High Heat (7 page)

A decade ago, Adams's dream of placing a semipro team just around the corner from the Montgomery Shopping Mall, hard by Interstate 270, was almost reality. Most of the bases had been covered—erecting a lovely ballpark, ordering the uniforms, lining up the ballplayers. Yet somehow in the swirl of it all, the team's nickname had been left until the late innings.

So, Adams called a board meeting and told everyone to come with a list of monikers. To his surprise, the favorite soon became Johnson's best-known nickname, “the Big Train.”

For those in the D.C. area, who went three-plus decades without a major-league team to call their own, who aren't quite sure who Walter Johnson was, Adams has a knee-jerk response. “Who was Walter Johnson?” he'll repeat, voice dripping with the same indignation that Tom Hanks's character, Jimmy Dugan, has in
A League of Their Own
. “He's only the greatest pitcher in baseball history and he lived right here, in Washington, in Montgomery County. If you're a baseball fan, you have to remember this gentleman.”

Before Ali-Frazier, Riggs-King, Bird-Magic, there was Smoky Joe versus the Big Train. In September 1912, Johnson faced off against Smoky Joe Wood of the Red Sox at the new Fenway Park. It didn't matter that the first-place Red Sox were 16 games up on the Senators in the standings. What sold the place out was the opportunity to witness two of the best fireballers of all time go toe-to-toe.

The two pitchers couldn't have been more different in stature or delivery. Johnson was 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, while Wood was 5-foot-11 and perhaps 165. Johnson easily threw the ball to the plate. His sidearm delivery belying how fast the ball arrived at the plate. In comparison, Wood had a pitching motion that bordered upon the violent as he put everything he had into the pitch. “I threw so hard I thought my arm would fly right off my body,” Wood said.

Johnson feared for his rival's safety, too. “When I used to see Wood pitch, although I admired his speed and control, it made my shoulder ache to watch his delivery,” he told
Baseball Magazine
. “That pitching with the arm alone, that wrenching of the muscles in the shoulder, would wear out my arm, I am sure, much quicker than the easy, swinging motion I always aim to use.”

Johnson had won 16 consecutive games earlier in that season. Heading into their marquee matchup, Wood was on a 13-game winning streak, and the Boston faithful were convinced he was well on his way to shattering Johnson's mark. Between the streaks and the
speed-versus-speed component, the showdown rapidly became a promoter's dream. And one that Senators manager Clark Griffith made sure came about by wiring the Red Sox management and personally challenging them to the contest. To add a little fuel, Griffith told the press that Wood's streak was meaningless unless he faced Johnson. The Red Sox took the bait and moved Wood up one day in the rotation to ensure that he would face Johnson at Fenway.

Incredibly, the game lived up to its hype. Johnson and Wood were on from the beginning, working out of jams in the early innings. It wasn't until the bottom of the sixth inning that the Red Sox broke the scoreless tie when Duffy Lewis drove home Tris Speaker. That slim lead held up until the ninth, when the Senators put a man on second base, thanks to a single and a sacrifice. It all came down to Wood against Washington catcher Eddie Ainsmith. Johnson's battery mate struck out swinging on a trio of Wood fastballs.

Even though Wood won, he would later call Johnson “the greatest pitcher who ever lived.”

Smoky Joe would go on to tie Johnson's consecutive-victories record (he would miss out on his 17th in a row when a pop fly dropped safely, allowing the tying and winning runs). His gaudy 34–5 record that season included a no-hitter against St. Louis. He won another three games in the 1912 World Series as the Red Sox defeated the New York Giants and Christy Mathewson in eight games (4-3-1, as Game Two that year ended in a 6–6 tie when called for darkness). For a single season, there was nobody better, or more popular, in the game than Wood.

“The whole world did love me that day, it seemed like,” Wood said years later. “It was my greatest season: 34 wins, 16 in a row and three more in the World Series. Then I hurt my hand and almost became a has-been.”

For an Andy Warhol moment, the baseball world was as captivated by Wood's backstory as it was by his pitching prowess. Wood, like Johnson, grew up in the West. While Johnson came of age in the oil patches of southern California and was toughed up a bit by his
time in Idaho, Wood grew up in southwest Colorado, a stone's throw from such places as Lizard Head Pass and Slumgullion Gulch.

“I see these western pictures on television and sometimes it just hits me,” Wood told Lawrence Ritter in
The Glory of Their Times
. “I actually lived through all that in real life. Sort of hard to believe, isn't it?”

So was how he broke into professional ball. By the time Wood was a teenager, his family had moved closer to civilization—actually Ness City, Kansas, about 60 miles north of Dodge City. Wood became the star pitcher on the town team, playing against squads from Scott City, High Point, and Wakeeney. Toward the end of his 16th summer, the Bloomer Girls came to Ness City. They were a barnstorming outfit that toured the country, and several of their top players were guys instead of girls. Rogers Hornsby and Rube Waddell's brother were among those who donned wigs and the team's baggy Turkish-style trousers, especially when the promoter wanted to cover side bets with the locals.

The Bloomer Girls' manager was impressed by Wood's game and invited him to finish out the 1906 season with them. After getting over some initial confusion about the team's configuration, Wood agreed. He played out the last three weeks of the season for $35. For games, his name was Lucy Tolton. Things went well except for the time when his wig flew off at the end of his violent windup and Wood narrowly made it out of town ahead of an angry mob. Yet, as they say, what doesn't kill us can make us strong, and two seasons later Wood was pitching in the majors for the Red Sox.

As often is the case in the realm of high heat, though, the line between tragedy and triumph can be a fine one. The 1912 season was the pinnacle of Wood's pitching career. Within a few seasons after the Fenway showdown, his arm went dead, and Wood ended his 14-year career in the outfield.

“I have seen Joe Wood pitch some days when I thought that he was faster than I,” Johnson later said, “and I believe that for two or three innings he has as much swiftness. But he could not hold it
during the game. He has a jerky motion, and it is this motion that weakens him.”

As Wood's career rapidly declined, Johnson kept rolling along. About the only fastball pitchers who came close to him in terms of velocity and longevity were Feller, Satchel Paige, and Nolan Ryan. As Wood was hampered by injuries, first a broken thumb and then a bum shoulder, Johnson led the league with a 36–7 mark in 1913 and was the American League's top game winner four of the following five seasons. Still, “the Big Train” sometimes struggled to win the so-called big games. Perhaps that reputation began with the epic showdown against Wood. It could have been perpetuated by his easygoing manner. For it is one thing to be regarded as a good guy, even a saint. It is quite another to be known as a big-game pitcher, no matter how fast you can throw a baseball. As Johnson's career wound down, he no longer led the league in victories, even though he continued to be the standard when it came to strikeouts.

In 1924, though, the planets in Johnson's baseball universe came into alignment. For the third time in his career he led the American League in victories, ERA, and strikeouts in the same season. More importantly, after 18 seasons in the majors, he finally reached the World Series, and much of the country was ready to cheer him on. Thanks to Western Union, 125 scoreboards for the games between the American League's Washington Senators and the National League's New York Giants were erected nationwide. Such star players as Cobb, George Sisler, and Babe Ruth were on hand to file special newspaper columns.

“Commercial radio, in its infancy in 1924, received a boost from the fledgling NBC network's live broadcast in Washington, New York and six other cities,” Thomas wrote in
Walter Johnson: Baseball's Big Train
. “Crystal sets were the hottest-selling item at department stores, and hundreds of them were set up in government and business offices throughout Washington.”

Of course, Johnson was the Senators' choice to pitch Game One. In the second inning, Giants slugger George Kelly lofted a deep fly ball to left-center field. Usually it would have been a routine play for
Senators outfielder Leon “Goose” Goslin. But he couldn't go back as far as normal due to a three-foot makeshift fence in front of the temporary bleachers. Despite Goslin's headlong dive into the crowd, the routine fly went for a home run and Johnson was quickly behind, 1–0.

The Giants upped their advantage to 2–0 in the top of the fourth inning. That's when the hometown Senators began to battle back. After shaving the lead to a run in the sixth inning, Washington rallied in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game at 2–2. With Johnson still on the mound, the contest barreled into extra innings. That's the way it remained until the Giants plated two runs in the top of the 12th inning.

The Senators refused to go silently in the bottom half, however. Rookie Mule Shirley, pinch-hitting for Johnson, reached second base after his pop-up was lost in the sun. A single promptly brought him home. With two down, the Senators had a man on third, with Goslin up. He lashed a hard ground ball to second base, which George “Highpockets” Kelly snared one-handed and flipped to first base. In a bang-bang play, Goslin was called out, the result being a heated argument between the umpire Bill Klem and several of the Senators. As Thomas later detailed, the squabble continued as President Calvin Coolidge filed past, headed for the exit. Despite striking out 12, Johnson had lost his World Series debut.

The Big Train was back on the mound for Game Five, with the series tied at two games apiece. On a chilly day in New York, Johnson started off well enough, holding the Giants scoreless through the first two frames. But New York took a 1–0 lead in the third. While the Senators tied it up in the next inning, the game soon unraveled for Johnson. The Giants picked up two runs in the bottom of the fifth inning and three more in the eighth.

“As the dying shadows of a chill October day crept down from Coogan's Bluff, Walter Johnson stood on the mound of the Polo Grounds taking his punishment without a murmur,” wrote the Associated Press's Robert Small. “There was a spirit of a dying gladiator in the air. The stands were silent; the spectators were stunned.”

It appeared that Johnson would only know disappointment in his first and perhaps his only World Series. He had started two games
and lost both of them. Many wondered if he would ever have another chance. “A bright vision hung and held for just a moment over the Polo Grounds this afternoon—the vision of a tall, fresh-cheeked, fairhaired, brawny youth pitching with power, with blinding, dazzling speed,” Damon Runyon wrote after Johnson's second loss. “It was just a mirage of other years. Now it has vanished. The youth is gone.”

As the Senators boarded the train back to Washington and what appeared to be an anticlimactic Game Six and a likely New York World Series triumph, Thomas later detailed a pivotal conversation between Johnson and Clark Griffith. The Senators' owner was considered to be the only one who could raise the Big Train's spirits at such a low point.

“Don't think about it anymore, Walter,” Griffith told Johnson. “You're a great pitcher. We all know it. Now tonight when we get home, don't stand around the box office buying seats for friends or shaking hands with people who feel sorry for you. Go home and get to bed early. We may need you.”

More prophetic words were never spoken.

Somehow the Senators battled back to take Game Six, 2–1, behind Tom Zachary's complete game. That set up the epic Game Seven. The starting pitchers were Curly Ogden for Washington and Virgil Barnes for New York. But Senators manager Bucky Harris said he was ready to employ all available arms, in large part to keep Giants rookie Bill Terry off the base paths. After Harris went over his strategy with Griffith, the Senators' owner called Johnson at home. The Big Train was told to be ready for late-inning relief work. At first, Johnson's wife, Hazel, was ecstatic about the news. Then she realized that her husband could be a three-time loser in the World Series.

On a beautiful day in mid-October, the stands were filled to overflowing in the nation's capital. Posing for photographs before the opening pitch, President Coolidge told the opposing managers, “May the better team win.”

Besides Johnson's inability to win with the nation watching, the 1924 World Series was also known for acrobatic catches or at least the attempts at such grabs. The Giants' Hack Wilson, perhaps trying
to copy Goslin's Superman effort in Game One, soared toward the stands after Bucky Harris's home-run blast. But instead of clearing the fence, “Wilson's ample girth made full contact with the top of it,” Thomas wrote.

To Grantland Rice, the collision sounded “like a barrel of crockery being pushed down the cellar stairs.” You don't find sportswriting like that these days.

In the bottom of the eighth inning, the Senators scored two runs to tie the game at 3–3. Moments after the Washington rally, the sellout crowd began to chant Johnson's name. The hometown crowd was ready to see what magic the Big Train had left. But those up in the press box, especially the guest columnists, didn't like his chances. The belief was he was too exhausted, too old to do much good. Still, there was little doubt that he was coming into the ball game.