster on the living room wall. At the age of 10, Feller's father gave him his first baseball uniform. Even though it didn't have a number or name stitched on the back, it was made of flannel, just like the major-league models at the time, and it came with a matching hat and stirrups. By this time Feller already had a bat of his own and two gloves—a Rogers Hornsby model and a Ray Schalk catcher's mitt.

Most parents would have stopped there. But with his son already considered the best shortstop in the county, Bill Feller decided to take things to another level. He dug up part of the pastureland, put up a fence to keep out the livestock, and built bleachers and a scoreboard. He formed a local team called Oakview (named after the timber and a view of the Raccoon River less than a mile away). Games were played on Sundays during the summer, with admission being 25 cents—35 cents for doubleheaders. It was “a field of dreams” almost a half century before W. P. Kinsella penned his famous novel that was made into the movie starring Kevin Costner.

The Oakview ballclub had some of the best players in the area and competed against teams from nearby Des Moines and other Iowa towns. For the most part, the Oakview roster was made up of players in their late teens or early 20s. The lone exception was Feller, who was 13. Father and son were convinced, even then, that he had a good shot at playing major-league baseball.

“He and I were in it together,” Feller remembers. “It wasn't like he was pushing me to do it. It wasn't like he was a stage mother or anything like that. I wanted to play ball and he did everything he could to
help me. Later on, people made it sound like I was his puppet or something like that. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Unlike the pampered sports prodigies one sees today, Feller still had plenty of chores around the farm to do growing up. He says he practiced in “a block of time here and there and all of a sudden I had an incredibly strong arm for my age. This made it possible for me to be known as a young phenom throughout Iowa.”

Feller fed the hogs, milked the cows, picked corn, pumped water, and toted bales of hay. The manual labor made his legs and arms strong, which years later he said was “exactly what a pitcher needs to be successful in the major leagues. This type of natural exercise was the best in the world, and the fact that my arm became strong was just a side benefit. The main reward was I knew I was helping my parents out and that meant the most to me.

“Later on, when I heard more about Walter Johnson and his story, I realized that this was something we had in common. Growing up the way we did made us strong on the mound.”

 

 

A
late winter wind buffets the redbrick building behind the backstop at Shirley Povich Field in Bethesda. Tarps cover home plate, as well as the pitching mound, and on harsh afternoons like this it's hard to imagine that spring and another baseball season are almost here. Up in the press box, though, the hot-stove conversation is crackling. Even in hibernation, the national pastime lends itself to not only what's on the horizon but what's gone down in the past. Such a nod to history has Bruce Adams explaining once again how his team got its nickname, the Big Train.