(a book review)
How do you like a baseball book that begins with post-Civil War border clashes between Kansas and Missouri, with renegade Confederate cavalry remnants terrorizing the countryside, with Cole Younger and the guerilla gangs of William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson?
When Walter Johnson’s mother was just eight years old, two men asked for her father’s permission to sleep in his barn. He stayed up all night to make sure they didn’t steal his horses. While her mother cooked breakfast the next morning, the two strangers sat on the porch and regaled the little girl with stories. One even whipped out a pistol and took down a blue jay with a single shot. Later that day, a sheriff’s posse rode up and informed them that their visitors had been none other than Frank and Jesse James.
From the lawless Great Plains to the oilfields of southern California at Olinda, America’s second gold rush, a narrative begins to weave its way, for baseball is old enough and geographically broad enough to be storied in parallel lines with the making of America. They called it “town ball” back then, at the turn of the last century, when, on weekends, the men of one town would challenge the men of another to a game. Local bands would play, there would be cookouts, special trains would roll between the competing municipalities, and, certainly, there would be lots and lots of gambling.
Everywhere Walter Johnson played baseball in those early years of the twentieth century, he was legend. They called him “The Big Swede,” though he had no Swedish ancestry, but he was so fair, so big and strong, he challenged everyone’s frame of reference. As his legend grew, it became known that his size and strength and toughness of spirit were only matched by his gentleness and consideration for smaller, weaker mortals.
It didn’t take long for him to gain notoriety in a sport endlessly seeking talent. He worked his way from the coastal leagues in California to the big time in just three years. Word reached Joe Cantillon of the Washington Nationals Baseball Club about a pitcher in the Idaho State League who mowed down 166 batters in eleven games and pitched seventy-seven consecutive scoreless innings. The scouting report comes down to us, “This boy throws so fast you can’t see’m… and he knows where he’s throwing the ball because if he didn’t there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho.”
Later, the pitcher’s wife would keep scrapbooks, meticulously preserving the precious artifacts of the man’s life and career, the man whose arrival in the nation’s capital had been so anticipated he was nicknamed by the press “Big Train” for the big train everyone was waiting on that would carry the Nationals’ new phenom into town. The year was 1907, and he was still mowing down hitters for the hometown Nats when they won the World Series in 1924.
Sixty-five years later, his daughter’s son, a grown man, would pull those massive albums of clippings and press releases, photographs and family memorabilia down from their glass cases, and be awed by the story pieced together from those fragmentary artifacts collected along life’s way.
We have that grandson, Henry (Hank) W. Thomas, to thank for the incredible story of Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train.
Now fifty-eight years old, Hank Thomas stands in the beer garden at the ballpark in Hagerstown, Maryland, cracking peanuts, sipping beer, and talking baseball. Watching a baseball game with Hank Thomas is a unique experience. He chats amiably about politics, history, and music, tossing in a random appreciation of the odd skirt floating by, and certainly he talks about times past and present in the great game of baseball. And when I say past, I don’t just mean over the course of his own lifetime, but three lifetimes and more. He articulates the word itself with a certain reverence, like you might hear an artist use the word “painting,” with the emphasis on the consonant in the middle of the word: “Baseball.”
During a game, you notice that Hank Thomas has developed a sixth sense for baseball’s crucial moments. He looks up when he hears something in the crack of the bat, his beak of a nose up in the wind like some nearly extinct bird of the game, hawking the air, hovering. He knows exactly where to look to catch up with the play in progress so as not to miss a critical moment, then returns to the thought he was developing, finding it right where he left off.
Being with him at a ballpark, you get the feeling that he has seen ten thousand games. And he has. In his book, he relives the games of yesteryear as though he were present with them in time. Writing the book about his grandfather, tearing into thousands of box scores, recreating ecstatic moments until now only preserved in those tiny fossilized boxes of little numbers, has plunged him into a matrix world of baseball’s deepest delights. It is so easy to follow him there. He long ago stopped worrying about who was playing, who was winning; he doesn’t keep score, meaning he doesn’t score the game, except in his head. Hank just wants to see good baseball, and he doesn’t care about the league, the team, or the venue.
He can’t remember when he last paid to see a big league game. Since the Senators left his hometown, Washington, D.C., way back in 1971, he spent the intervening years until the big game’s return attending minor pro league games, professional league games, and wherever organized baseball is played. He wants to be where the beer is cheap and the peanuts are salty. He even general-managed Bethesda’s Big Train, named after his grandfather, their first year in the Clark Griffith League, a league of NCAA baseball prospects that plays a forty-game season in midsummer between spring and fall semesters. It’s great baseball.
Want to know what Hank has to say about being a GM? “It was terrible! It turned baseball into work! I want to enjoy the game, not suffer through it like it’s some kinda job!”
Walter Johnson was terrified that his amazing fastball would one day kill a man, so he rarely threw inside. When the great Ty Cobb realized this, he started to crowd the plate. He got more hits off Johnson that way than anybody else. Others weren’t so brave. Cobb remembered it this way, “The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy wind-up—and then something went past me that made me flinch. I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. The thing just hissed with danger. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”
Will Rogers speculated that if Johnson had played for the mighty New York Giants he most likely would not have lost a single game in eighteen years.
Thomas’s biography of his grandfather is pure baseball beginning to end. Unlike other baseball classics—like Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, dripping with nostalgia and ripe with sublime social commentary, or Thomas Boswell’s How Life Imitates the World Series, which is a baseball voyage of discovery with the 1979 Baltimore Orioles, both must-reads—Thomas’s book is history told from inside the lines, and, as any good history book should be, is packed with sources: sixty-nine pages of footnotes, a ten-page bibliography, a comprehensive index, fourteen pages of the great pitcher’s stats, and pages and pages of personal game-day photographs from the family collection.
“The publishers and even the printers thought I was crazy to insist on so many pictures, but they help bring the story back to life,” he insists, and he’s right. Best of all, Walter Johnson arrives in D.C. on page 37. No foolin’ around with preliminaries, we get right to the games. From there we are treated to a history rich and wide, and tons of baseball.
When Clark Griffith managed the Nationals, if there wasn’t a pennant on the line—and more often than not, there wasn’t—the last home game of the season would be a “joke game.” Fans loved it. Outfielders were called gardeners. The right gardener would perch up on the Bull Durham sign, swinging his legs, or roam around the infield completely out of position. Johnson played in center during joke games, but when called in to pitch an inning or two to please the crowd, he would lob balls at the plate allowing hitters to spray them around the park, returning to his position in center in mock disgrace.
“Just think,” Thomas says, “without those joke games shaving off mere fractions from Johnson’s lifetime statistics, he has records that nobody would ever have broken!” In 1913, for instance, Johnson’s ERA for the season was an incredible 1.09, but with the joke game stats added in, his ERA for the year ballooned to 1.14, surrendering the All-Time Single Season ERA record to the Cardinals Bob Gibson in 1968, at 1.12.
It was in one of those joke games that Babe Ruth got his first big league hit.
Thomas argues that 1913 was most likely the best season ever for a big league pitcher. Johnson won thirty-six games and lost seven. He led the league in wins, winning percentage (.837) ERA, complete games (29), innings (346), strikeouts (243), and walked only 38. He also led the league in shutouts (11). Batters averaged .187 against him. He batted .266 with a slugging percentage of .433. Twenty-eight of his wins were by two runs or less and he was 20-3 on the road. Not too shabby. He handled all 103 of his chances without committing an error. This fielding accomplishment was the best by a pitcher in both leagues until 1976, and still stands in the American League today.
The numbers don’t tell the human story. In these pages, black-and-white two-dimensional figures suddenly morph back into full color and three dimensions, like in a James Cameron film. Calvin Coolidge and John McGraw, Will Rogers and Lou Gehrig, Sam Rice and Joe Jackson, Grantland Rice and Shirley Povich become living, breathing men living big lives with big things on the line. It is their world, and through Hank Thomas’s steady lens we can see, hear, and get a feel for their time, their passions, and their struggles with fate. Johnson’s duels with Cobb, his relationship with Griffith, the endless road trips, the exhibition games around the country before and after each season, and, as today, the bickering with management over money, fill out the picture in very real terms.
Writing in the July 1911 issue of Baseball Magazine, Johnson described the relationship between player and management this way, “(It’s) the Great American Principle of Dog Eat Dog…the employer tries to starve out the laborer, and the laborer tries to ruin the employer’s business. They quarrel over a bone and try to rend each other like coyotes.” Benjamin Minor, the Nationals’ president, once reacted to Johnson’s request for a raise by telling Clark Griffith, “Johnson had a bad season this year, he only won twenty-eight games.”
It was Walter Johnson who handed the Yankees their first defeat in their new home, Yankee Stadium.
Walter Johnson won 417 games in his big league career. The legendary Bob Feller speculated in his autobiography that, if Johnson had been allowed to change teams, he could easily have won another hundred. He still holds twenty-eight major league records, thirty-nine American League records.
Hank Thomas wrote this marvelous book over a five-year period in the late 1980s-early 1990s. He couldn’t have known that he would eerily foreshadow the events of the late 1990s, after labor strife caused the cancellation of the World Series, with his description of the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal of 1920. Thomas unwittingly unearths Major League Baseball’s remedy for fan desertion—juice the ball, bring in the fences, and shrink the strike zone. Sure enough, as they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, homers soared, records fell, and diehards screamed, “This isn’t baseball!” Sound familiar? The only thing missing was steroids.
Today, Hank Thomas runs a baseball memorabilia business called Phenom Sports. When asked if he plans to write another book he says, “God no! If you want another book, YOU write it!” And after a few deep breaths, he adds, “I’ve done two great things in my life. I wrote the book about my grandfather, and I made the audio record of baseball’s early greats [The Glory of Their Time, with Lawrence S. Ritter]. You know, most people don’t even get to do one great thing. I’ve done two.”
Every season, when the robins and the cherry blossoms return to Washington, D.C., I try to get jazzed up for the baseball season ahead by picking up a baseball book I haven’t read. There are always plenty to choose from, but none better than Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train the definitive history of a man, an era, and a game of games.