Tales from the Seattle Mariners Dugout by Kirby Arnold

Author:Kirby Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683582878
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2019-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

Randy Johnson: A Talk With the Master, Then Dominance

A baseball philosopher once said, “Show me a player with potential, and I’ll show you a guy who hasn’t done squat.”

After three and a half seasons with the Mariners, Randy Johnson hadn’t done squat. He’d come to the Mariners in a trade with the Montreal Expos in 1989, and in 119 starts with the M’s, Johnson put together a mediocre record of 46–44.

He was a gangly-looking, walk-an-inning machine who struggled to get all the parts of his 6-foot-10 body in sync. The result was the American League lead in walks for three straight seasons and hit batters in two of them. He walked 120 and hit 12 in 1990, walked 152 and hit 18 in 1991, and walked 144 and hit 16 in 1992.

With a 100-mph fastball, a slider that froze hitters at the plate, and sometimes no idea where those pitches were headed, Johnson was an every-fifth-day enigma early in his career. The good Randy was almost unhittable; the wild Randy struggled to throw strikes. He’d walk 10 in a game one start, then flirt with a no-hitter in another.

“He was elbows and kneecaps and came at you with maximum effort,” said Bill Krueger, a teammate on the 1991 club who became a friend of Johnson’s. “He was a roller coaster on the field, but you could definitely see the greatness coming. He lived at 100 mph for the first three or four innings, and this wasn’t 100 mph that was pumped up by a false radar gun reading like we see at the ballparks today. This was Nolan Ryan 100.”

The good Randy and the wild Randy converged for the biggest night in Mariners history on June 2, 1990. He walked six and pitched a no-hitter against the Detroit Tigers—the first in the history of the Mariners.

Pitching coaches worked with Johnson to corral his control issues, and he was tireless in his own preparation. Only time, it seemed, would allow his body to catch up with that golden arm and produce the consistency needed to become a great pitcher.

The key to Johnson’s transformation, strangely, may have been a series of celebrity blackjack tournaments that head athletic trainer Rick Griffin entered. Griffin struck up a friendship with Nolan Ryan after a tournament in 1991.

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