Walter Johnson: A Life

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 19, 1995 | by Dick Heller

One of the great gaps in baseball publishing has been the absence of books about Walter Johnson, the greatest professional athlete in Washington sports history and the best pitcher in baseball's 120 seasons. Now two biographies have appeared almost simultaneously to constitute what most definitely is a mixed bag.

The thoroughly researched and detailed account by grandson Henry W Thomas, Walter Johnson: Baseball's Big Train (Phenom Press, 458 pp), is every bit as worthwhile as the accomplishments of its subject, who won a monumental 417 games for mostly miserable Washington Senators teams between 1907 and 1927. Jack Kavanagh's book, Walter Johnson: A Life (Diamond Communications, 300 pp), is less successful.

Let's get Kavanagh out of here right away with a couple of swift ones down the middle of the plate. Author of a children's book about Walter Johnson some years ago, this freelance writer had no access to Johnson family records. That unfortunate circumstance is compounded by factual errors. Among them, Kavanagh consistently misspells the names of Johnson's children and that of current Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken, refers to pennant-winning Washington manager Bucky Harris as the "Boy Manager" rather than the "Boy Wonder" and mourns the loss of "Walter Johnson's team" to Texas in 1971. (The original Senators moved to Minnesota in 1960.) In short, Kavanagh's book can be dismissed as easily as Johnson did the 3,509 batters struck out during a career that made him a hero to fans and players across the country.

Thomas' book is a whole different ball game. The author came to know his grandfather only through five years of archival study; he was born shortly before Johnson's death at Georgetown University Hospital from a malignant brain tumor in December 1946. (In one of the book's more poignant moments, Johnson rouses himself from a coma to ask his daughter Carolyn, "How's that fine baby boy of yours?")

As a boy and young man, Thomas says, he was aware of his grandfather's fame but not of his impact both on and off the field. In an era when roughnecks dominated baseball, Johnson emerged as a gentle, modest man whose greatest fear was that he might maim any batter he hit with the swiftest fastball ever seen. (Said one opposing player to the umpire, starting for the dugout with only two strikes on him: "You can have the third one -- it won't do me good.")

It was during a family Thanksgiving gathering that Thomas began leafing through 30 yellowing scrapbooks compiled by Johnson's wife, Hazel, between 1919 and her death in 1930 -- and was instantly hooked. "I had never thought much about how much my grandfather meant to people because nobody in the family made a big deal of it," Thomas says. "But through the scrapbooks and my research, I came to realize that he really was the greatest pitcher of all time -- not one of the greatest but the greatest. During his career, he was never compared to anybody else."

Johnson's customary rivals for that designation are Cy Young (511 victories), Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander (373 each). But during Johnson's 21-year career, the Senators won only two pennants and were bad enough otherwise to inspire the vaudevule line "Washington -- first in war, first in peace and last in the American League." It has been projected that with a constantly contending team, Johnson would have won more than 600 games.

Regardless, his feats were astonishing, even in an era when pitchers dominated. In 1913, he compiled a record of 36-7. In 1916, he pitched 370 innings without allowing a home run and finished with no better than a 25-20 record because his own team hit with the force of a spring shower. In 1918, he finished all 29 games he started. And in 1924, the most glorious season in Washington sports history, he won the most dramatic World Series finale imaginable.

Under rookie manager Harris, the dog-meat Senators suddenly surged to their first pennant, putting Johnson in a World Series at the advanced age of 37. Even many fans of the rival New York Giants were rooting for Johnson to win a Series game, but he lost his first two starts as the nation's capital mourned.

Then came Game 7. Summoned unexpectedly to pitch in the ninth inning of a tied game, Johnson held off the mighty Giants until the 12th. Thomas quotes Hazel Johnson as saying, "I saw men crying unashamed, and men and women praying aloud.... It was more than a ballgame to me. It was life and death."

In the bottom of the 12th inning, fate came through for the Senators. With Walter Johnson on first base and another runner on second, right-handed batter Earl McNeely hit a grounder that bounced off a pebble over the head of the Giant's third baseman, scoring the winning run. Washington fans began a historic night of hysterical revelry Thomas describes Johnson in the climactic moment standing on second base, "looking straight toward home with a broad smile breaking over his face and tears welling up in his eyes."

Thomas is a businessman rather than a professional writer, but his meticulous work and love for Johnson enabled him to turn out a book that belongs in the very top ranks of sports biographies. Perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay him is to reiterate that he does his subject proud.