The Big Train Blew Past Them All—Walter Johnson

Pitcher Walter Johnson as a young hurler from the stix on a 1910 American Caramel Company trading card.

Pitching legend Walter Johnson, in most experts opinions the most dominating pitcher in Major League history over the long haul, passed on to the Great Ballpark in the sky on December 10, 1946 at the age of only 59.  Bad news for him, but good news for us in the bleak mid-winter, as poet Christina Rossetti once put it.  It gives us an opportunity to bring the sunshine and green grass of America’s pastime to the gloaming days of the year.

Johnson was born on November 6, 1887 on his parent’s farm near Humboldt in southeastern Kansas.  His mother, the former Minnie Olive Perry, was 20 years old and five years younger than her sodbuster husband at the time.  She would go on to long outlive her illustrious son, dying in 1967 at the age of 100.

When the boy was 14 in 1902 the family relocated to Olinda, California, in the Orange County oil boom district.  Johnson first picked up a baseball in local sand lot games.  “From the first time I held a ball, it settled in the palm of my right hand as though it belonged there and, when I threw it, ball, hand and wrist, and arm and shoulder and back seemed to all work together,” he would later recall.  He easily became a star of the Fullerton Union High School nine where he struck out 27 batters during a 15-inning game against Santa Ana High School, first attracting press note.

He was a tall, blond, gangly hayseed of a kid with impossibly long arms that dangled to his knees in and spindly fingers that engulf the horsehide.  Had he been playing back East, he would have been snapped up by scouts.  But California was practically off of the baseball horizon.  Johnson seemed to have no hope of a professional career and worked with his father in the oil fields when not in school. 

Then in 1906 Johnson was lured to Weiser in eastern Idaho to play ball and work for the local telephone company. He once pitched 84 consecutive scoreless innings and dominated the semi-pro Idaho State League. He caught the eye of a bush beating scout from the Washington Nationals and was signed in July 1907 at the age of nineteen. 

The perpetually bottom dwelling Nats hustled him right into the rotation with not even a cup of coffee in the minors.  His appearance, and a friendly, awe shucks demeanor did not exactly strike fear into his opponents.  Ty Cobb, as mean as Johnson was gentle, and not one to cut any of his opponents any slack, described what would become the first of many encounters:

On August 2, 1907, I encountered the most threatening sight I ever saw in the ball field. He was a rookie, and we licked our lips as we warmed up for the first game of a doubleheader in Washington. Evidently, manager Pongo Joe Cantillon of the Nats had picked a rube out of the cornfields of the deepest bushes to pitch against us. ... He was a tall, shambling galoot of about twenty, with arms so long they hung far out of his sleeves, and with a sidearm delivery that looked unimpressive at first glance. ... One of the Tigers imitated a cow mooing, and we hollered at Cantillon: “Get the pitchfork ready, Joe—your hayseed’s on his way back to the barn.” ... The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup. And then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn’t touch him. ... every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park.

Frenemies--Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb.  The pitchers was as nice as Cobb was ornery but there was no other hurler in the game Cobb respected more.

The Nats, more popularly known as the Senators, were the dregs of the new American League.  Sportswriter Charley Dryden of the San Francisco Chronicle accurately described the team—“Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”  The arrival of the lanky teenager gave the fans something to cheer about.

Take Labor Day Weekend of 1908 in Johnson’s sophomore year with the team and playing before some of the biggest crowds of the season.  The kid started three consecutive games and shutout the New York Highlanders (soon to become the Yankees) in each giving up six, four and two hits respectively—a stunning display of power and endurance in any era.

Johnson began to collect nicknames as sportswriters fell all over themselves in praise of his blistering fastball and the unconventional side-arm delivery that mystified right handed batters.  Despite his English family heritage, he was called the Big Swede because of his blond hair and Scandinavian sounding names.  Others called him Barney after race car driver Barney Olefield.  But the moniker that stuck was hung on him by the dean of sports writers, Grantland Rice—the Big Train because locomotives where then the fastest and most powerful  thing on wheels.

In 1911 and ’12 Johnson racked up two consecutive 30 plus win seasons—33 games and 35 respectively, enough to lift the Senators into contention, respectability, and two second place finishes in the American League.  The next year Johnson won the first of his two Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards. 

After that notoriously penny pinching ownership failed to surround Johnson with first class players with offensive punch and defensive range.  The team fell back to mediocrity and Johnson lost games he should have won.  But he improved his effectiveness by developing a wicked curve ball to accompany his fast ball.

After ten years in the league, by which time he had probably lost a little zip, someone thought to bring Johnson into a a Bridgeport, Connecticut munitions laboratory which recorded Johnson’s fastball at 134 feet per second or 91.36 miles per hour.  Many modern flamethrowers can routinely meet or surpass that speed, but it was completely unmatched in its day.

Despite Johnson’s superb control, such speed was intimidating.  Fearing to be hit, most batters backed off the plate giving Johnson an advantage.  But Ty Cobb realized that the notoriously soft hearted pitcher was terrified of hurting anyone.  So he actually crowded the plate which did cause  Johnson to throw wide and get the aggressive base runner with his sharpened spikes on base with walks if he couldn’t get a hit. In 1920 a frustrated Clark Griffith, the Senator’s field skipper, scraped together the money to buy the franchise.  He left the bench for the front office where he began to build a solid team around Johnson beginning with player/manager Bucky Harris  and the offensive punch of  Goose Goslin and Sam Rice.  In 1924 the Senators captured their first American League pennant, two games ahead of Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees.      

As a mature  pitcher in the 1920's Johnson still had plenty of mustard on his fast ball ahd had developed a wicked curve.  He he is beging the wind-up for the sidearm deliery that mystified hitters.

In their first World Series Washington faced John McGraw’s heavily favored New York Giants.  Johnson had uncharacteristically lost both of his starts, but the Senators managed to force a game 7.  With the game tied 3-3 in the 9th,   Harris brought in Johnson in relief on just one day’s rest telling him, “You’re the best we got.”   Johnson held the Giants for four innings until the Senators were finally able to put a run across the plate giving them their first—and only World Championship.  Johnson took home his second MVP award for the season.

The Senators were back in the World Series in 1925 against the Pittsburg Pirates.  This time Johnson won his first two outings but lost game seven.

After that Johnson went into a modest decline, and decided to retire after the 1927 season—a 21 year major league career. 

In 1928 Johnson became the manager of the Newark Bears of the International League.  After that Clark Griffith  tapped him to manage his old team, which had fallen back into second division status.  A lot of people thought he was too easy going to manage the rowdy ball players of the era.  But Griffith began to find solid talent and the team responded to Johnson’s gentle touch.  Unfortunately the American League also fielded the powerful Murder’s Row of the Yankees and the nearly as talented Philadelphia Athletics.  Despite a strong run, Johnson and the Senators were only able to finish in third place in 1931 and ’32.  Johnson, for the first time in his life was fired.

Walter Johnson as manager of the Ceveland in the 1930'

He bounced back as manager of the Cleveland Indians in from 1933 through ’35.  He managed a mediocre team ending each season in the middle of the pack.  He was replaced for 1936 just ahead of the arrival of another young phenom with a blazing fastball, Bob Feller, who would remind a lot of people of Johnson in his prime.

After spending a season as an announcer on the Senator’s radio broadcasts, Johnson retired to to Germantown, Maryland where he became a beloved civic leader and dabbled in Republican politics, including an unsuccessful 1940 run for Congress.  

Johnson was enshrined as one of the Imortal Five--the only pitcher among the first five inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936.

Johnson died of a brain tumor in Washington shortly after his 59th birthday, and was interred at Rockville Union Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. But you couldn’t bury Johnson’s accomplishments on the field.  In 1936 he one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame along with Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth,  and Honus Wagner—the Five Immortals.  Here is why:

Johnson had twelve 20-win seasons in a 21-year career, including ten in a row from 1910-1919 including those two 30 years.  He pitched Johnson's record includes 110 shutouts, the most in baseball history, had a 38–26 record in games decided by a 1–0 score, and lost  lost 65 games because his teams failed to score a run.

Johnson won the triple crown for pitchers in 1913, 1918 and 1924, and two American League MVP awards Johnson twice won the American League Most Valuable Player Award, a feat accomplished since by only two other pitchers, Carl Hubbell in 1933 and 1936 and Hal Newhouser in 1944 and 1945.

His earned run average of 1.14 in 1913 was the fourth lowest ever at the time he recorded it; it remains the sixth-lowest today, despite having been surpassed by Bob Gibson in 1968 (1.12) for lowest ERA ever by a 300+ inning pitcher.  For the decade from 1910-1919, Johnson averaged 26 wins per season and had an overall ERA of 1.59.

Johnson won 36 games in 1913, 40% of the team’s total wins for the season. In April and May, he pitched 55.2 consecutive scoreless innings, still the American League record and the third-longest streak in history. In May 1918, Johnson pitched 40 consecutive scoreless innings; he is the only pitcher with two such 40+ inning streaks.        

There are slews of various records still on the books and various formulas concocted to compare pitchers of vastly different eras generally rank him as the best pitcher of all time.   In 1999, The Sporting News ranked Johnson number 4 on its list of Baseball’s 100 Greatest Players, the highest-ranked pitcher. Later the same year, he was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.  

The Greatest Baseball Player Ever and a Despicable Son of a Bitch

Cobb did not so mush slide as leap sharpened spikes first into home plate, intimidating catchers.  More than one required stitches after the collision.

Ty Cobb died on July 17, 1961, at Emory University Hospital.  He had arrived at the hospital weeks earlier in bad condition and carrying a paper bag with $1 million in cash and a pistol.  His one surviving son, three daughters, and first wife were with him at his death.  One said they just wanted to make sure he was dead.

Cobb was covered in baseball glory.  Revered as one of five original inductees into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, he received more votes than Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson.  He earned 98% of the eligible votes cast.  He was simply the greatest all-around player of all time.  Still is.  And everyone knows it.

More astonishing, it is likely that not one of the voters in that historic balloting would have had a good word to say about Cobb as a human being.  He was one of the meanest, most miserable human beings imaginable.  He had admirers.  He was respected.  But he had absolutely no friends.  His own team mates feared and loathed him.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb was born on December 17, 1886 in Narrows, Georgia.  His father, William Herschel Cobb was a stern Calvinist who demanded much of his eldest son yet never offered a kind word or encouragement.  When headstrong young Ty defied his father’s demands that he complete school, go to college, and become a lawyer by running away to join semi-pro  small town teams in his home state, the old man coldly told him, “Don’t come home a failure.”  Yet the young man idolized his father anyway.

Cobb’s mother, Amanda Chitwood Cobb had been only 12 years old when she was married and only 15 when Ty was born.  Shortly before Cobb’s contract was bought by the Detroit Tigers, Amanda shot and killed her husband on August 8, 1905.  She claimed he was skulking by her window and she mistook him for a burglar.  In fact the insanely jealous man was convinced his wife was cheating on him and was spying on her trying to catch her in the act.  She was charged with murder and brought her to trial, but the local jury, knowing about William’s brutal reputation, acquitted her.

Young Ty, however, never forgave her.  He packed his bags for Detroit and was on the field that September determined to make his father proud at all costs.

As a young rookie for Detroit Cobb was mocked as the Georgia Peach for the downy fuzz on his cheeks.  The nick name stuck.

In the memoirs that he dictated late in life, Cobb claimed that he had joined the Detroit as a nice Sunday school boy but that the customary, if harsh, hazing all rookies then experienced, changed him.  “These old-timers turned me into a snarling wildcat,” he wrote.  Among the taunts he endured was being called the Georgia Peach for the light fuzz on his 18 year old cheek.

But it is doubtful if Cobb was ever a sweet or pleasant young man.  He had been carefully schooled by his father to hate Yankees, Catholics, Jews, the very rich, the poor whites below him, and above all Blacks.  And after the murder he hated women as well.  Cobb hated everyone who was not exactly like him in every regard and was eager to act physically on that hatred on the slightest of pretenses.

Yet there was no denying his talent, in his first at bat he doubled off of the ace of the New York Highlanders and finished the last 41 games of the season with a respectable .270 batting average.  That was enough to get resigned for the full 1906 season for a very hefty $15,000, almost unheard of for a rookie. 

Cobb’s career achievements kept pace with his vicious attacks off the field, and sharpened-spikes-held-high style of sliding into base meant to maim defenders or scare them off the bag.  As the starting center fielder, Cobb .316 in 98 games and never hit below that for the rest of his career. He was in numerous altercations with his team mates and opposing players both on and off the field.

In 1907 he hit .350 becoming at age 20 the youngest player ever to win an American League batting championship.  He also batted in 115 runs and stole 49 bases, including for the first time in his career stealing second, third, and home after getting on base with a hit.  He would duplicate that feat four more times in his career.  During Spring Training that year in Augusta, Georgia he assaulted and nearly beat to death a black groundskeeper and choking his wife, who came to the rescue of the fallen man.  His teammates pulled him off of her screaming curses and threats.

His numbers propelled the Tigers to the American League Pennant.  With Cobb setting the pace they would win again in 1908 and 1909.  They could never win the World Series, however, losing to then Chicago Cubs the first two years and Pittsburg Pirates in 1909.  In each case Cobb’s post season numbers failed to match those during the Pennant races.

In the midst of this steak, Cobb found a woman who would abide him.  In 1908 he married Georgian heiress Charlotte  “Charlie” Marion Lombard. At first they lived on her father’s estate near Augusta until he built a comfortable mansion in town.  During their marriage Cobb was in several brawls over alleged offenses to her status as Southern Gentlewoman.

His personal fortune also fattened by a relationship with Atlanta based Coca-Cola.  He endorsed the beverage in print ads and soda shop posters and took part of his pay in company stock.  Eventually he became owner of bottling franchises.  His pay checks, investments, and his wife’s eventual inheritance made him a wealthy man.  But he could have earned many times more if he were not so universally detested outside of Detroit and Georgia.

Although the Tigers never again won a Pennant, Cobb kept producing year after year piling up accomplishments and baseball records, many of which stand to this day.   

Cobb in 1910.

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In 1911 had a 40 game hitting streak and he hit for his top average, an astonishing .420 narrowly beating out Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Cleveland Naps for the batting crown.  Jackson was a fellow Southerner and as close to a personal friend as Cobb had in baseball.  Cobb “psyched him out” by shunning him on and off the field.  Cobb claimed in his memoirs that Jackson’s anguish at the unexplained rejection sent his batting into a tail spin. 

But he was always in trouble. In an early season game in 1912 against the Highlanders at the Polo Grounds Cobb charged into the stands and beat a heckler,  Claude Lueker who had allegedly called Cobb a “half-nigger.”  Lueker was missing one hand and several fingers on the other due to an industrial accident.  As fans tried desperately to call Cobb off pleading that his victim had no hands, he snarled, “I don’t care if he has not feet.”  Cobb was suspended and heavily fined by the League.  But his teammates swallowed their personal distaste for Cobb and went out on strike in his defense claiming that the League had not acted to protect the player from an abusive fan.  Because Detroit was once again in a Pennant race, ownership actually made some concessions and the players returned to work.  The Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, an early incarnation of what is now the Major League Baseball Players Association, grew out of this episode, although Cobb himself was bitterly anti-union.

There were other incidents almost too numerous to mention.  He challenged umpire Billy Evans to settle thing in a post-game fight under the stands.  Members of both teams attended the event at which eye-gouging and kicking Cobb quickly had the upper hand.  He pinned the ump and was choking him when he was finally dragged off.

In another incident, Cobb slapped a Black elevator operator for “being uppity” and stabbed a Black janitor who came to his aid with the switch blade he always carried.  This case was hushed up by Detroit management which paid the victims to go away and keep quiet.

Year after year he produced.  He won the batting championship eight of nine years and racked up records for stolen bases.  

Captain Cobb served in the Chemical Corps in a unit of baseball players under Branch Rickey during World War.

Baseball was suspended for the 1918 season.  Cobb and several other major leaguers including Christy Mathewson enlisted in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and served in France under Major Branch Rickey, the St. Louis Cardinals President.  They trained men in gas mask usage and exposed them to gas in special chambers.  Cobb was made a captain.  After oversees duty of 67 days, the war ended and he was honorably discharged and returned to the States.

When play resumed in 1919, Cobb was back playing furiously as always, racking up hits and flashing along the base paths, maybe a touch slower, but every bit as fearsome.  In August of  the ’21 season he got his 3000th hit, at 36 the youngest man ever to accomplish that and he did it in the fewest at bats—8,093.

That same year the baseball world was shocked when he was named to replace the beloved Hughie Jennings as Detroit manager.  Although naming a long time star as a player manager was still a common occurrence in the major leagues, Cobb was so disliked by his team mates that no one thought it would work out.  Although in his five years at the helm he earned a winning record of 479 wins and 444 losses, he was never able to pilot his team to higher than third place in the American League.  He blamed parsimonious ownership which would not invest in the top players he tried to recruit and on the “softness” of his squads.  His unremitting harshness and martinet style of leadership led to understandably poor team moral.

Cobb bitterly resented rising star Babe Ruth but frequently posed with when the Tigers and Yankees faced off.

But his biggest problem was the rise of Babe Ruth who had abandoned a career as an ace pitcher for the Boston Red Sox to become a new kind of slugger hero for the suddenly powerful New York Yankees—the formerly undistinguished Highlanders.  Cobb hated everything about Ruth.  He resented the emphasis on homeruns, which he though sullied the “beautiful” game of baseball.  Even worse, Ruth was a beer swilling, hot dog munching, skirt chasing fat guy with a happy-go-lucky outlook on life, the antithesis of Cobb’s insistence of puritanical self-denial, discipline, and seriousness.  Worse yet was the ascension of New York, which he regarded as a vipers nest of Jews, Catholics, Wets, and Communists.

Not only were Ruth and the Bronx Bombers winning, they became fan favorites, eclipsing Cobb’s personal glory and demanding a change in the way the game was played.

In 1925, Cobb got fed up.  On May 5 he told reporters that he could do anything Ruth could do and would prove it by swinging for the fences.  In that game he went 6 for 6 at the plate with three homers, a double, and two singles.  The next day he clobbered two more homers and added another single.  Not even Ruth had ever slammed five round trippers in two days.  The total of 16 bases on the  first day was a record that lasted until this May of 2013 when Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers hit four home runs and a double for a total of 18 bases.  Having proved his point, Cobb returned to his old hit, run, steal kind of play with a high batting average and lofty Runs Batted In (RBI) count.

For his part, Ruth was generally generous to his rival, but later did say “I could have a lifetime .600 average, but I would have had to hit them singles." The people were paying to see me hit home runs.”

Cobb career as a manager came to an abrupt stop when he announced his retirement in November of 1926 at age 39 after 22 years as a Tiger.  The news stunned baseball, as did the nearly simultaneous announcement of the retirement of another player manager and baseball legend, Tris Speaker of the Cleveland Indians.  Both had been forced into retirement because of allegations that they had been involved in rigging a Detroit win in a 1911 game between the two squads.  The charges were leveled by a former Tiger pitcher Dutch Leonard, angered that Cobb had benched him.  He produced two semi-incriminating telegrams which Cobb and Speaker insisted concerned a horse racing wager, not a baseball game.  Leonard refused to testify in court and no charges were filed.  Baseball Commissioner Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis held a secret hearing into the affair, then cleared both men and allowed them to return to their teams.

Both teams, having moved on with younger players and new leadership allowed the two aging stars to become free agents.  Cobb went to Philadelphia Athletics, a hot young team in 1927.  Speaker went to Washington, but joined Cobb for the ’28 season.  He collected his 4,000 hit back in his hold stomping ground in Detroit in July.  The young team finished second to the most famous and successful of Yankee teams.

Cobb was back the next year but beginning to feel his age.  And with so many young players he was used sparingly as a fill in, utility player, and pinch hitter.  Still Cobb hit over 300 again in ’28 for the 22nd time, one of those baseball records that will probably never be broken.  He collected his last hit doubling as a pinch hitter against the Senators on September 3 and retired for good after the end of the season.

Although extremely wealthy through his ownership of stock in Coca-Cola and General Motors as well as other securities speculations and real estate deals, retirement did not sit well with Cobb.  He tried travel with his family to Europe, and especially to Scotland.  He hunted, fished, played polo, and took up golf.  And the former proponent of “clean living” began drinking and smoking heavily.

His family life was in a shambles.  In 1930 he moved to a mansion outside San Francisco while his wife and children stayed behind in Augusta and she filed the first of several divorce actions made and withdrawn over the next few years.  They finally split for good in 1941. 

His relationships with his children were cool, especially with his sons, on whom he made the same, lofty and inflexible demands as his father had of him.  After his son Ty Jr. failed at Princeton, his father drove across country to whip him.  The young man re-enrolled at Yale, but later dropped out causing a permanent rift between them.  The the younger Ty did eventually return to school and became a successful pediatrician who died at age 42 of brain cancer essentially un-reconciled with his father.  The younger brother experienced similar, if not as severe problems.

Cobb got more votes than any player including Ruth  in the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The 1937 Hall of Fame Election and 1938 induction were the highlights of his retirement.  He occasionally socialized with the few old timers who would speak with him.  Sports writer Grantland Rice, a golfing buddy, was as close to a real friend that he had.  He sometimes tried to befriend and mentor young players of promise.  He helped Joe DiMaggio negotiate his first contract.  But another notoriously prickly personality, Ted Williams found himself shut out of Cobb’s life for simply suggesting that Rogers Hornsby may have been as good a hitter.

In 1949 Cobb married for a second time to 40-year-old Frances Fairbairn Cass, a divorcee.  Their childless and unhappy marriage lasted until 1956.

That year he began work on the first of two memoirs written with professional reporters,  The Tiger Wore Spikes: An Informal Biography of Ty Cobb by John D. McCallum.  This book combined a pep talk for young players with a flattering appraisal of his career glossing over the harder edges.  The book was a success and Cobb had enjoyed the experience.

Without a writer to talk to and his family estranged, he grew lonely, especially after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and Bright’s Disease in 1959.  He spent his time crisscrossing the country in search of a medical miracle and in unexpected charity as he tried to secure a legacy.  He endowed a 24 bed hospital in Royston, Georgia in honor of his parents and endowed a Georgia scholarship fund for needy college bound students.

This unapologetic autobiography dictated to reporter Al Stump was publsihed postuously.  Five years later Stop published an even more revealing and damning book

But mostly he poured his heart out to Al Stump, hired to ghost a new biography, in which he was defiant and unapologetic.  Stump claimed he was also personally abusive to him.  My Life in Baseball: The True Record was published shortly after Cobb’s death in 1961.

He was interred in the elaborate mausoleum he built for his parents in Royston.

Nearly ten years after Cobb’s death, Stump released a new book purporting to be even more frank and unflattering.  It became the basis for Cobb, a 1994 biopic starring Tommy Lee Jones.

Maybe Cobb summed up his life best “In legend I am a sadistic, slashing, swashbuckling despot who waged war in the guise of sport,” he told Stump.  He seemed quite satisfied with that.