Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [48]
“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.