High Heat Read online

  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.

  Born 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.

  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 ri
val’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 scorele
ss 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.”