JOHNSON, Walter Perry ("The Big Train")

(b. 6 November 1887 in Coffeyville, Kansas; d. 11 December 1946 in Washington, D.C.), one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, who was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1936.

Johnson was the second of six children, and the first of four sons, born into a farming family that hoped to improve their lot by moving to California's new oil fields. His parents, Frank Edwin Johnson and Minnie (Perry) Johnson, had traveled to Kansas from Pennsylvania by wagon train, and moved to California the same way in 1901. Johnson attended Orange County's Fullerton High School, where he played on the baseball team. He also played baseball in Tacoma, Washington, before moving to Weiser, Idaho, to work for the telephone company.

In Weiser, Johnson knocked about playing semiprofessional baseball and became a local celebrity with his fast-ball. He was discovered as a sports talent when a traveling salesman saw him pitch in 1906. The salesman wrote to Joe Cantillon, the manager of the Washington Senators. Cantillon ignored the letters that kept coming about Johnson, even though the Senators needed players. He decided to send a catcher on his disabled list to check on an outfielder named Clyde Milan then playing in the Western Association, and while there take a look at Johnson. After receiving a favorable report on Johnson, the Senators offered him a $100 bonus, plus $350 per month and $9 for train fare to Washington, D.C.

Johnson's definitive nickname was "The Big Train," to distinguish his lashing, overpowering, sidearm fastballs that froze hitters and gave him 417 victories and a winning percentage of .599 in a twenty-one-year career with the Senators. Over that time, the winning percentage for the entire team was only .462. Johnson could have come from central casting for any baseball novel or motion picture. In appearance he was a gangly, raw-boned country boy, all natural talent and no guile, who could humble the best hitters and the best teams on almost any day he pitched.

Yet Johnson's first three seasons with the Senators were mediocre. Inexperience, a last-place team, and problems fielding the bunt all made his fastball less formidable. But he was durable, providing a lot of innings in a lot of games, for example going 13–25 in 1909. He could pitch with few rest days and was willing to start and relieve throughout his career. In 1908 he shut out the New York Highlanders (later known as the Yankees) three times in four days. His ascendancy as a dominating pitcher of his era began in 1910 when he won 25 games, followed by 23 in 1911, 32 in 1912, peaking in 1913 with a 36–7 won-to-lost record. In the 1913 season he also had an earned run average (ERA) of 1.09 and a string of fifty-six scoreless innings, a record that lasted for sixty-five years. On 24 June 1914 Johnson married Hazel Lee Roberts, the daughter of a Nevada congressman.

If baseball is immortal because of statistics, Johnson's career was a shrine to the game. His ERA was less than 2.0 in eleven years and 2.17 in his lifetime. In 1925 at the age of thirty-eight he was a twenty-game winner. He ranked first in shutouts with 110, second in wins with 417 (but with fewer losses than Cy Young), and third in innings pitched with 5,923, and he had a lifetime winning percentage of .599, all of which were achieved with substandard teams through most of his career. He led his league in wins six times, strikeouts twelve times, shutouts seven times, and ERA five times. Of his 279 losses, twenty-seven games were one to nothing and sixty-five were shutouts. Johnson was one of the first five players to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the sports television conglomerate ESPN made him "60" in its top 100 athletes of the century in 1999.

Opponent hitters often decided to take a day off when they were scheduled to face Johnson, but the Big Train was not a headhunter. He did not as a rule throw at a hitter, although in his 5,923 innings he compiled a record of 206 hit batters. Instead he relied on raw speed and the ball's natural movement as it rocketed across the strike zone. "Sounding like a strike" was more than a one-line description of a Johnson fastball. In the 1924 World Series, Johnson's first, against the New York Giants, the umpire Bill Dineen told the Washington catcher Muddy Ruel that Johnson's pitching was so fast that he was doing some lively guessing as to where the ball crossed or didn't cross the plate. Ruel said he didn't tell Dineen to keep his eyes open since he himself was having trouble with Johnson's fastball.

For speed, Johnson himself believed "Smokey" Joe Wood was the fastest, claiming that no man alive could throw any harder than he could. Wood once said, "I threw so hard I thought my arm would fly right off my body." However, Wood won less than one-third of Johnson's total and, despite a stellar career with Boston and Cleveland, did not make the Hall of Fame. None of Johnson's contemporaries equaled his numbers. Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton of the late twentieth century surpassed Johnson's strike-out totals, but Johnson's total record made him the greatest right-handed pitcher in baseball history.

It was unfortunate that the Senators did not become a contending team until Johnson was in his declining years. By 1923 the new owner Calvin Griffith had made some good trades and purchases and had made Bucky Harris the manager. Harris molded the Senators into a pennant winner in 1924 and 1925. Johnson became instrumental in the deciding seventh game in 1924 when he pitched four brilliant innings in relief in a twelve-inning game, and gained the victory when the Giants defense broke down. This was small recompense for his two losses as a starter in that series. In 1925 against Pittsburgh, Johnson was a decisive winner in his first two starts, but in the deciding seventh game on a rainy day, he couldn't hold a lead through the eighth inning and took a 9–7 loss. The gallant old master pitched two more seasons, finishing with 15–16 in 35 appearances in 1926 and 5–6 in 26 appearances in 1927.

In 1929 Johnson was made a manager for the Senators and had a mediocre three years. He then managed Cleveland from 1933 to 1935. Although his teams had a winning percentage, he was regarded as too easygoing. Under Joe Cronin as the manager, Washington again won a pennant in 1933, but lost to the Giants in the World Series. They fell to seventh place the next year and had only four winning seasons in the next twenty-six years.

Johnson slipped easily into retirement, a hero to baseball generally and to Washington, D.C., fans in particular. In 1936, to commemorate George Washington's birthday, he accommodated fans by throwing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River, a distance of 272 feet (he abashedly commented, "The river was probably wider when George Washington threw his dollar"). In the same year Johnson followed Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, and Honus Wagner as one of the first five inductees into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He owned a 550-acre dairy farm in Maryland that he shared with his five children, three boys and two girls (another daughter died in 1921). By then he was a widower, his wife, Hazel, having died in 1930. Johnson became involved in the Republican Party after serving as the president of the Association of Professional Baseball Players from 1936 to 1938. In 1938 he was elected to the board of commissioners of Montgomery County, Maryland, but in a run for the sixth congressional seat in 1940, he lost. He also served as an announcer at Washington Senators games and during World War II attended fund-raisers for the war effort.

Always physically fit at six feet, one inch and 200 pounds, Johnson died of a brain tumor at Georgetown Hospital on 11 December 1946. He is buried in Rockville Union Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland. Throughout his playing career and retirement years, Johnson remained the friendly, mild, modest man who had come to Washington, D.C., in 1907. Back then he had been so green that he believed a stranger who told him that he was already so famous they had named the Johnson Hotel after him. It was typical of Johnson that he enjoyed telling that story on himself.

Books about Johnson include Hy Turkin and S. C. Thompson, The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball (1977); Lawrence Ritter and Donald Honig, The Image of Their Greatness: An Illustrated History of Baseball from 1900 to the Present (1979); Joseph Reichler, The Great All-Time Baseball Record Book: The Unique Sourcebook of Facts, Feats, and Figures (1993); Jack Kavanaugh, Walter Johnson: A Life (1995); and Henry Thomas, Baseball ' s Big Train (1998). An obituary is in the New York Times (11 Dec. 1946).

Jack J. Cardoso