“Now I’m in Weiser, Idaho on a wild goose chase here to look over some palooka who was burning up the Snake River Valley Semi-Pro League. Someone sent the Senators a telegram, said there was a kid, Johnson, threw so fast you couldn’t see ’em, and that he knew where he was throwing it too because if he didn’t, there’d be dead bodies buried at home plates all over Idaho.
“I get to the field just in time to see him shamble out to the mound, all arms and legs, eyes down like he doesn’t even want to be there. Then, holy smoke, 19 years old and no one in big league ball ever had a fast one like this. So I offer the kid $500 to join the Senators. You know what that hayseed said? If I promise him train fare home in case he don’t make it, he’ll come. I say, ‘Kid, a one-way ticket’s all you’re gonna need.’”
This will sound corny, absolutely, but there’s something sacred about the fastball. At the heart of this American game, beneath the strategies, the analytics, the statistics, the sacrifices, the shifts, the legends, the movements, the infield fly rule, there’s a player with a ball and there’s a player with a bat, and they stand 60 feet, 6 inches away from each other.
The player with the ball throws it as hard as he can.
The player with the bat tries to hit it. Good Luck.
That is the spark of baseball, that little piece of magic that rises above and grabs the heart and gives this game something that resembles timelessness. You don’t have to understand anything about stealing signs or linear weights or launch angles or tunneling or working the count to grasp and feel awed by what my friend Jon Hock — who I worked with on the documentary “Fastball” — calls “a primal battle between a man with a stick and a man with a rock.”
And to think that the pitcher who might have thrown the most mind-blowing fastball of them all was just a nice guy from Humboldt, Kan. who threw sidearm more than 100 years ago — well, yes, it sounds corny, but that’s OK because if you can’t say something corny about baseball, especially now, what’s the point of anything?
There have been many, many pitchers with great fastballs. I keep an updated list of 50 on my computer, the 50 I believe threw the hardest fastballs of them all. You’d recognize most of the names: Rube Waddell; Smoky Joe Wood; Smokey Joe Williams; Lefty Grove; Van Lingle Mungo; Ryne Duren; Sandy Koufax; Herb Score; Sudden Sam McDowell; Goose Gossage; Roger Clemens; Rob Dibble; Randy Johnson Billy Wagner; Justin Verlander; Joel Zumaya; Noah Syndergaard; Jordan Hicks and so on.
But I believe there are seven fastball pitchers who transcended, seven pitchers who blew up the conception of what a fastball looks and sounds like. These are pitchers I like to think of as “X” in that famous algebraic equation: “Wow, this pitcher throws even harder than X” or “Nobody every threw harder than X.”
The first of these was Amos Rusie, the Hoosier Thunderbolt, who pitched in the 1890s and first inspired the famous quote, “You can’t hit ’em if you can’t see ’em.” John McGraw said that of Rusie’s pitches. There are those who believe that Rusie, more than any other player of the time, was responsible for the National League moving the pitcher’s box from 50 feet away to 60 feet, 6 inches. Hitters were that frightened of his fastball.
And for more than 20 years after Rusie began throwing that blazing fastball, newspaper writers would compare other pitchers to him. The list of comparables included Waddell, George Meakim, a Yale pitcher named Carter, a Philadelphia area semi-pro pitcher named Stein, Harry “Beans” Keener, Pink Hawley, Archie “Lumbago” Stimmel, Doc McJames, and no, I have not made up any of these names. Each of them, the writers claimed, “has as much speed as Rusie.”
None of them, obviously, really did have as much speed as Rusie. It’s just that they threw pretty hard and Rusie’s fastball was as far the imagination went.
Those comparisons continued until the mid-1910s when Walter Johnson came along. He’s second on the list.
Third was Bob Feller, who just showed up as a high school pitcher from little Van Meter, Iowa and threw fastballs so hard that major-league hitters flinched. Nobody in baseball history, by the way, worked harder to figure out the exact speed of his fastball. He raced a motorcycle with it. He threw it through numerous contraptions. His most famous reading was 98.6 mph, which seemed perfect since 98.6 is also supposed to be the temperature of the human body.*
Satchel Paige, fourth on the list, had a mythical fastball. It wasn’t just breathtakingly fast, it was also perfectly placed where Ol’ Satch wanted to throw it. That combination of power and control is probably unmatched in baseball history. “I never threw an illegal pitch,” Paige once said. “The trouble is, once in a while I would toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.”
Fifth on the list is a folk hero, Steve Dalkowski, who never threw a single pitch in the Major Leagues and, in fact, only managed to get into 15 games in Triple A. But he threw so impossibly hard that he was, at least in part, the inspiration for both Nuke Laloosh of “Bull Durham” and George Plimpton’s April Fool’s Day pitcher Sidd Finch. He really was an almost fictional character with a lightning bolt fastball. And he just couldn’t throw it for strikes. In 1960, in Class-C ball, he pitched 170 innings, struck out 262 and walked 262. But people who saw the pitch said no one ever threw it faster, and the witnesses included Ted Williams, who faced Dalkowski just once in batting practice and promised that he never would again.
Sixth is Nolan Ryan . His fastball needs no introduction or explanation. Nobody will ever strike out more batters. No one will ever walk more batters either. No one will ever throw more no-hitters. In “Fastball,” physicists concluded that Ryan most likely threw the ball harder than anyone in baseball history (his renowned 100.9 mph pitch, which for years was declared the fastest pitch ever by the Guinness Book of World Records, was, again by today’s standards, adjusted to 108.5 mph).
And, seventh, at last, is Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, who has thrown 17 of the 20 fastest pitches ever recorded by Statcast, including the top seven. He was clocked at 105.1 mph.
We can argue forever — and with no possibility of consensus — which one really threw the ball the hardest.
But it seems to me that, numbers aside, none of them had a fastball that was quite as revolutionary, quite as heart-stopping, quite as new as the one thrown by that 6-foot-1, 200-pound Kansan who went to high school in Southern California and was discovered in Idaho, that friendly hayseed Cliff Blankenship gave train fare to in 1908, Walter Perry Johnson.
Walter Johnson won 417 games, far and away the most in modern baseball — meaning since the American League was founded in 1901. He threw 110 shutouts, far and away the most. His 3,509 strikeouts still rank ninth all-time, even though hitters rarely struck out in his day.
His 147 career ERA+ is third all-time among starters (not including active pitchers like Clayton Kershaw and Jacob deGrom who have a lot of career left) behind only Pedro Martinez and Grove — but Martínez pitched fewer than half the innings Johnson pitched, and Grove’s raw ERA is almost a full run higher than Johnson’s 2.17.
His 164.5 Baseball-Reference Wins Above Replacement rank second in baseball history behind only Babe Ruth.
No, it’s true, you can’t really compare the pitching Johnson did during Deadball — or even in those early years after Deadball — with baseball 100 years later. Different games. Different times. We have nothing at all to compare with Johnson’s pitching from 1910-1915, when he went 174-80 with a 1.51 ERA, 1,494 strikeouts, 390 walks and 24 homers allowed in more than 2,100 innings.
In 1916, Johnson pitched 369 innings and gave up zero home runs. Zero.
There’s no conversion chart that can tell us how Johnson’s stuff would hold up today. All we have are the stories and the quotes — and from those, you can understand the awe that people felt when seeing how impossibly hard Johnson threw.
“When you see the arm starting forward,” Birdie McCree said, “swing.”
“The thing just hissed with danger,”Ty Cobb said.
“He’s got a gun concealed about his person,” Ring Lardner wrote, “and he shoots them.”
“On a cloudy day, you couldn’t see the ball half the time it came in so fast,” Jimmy Austin said.
“Most of the time you couldn’t see the ball,” Fred Snodgrass said.
“You batted against him for the first time,” Dutch Ruether said, “and that easy sweep of the arm, with a bullet coming out of it, made you blink and wonder if your eyes were failing.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve come to one inescapable conclusion,” George Sisler said. “If Ol’ Walter Johnson had a curve, no one ever would have gotten a hit off him. Every game he pitched would have been a no-hitter.”
Yes, he was purely a fastball pitcher until his later years. And it was enough. Legends? Oh, there are plenty of Walter Johnson legends. A former big-league pitcher named Al Schacht said that Johnson threw so hard, he once got a game called for darkness in the middle of bright sunshine. How’d that happen? The Senators’ regular catcher was injured, and the new catcher simply wasn’t up to the moment. On the first pitch of the game, the ball ticked the top of his glove and smashed into umpire Billy Evans’ shoulder. He howled in pain but after a moment or two, he was able to get back to work.
The next pitch was low, the catcher never saw it, and it smashed into Evans’ left shin.
“That’s it,” Evans shouted out. “Game called because of darkness.”
Evans himself told another story, one about a batter who faced Johnson, saw (or didn’t see) two fastballs go by for strikes, and headed back to the dugout.
“You’ve got another strike coming,” Evans shouted to the player.
“I don’t want it,” the hitter said. “I’ve seen enough.”
So many stories. Johnson said he once pitched for a Negro Leagues team — he didn’t know it was a Negro Leagues team until he showed up, but $800 was $800 — and the first batter he faced was a great slugger called Home Run Johnson.
“Come on, Walter Johnson, let me see that fastball,” Home Run shouted out as he stepped to the plate.”I’m going to hit it out.” And then he did hit it out. Big Train was impressed by that — he often talked about how great so many of the Negro Leagues players were — but he was not impressed by the way Home Run Johnson kept jawing after hitting it. In fact, he was so angry that he did something he never did: He began throwing the ball high and inside to Johnson. This sent Johnson tumbling to ground time and time again. Walter threw it high and inside so many times and with such speed, that the last time Home Run Johnson came up, facing no balls and two strikes, he hit the dirt before Big Train even let go of the pitch.
The ball curved over the center of the plate for strike three.
Clyde Milan, a fine center fielder who twice led the league in stolen bases, told another great Walter Johnson story. Washington was playing in an exhibition game against Boston, and the first time up, Johnny Evers cracked a hit off Johnson.
Evers was famously cocky, and so when he got to second base he shouted to Milan in center field: “So that’s the great Walter Johnson. Listen, we’ve got a half-dozen pitchers in our league who are faster than he is.”
Milan relayed exactly what Evers said to Johnson, who didn’t say a word. But the next time Evers came up, Johnson threw three rocket fastballs by Evers, who didn’t even move his bat he was so paralyzed. “Johnny hasn’t seen any of them yet,” Milan said.
At the end of that inning, Evers made sure to find Milan. Evers was still pale.
“You big blabbermouth,” Evers screamed. “You told Johnson what I said, didn’t you?”
How fast did Johnson actually throw? Let’s go down that rabbit hole for a minute, even though we can’t know for sure. Johnson always said that his ability to throw hard was just natural. “From the time I held a ball, it settled in the palm of my right hand as though it belonged there,” he said.
And while we can’t tell you exactly how fast the ball went, we do have a clue. Johnson was the first pitcher to have his fastball’s speed measured. True, it was measured by an archaic (and ingenious) apparatus developed by the Remington Arms Company. But it’s something. Remington had developed the machine to time the speed of bullets. Johnson’s fastball seemed the obvious next thing.
Johnson and another pitcher, Nap Rucker, showed up in a large room at the Remington lab in Connecticut. The scientists had him stand 60 feet, 6 inches away and throw his fastball through a mesh square. The ball would brush through the mesh, triggering the clock. Then, 15 feet later, the ball would slam into a metal plate, stopping the clock. Johnson’s fastball covered that distance in .1229 seconds, which means that it traveled 122 feet per second.*
This became a pretty famous measurement of the time: 122 feet per second! That’s fast! As newspapers reported in the day, “The Twentieth Century Limited, flying at a mile a minute gait over the rails, makes only 88 feet per second!” He threw it faster than a train!
This was not the reason Johnson was called Big Train, by the way. We’ll get to that.
What is 122 feet per second as we would understand it now?
It is 83.2 miles per hour.
It’s OK to feel let down. But the story isn’t over yet.
First, there’s the measurement point. As mentioned above when talking about how fast Feller and Ryan really threw, the speed of today’s pitchers is measured out of the hand. Feller’s pitch was measured as it crossed the plate. But Johnson’s pitch was measured seven and a half feet after it crossed the plate.
So, that requires a major adjustment. The “Fastball” physicists did the calculations and found that today Walter Johnson’s pitch would actually be measured at 94 mph or so.
That’s obviously very fast, though it certainly would not make anyone in today’s game back away. But there’s more: Johnson threw the ball with a shirt and tie on. He did not throw off of a mound. And most of all, he did not throw as hard as he could because he was trying to guide his pitches through the target. It was an awkward thing, and it took him numerous tries to get it right.
“He didn’t throw full speed or anything close,” Rucker said after the experiment. “If he had, he would have thrown over 150 feet per second.”
For the record, 150 feet per second is more than 102 mph. In church clothes. On flat ground.
Let’s talk for a moment about the nickname: The Big Train. Few nicknames have ever fit a player better. Johnson actually had a lot of nicknames — Barney*, the Coffeyville Express, the Kansas Cyclone, and, in 1907, the Washington Post briefly tried to call him “Jingles” because “he certainly has the bells on.” Whatever that means.
*The Barney nickname comes from a time when Johnson was pulled over for speeding. He was in the car with his teammate Germany Schaefer, who said to the officer, “Don’t you know who this is? Why, this is Barney Oldfield!” Barney Oldfield was the most famous race car driver of the day, a man whose name, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “was synonymous with speed.” The officer let the ballplayers go. And Walter Johnson became known as Barney.
But “Big Train” — that’s the nickname. It perfectly represents his fastball and his time, when a train symbolized the very pinnacle of speed and power — you’ll remember that Superman, created a decade after Johnson retired, was more powerful than a locomotive.
Here’s the funny part: Walter Johnson was not the original Big Train, not even close.
No, it was a horse’s nickname first.
When Johnson first got to the Washington Senators in 1907 at age 19, one of the most popular racehorses in the country was an enormous Thoroughbred named Roseben. The horse was so huge and strong that he routinely raced under monumental weight handicaps, meaning Roseben would carry 40 or 50 pounds more than the other horses. And he still won all the time, thrilling the nation.
As you guessed: Everybody called Roseben “Big Train.”
So how did that nickname get passed on to Johnson? Well, it didn’t at first. Other ballplayers were called Big Train before him. Sometimes, sportswriters called Christy Mathewson “Big Train.” Lefty George, a large left-handed pitcher, was called “big train” for a year or so, though it was usually in lower-case letters as if he wasn’t that big a train.
Most of all, that was the nickname for Ed Konetchy — a 6-foot-2, 200-pound first baseman who led the league in doubles and total bases in different years. Konetchy was particularly fast for a player so big, so you could see how he compared with Roseben … and big trains.
Best we can tell, Washington Herald sports editor William Peet was the first to call Johnson “Big Train,” on Sept. 6, 1913. This was after Johnson had pitched a three-hit shutout. It didn’t catch on, though Peet stubbornly continued to call Johnson “Big Train” even as few others did.
No, Johnson didn’t really become “Big Train,” until a decade or so later, when he was nearing the end. Everybody admired Johnson by then, of course, but until 1924 there was something missing from his record: A championship. Johnson had played just about his whole career for bad teams. From 1907 to 1923, his teams finished an average 25 games out of first place — only once finishing within five games of the pennant.
Those Senators were famous for being “first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” And as unfair as it was, yes, this affected the way people looked at Johnson. Great pitcher? Absolutely! Nice guy? The nicest! Good fastball? The fastest! But if he was so great, why did his teams never win anything?
In 1924, finally, the Senators put together a competitive team with Hall of Fame outfielders Sam Rice and Goose Goslin each having excellent years. Johnson was 36, and this was no longer Deadball, but he put together one more season for the ages. He won the last of his three pitcher triple crowns by leading the league in wins (23), ERA (2.72) and strikeouts (158). He also led the league in WHIP, hits per nine innings and strikeout-to-walk ratio. The Senators won the pennant. And Johnson was named the league’s MVP.
And that was when everybody started calling him the Big Train. In the World Series against the Giants, he started Game 1 and was off his game. He gamely kept getting out of jams, but the Giants got him in the 12th inning for two runs on a couple of walks and singles, and he took the loss.
He also took the loss in Game 5, giving up six runs in eight innings.
But in Game 7, on one day’s rest, he came into a tie game in the ninth. He promptly gave up a triple to Frankie Frisch and it seemed like he might be the goat of the series. But he got out of the jam, striking out future Hall of Famer High Pockets Kelly along the way.
In the 11th, he got into another situation, putting the winning run on second with one out. But he struck out Frisch and Kelly to end the threat.
He gave up a leadoff single in the 12th too, but he got the next three batters, and the Senators scored in the bottom of the inning to take the World Series title. Walter Johnson pitched four scoreless innings when the team needed them most. That was the only World Series victory in the history of the Washington Senators, and the only title in Washington until last year’s Nationals’ win. The Big Train was finally the hero.
When Johnson died, more people talked about his decency and his kindness than even his fastball. In a game where so many all-time great players are also supremely nice people — Honus Wagner, Stan Musial, Roy Campanella, Brooks Robinson, Tony Gwynn, Mike Trout, on and on — Walter Johnson might just have been the nicest of them all.
He was so nice that many people in his day saw it as his one fatal flaw. Ty Cobb used to crowd the plate against Johnson, knowing full well that he was too nice to throw at him. Babe Ruth used to talk about how he liked facing Johnson for the same reason (Ruth hit .350/.495/.675 against Johnson by the best stats we have).
“If he had been born a mean cuss and tried to dust off the hitters,” Joe Sewell said, “nobody would have had a chance.”
But he just couldn’t be mean. It wasn’t in him. He loved people, especially kids. He signed all the autographs. He talked baseball with anyone who wanted to talk baseball. He refused to question umpires. The umpire Billy Evans had another favorite Johnson story. Johnson had worked a 3-2 count against a hitter and then threw a clear strike three, but Evans called it a ball. “Sometimes,” Evans would say, “we as human beings just make mistakes.”
Evans felt terrible because the walk cost Johnson a couple of runs, so he gave Johnson an opportunity to complain. “How’d that one look to you, Walter?” he asked.
“Maybe a trifle low?” Johnson said kindly, and he smiled, and Evans later said, “A better man has never played the game of baseball.”
Here’s another one: You know the story about Wagner’s refusal to appear on a tobacco card — that’s why his T-206 card, the few that were printed before he made his refusal known, is the most valuable baseball card in the world.
Johnson had what might be an even more compelling story. A cigarette company offered him $10,000 — more than $250,000 in today’s money — to appear in an advertisement, and all he had to do was say that he smoked that brand. Unfortunately, he could not do that because he did not smoke at all.
“I needed that money badly,’ he would say. “But I couldn’t take it. I don’t object to cigarette smoking. But I don’t use them. And I believe it would have been worse than thievery if I had urged the kids to buy a package of my ‘favorite’ brand and helped to increase the habit of smoking among our youngsters.”
There are a million more examples. My favorite might be this: People often called Walter Johnson the “Big Swede.” This was somewhat disconcerting in that Johnson was not Swedish. He had, as far as he knew, no Swedish ancestry whatsoever. And yet, he accepted the nickname with the same gentle equanimity he accepted all well-intended things.
And when asked why, he simply said: “I didn’t want to offend anybody.
There are a lot of Swedes I know who are nice people.”
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