The Baseball 100: No. 28, Randy Johnson

Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy. 

The first time I saw Randy Johnson happened to be the first time I went on the road as a baseball writer. It was really exciting. I was 20 years old and working as an agate clerk for The Charlotte Observer. My job as an agate clerk was answering the phone, putting together the daily standings, taking high school and community results over the phone and so on. Many people had to be sick, on vacation or otherwise indisposed for me to get a chance to cover a ballgame.

But that summer, thanks to a series of increasingly unlikely occurrences, I ended up being the only healthy and available person who could join columnist Tom Sorensen for a road trip to Jacksonville as the Charlotte O’s and Jacksonville Expos battled for the Southern League Eastern Division title.

This is an aside — well, this whole thing is an aside — but that O’s team had one of the first great players I ever covered, a guy by the name of Tom Dodd. If you know the name now, it’s probably because he was involved in one of the weirder things the New York Yankees have ever done. They drafted him in the first round of the 1980 secondary draft, and two years later they traded him to Toronto for John Mayberry.

A few months later, they worked out a trade to get Dodd back. In exchange, this time they threw in soon-to-be Hall of Famer Fred McGriff.

In any case, by the time I was covering Dodd and the O’s, he was 28 and no longer a prospect — he’d already had his cup of coffee for Baltimore in the big leagues. But he was a Charlotte legend. He hit 37 home runs that season with 127 RBIs; it just didn’t make any sense to me at all that he wasn’t good enough to hit in the big leagues.

I didn’t fully understand then that baseball doesn’t quite work that way, that while Dodd very well might have been good enough to hit in the big leagues, many things need to come together for a player. He didn’t really have a defensive position, he played first base by default and the Orioles had a pretty decent first baseman named Eddie Murray. Dodd had blossomed late and, as such, had missed his window. It is not an uncommon story.

Anyway, Tom and I drove to Jacksonville for the big playoff game. And I saw Randy Johnson. It turns out, looking back at the Jacksonville roster, that I must have seen Larry Walker too, though I have no memory of it.

But Randy Johnson? Yes. Of course. You don’t forget your first 6-foot-10 pitcher. That’s really all he was known for then: Being the tallest pitcher in the history of professional baseball. He was drafted by the Expos in the second round out of USC, where he had gone on a joint basketball-baseball scholarship. Everyone knew he had great stuff, otherworldly stuff, but whether or not he would ever be a major-league pitcher was an open question. He didn’t have a windup and delivery in those days so much as he unfolded before your very eyes, like an air mattress being filled with air and coming to life. He more or less had no idea how to control his stuff. It wasn’t clear he could ever learn.

When I asked someone in Jacksonville if Johnson would become a big-league star, the answer was as direct and memorable as such an answer can be:

“Johnson? Hell no. That guy could throw a pitch from under the Eiffel Tower and not hit Paris.”

Late bloomers are fascinating creatures. Phenoms, those people who were seemingly born with an abundance of talent and an instruction manual logged in their heads, are one thing, but what about people like Johnson? He was already 24 years old when I first saw him in Jacksonville. That year, he pitched 140 innings and walked 128 batters. True, he also struck out 163 and allowed just 6.4 hits per nine innings, but that was in Double A.

The better the hitters got, the less likely it would be that they were going to swing at whatever he was trying to sell.

He went to Indianapolis the following year and somehow — it’s unclear how he did this — managed to balk 20 times in just 113 1/3 innings. He had three balks in one game in Louisville. He did combine with former U.S. Olympian Pat Pacillo on a no-hitter in Nashville, but even that wasn’t ideal. Johnson lost the game by walking Lenny Harris in the first inning and then allowing Harris to steal second and third. Harris scored on a groundout for the only run of the game.

The Expos called Johnson to the big leagues five days after his 25th birthday. The papers trumpeted the fact that he had become the tallest player in Major League Baseball history, and in his second big-league start he was fantastic, throwing a complete game, allowing one run, striking out 11. He made quite an impression.

“You’re one big unit, aren’t you?” his teammate Tim Raines asked.

But it wasn’t going to be a smooth rise in the big leagues. Yes, he was a big unit, but he wasn’t yet the Big Unit. Players sensed weakness. In a spring training game, several New York Mets players screamed insults at him. “We were on him pretty good,” Mets manager Davey Johnson said at the time (Randy Johnson was so new then that newspapers felt it necessary to put “no relation” after Davey’s name). Johnson tried to fight back by celebrating after every out he got.

“If they think they can intimidate me,” he told reporters, “they’re wrong.”

But they could. And they knew it. Even years later, he remembered a time when Tony La Russa, then managing Oakland, began yelling for him to quit whining, and it turned him into jelly. “It was as if I was this California surfer dude who’d let you take advantage of him,” he said. “People tried to rattle me. And it worked.”

Johnson started just six games for the Expos in 1989. He walked seven batters in his first one. He lasted just three innings in his second and didn’t make it out of the second inning the next time. In early May, the Expos made their decision: They weren’t willing to wait and see what Johnson might become. They traded him to Seattle for a few months’ worth of an established left-handed power pitcher, Mark Langston. Those Expos had delusions of grandeur; they believed themselves to be one pitcher away from glory.

Langston was every bit as good as they could have hoped — he pitched 176 innings, struck out 175, had a 2.39 ERA and threw four shutouts. It didn’t matter. The Expos went 81-81 for the second straight year and finished a distant fourth. Langston left for Anaheim. And four years later, the Expos added a young pitcher named Pedro Martínez — whew, can you imagine how that Unit-Pedro 1-2 punch would have looked?

But at the time of the trade, it seemed that nobody at all talked about Johnson, not even in Seattle. Most focused on the anger over the Mariners dumping fan-favorite Langston rather than paying him. Some complained that other teams had offered more for Langston. Heck, the Mets had offered Howard Johnson! Randy Johnson seemed more a baseball oddity than anything.

And then Johnson came to Seattle and promptly made an impression. He threw a no-hitter against the Tigers in his first full season with the Mariners. He also led the league in walks three years in a row — his 152 walks in 1991 are the most for any pitcher in the last 30 years. In 1992, he had a particularly strange year — he led the league in walks, strikeouts, fewest hits per nine and hit-by-pitch — his 18 HBPs was the seventh-highest total for a pitcher since World War II.

And if all this sounds familiar — all those walks, all those strikeouts, all those intimidated hitters, all those wild pitches, a Polaroid windup that took forever to develop — well, yes, that’s right: He was basically a left-handed Nolan Ryan. He was also 29 years old and it did not look like he would ever put everything together.

But, Randy Johnson has something that Nolan Ryan did not have.

He had Nolan Ryan himself.

“You’ve got to get your control,” Ryan said to him, and it meant a lot because Johnson was more than just a gruff-looking Big Unit who scowled at everyone. He was a lover of baseball history. He was a guy who would occasionally — and without any warning at all — drop a Kid Nichols or Christy Mathewson reference in conversation. He had the numbers of Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax and Steve Carlton* plugged into his phone, and he took them up on their offer to call and talk baseball.

*Big Unit particularly bonded with Carlton; they would talk about how a pitcher has to be the leader on the mound, has to take care of his teammates, and they shared trade secrets about throwing the slider. That must have been some conversation: When Rob Neyer and Bill James rated the greatest sliders in baseball history in their Guide to Pitchers, they rated Carlton’s and Johnson’s Nos. 1 and 2, respectively.

So when Ryan talked to him about getting control of his stuff and thinking more on the mound and remembering that he was the intimidating one out there, not all those players yelling insults and trying to distract him, well, he took that to heart.

And then there was something else, something much more personal and painful. His father, Bud, died on Christmas Day of 1992. Randy had raced home to say goodbye, but his father was gone by the time he reached the hospital. He put his head on his father’s chest and wept.

And after that, life was different. At first, he thought about quitting pitching. But with his mother’s encouragement, he resolved instead to focus on what matters in life. He turned to his faith. He turned to things that mattered. “From that day on,” he would say, “I got a lot more strength and determination to be the best player I could be and not get sidetracked and not to look at things as pressure but as challenges. What my dad went through was pressure. That was life and death. This is a game.”

It’s always problematic to write about life like it’s a movie, like one montage or scene can change everything. But it’s unmistakable: Beginning in 1993, as a 29-year-old, Johnson was a different pitcher. He struck out 308 batters that season, becoming the first pitcher to strike out 300 since his mentor Ryan. The league hit just .203 against him. He finished second in the Cy Young voting to Jack McDowell, who did not have nearly as good a year (but did win three more games — wins were everything in those days).

And for the next decade, Johnson was profoundly different from any pitcher in the history of the game. He led the league in strikeouts in every full season he pitched but one from 1992 to 2004. The one full season he pitched when he did not lead the league in strikeouts? That was 1997. He struck out 291. Roger Clemens struck out 292.

From 1999 to 2002, four seasons, he left the known universe. He went 81-27 with a 2.48 ERA, a 187 ERA+, and he averaged — averaged — 354 strikeouts per season. He won all four Cy Youngs, carried the Arizona Diamondbacks to a World Series title and was named Sports Illustrated’s co-Sportsperson of the Year along with his teammate Curt Schilling.

He did all this from ages 35-38. It’s the greatest four-year run for any late-30s pitcher ever.

He kept on going to age 45 though, and as happens to even the greatest, his fastball finally did lose some of its heat, his slider some of its tilt. But in all, Big Unit won 300 games, finished second all-time with 4,875 strikeouts, and he is fifth in FanGraphs WAR, ahead of every other left-handed pitcher in baseball history.

He is also fifth-all-time with 190 career hit-by-pitches. He ranks behind four Deadball era pitchers. You did not want to crowd the plate against Randy Johnson.

This will sound strange, but I think Johnson is somewhat underrated. I mean, sure, everybody knows he’s one of the greatest pitchers ever. He was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot with 97.3 percent of the vote — he went into the Hall with Pedro, who could have been his teammate so many years before.

But because of the odd shape of his career, I’m not sure people quite grasp his place in baseball history. He came along at the very golden age of baseball pitching, when three other all-time greats — Greg Maddux, Clemens and Martínez — were all at their height.

And Johnson had the quirkiest of the four careers. He was traded before he really began. He was a misfit before he became an ace. He didn’t play in a major market until he was 41 and spent a couple of declining years with the Yankees. While Maddux was beloved by fans in Atlanta and Chicago, while Pedro was idolized in Boston, while Clemens was a larger-than-life character, Johnson kept to himself. And I’m just not sure that, for most people, his name is among the first that comes to mind when thinking of the best pitchers to ever take the mound.

But it should.

One thing that should be added is that Johnson has shown some of his personality since he retired. He appeared as himself on “The Simpsons,” and he has done some fun commercials — like the one about how you don’t ever really want to get into a snowball fight with Randy Johnson — and it does humanize him, which is great, because he was more than just a guy who carried a scowl and a grudge and took the inside of the plate by force.

Randy Johnson is the most recent pitcher to win 300 games. Now the question is: Will Johnson be the last pitcher to ever win 300 games in a career? I don’t think so. For one thing, it’s probably good to follow the advice of Romeo Void (or Justin Bieber, if you insist on being more current) and never say never.

But, even beyond that, I don’t think you have to work that hard right now to imagine a 300-game winner. I think Justin Verlander, for example, might have a shot. Sure, it’s something of a longshot — he still has 75 wins to go and he’s 37 — but he has a shot just the same.

Heck, Johnson had 46 fewer wins at Verlander’s age.

Even Zack Greinke, who is a few months younger than Verlander, might have a shot. It’s a longer shot — he’s 20 wins behind — but the point is that if there are active players with a shot at 300 wins, it seems sure that there will be a 300-game winner sooner or later.

At the same time, it is also clear that an era ended when Johnson won No. 300 on June 4, 2009. Three of his contemporaries — Maddux, Clemens and Glavine — also won 300 games. Will a group like that come along again? It’s hard to imagine that now with the way the game is being played, with starters going fewer and fewer innings, with teams trying out specialty openers. But it’s good to remember that the game is in constant motion and something new will always come along to surprise us.

Who could have imagined Randy Johnson before Randy Johnson?

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

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(Photo: Matt York / AFP via Getty Images)