"I never saw a kid with more than he displayed." - Hall of Famer and contemporary Addie Joss speaking about Walter Johnson
". . . his motion was so slow and easy . . . I thought I was a pretty good college ballplayer, and I'm swinging way late on these things and he wasn't even trying to throw hard. . . That was my first realization of how fast he really must have been." - son Eddie Johnson, a star from the University of Maryland, about batting against a 50-year-old Walter Johnson in 1937, from the book "Walter Johnson: Baseball's Big Train"
Walter Johnson was a pitcher for the Washington Senators from 1907 to 1927, and later manager of the Senators (1929-1932) and the Cleveland Indians (1933-1935). He was the American League's dominant pitcher for the 1910s, and set numerous AL and Major League records, several of which still stand. He was one of the "Five Immortals" elected to the Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class of 1936.
Early Years
Walter Johnson was born and raised on his family's farm a few miles outside Humboldt, Kansas. When he was 13, a severe drought forced his parents to sell the farm and move, first into town and then to Olinda, a small town near Fullerton in Orange County, California.
While Walter had received some exposure to baseball in Kansas, he never played in an organized game until moving to California. Even in California he was first limited to informal sandlot games. Johnson later attributed his endurance to his relatively late introduction to the game, saying that he built up his arm strength in ordinary daily work to the point that he was too strong to hurt himself by pitching. His informal background also led him to develop an unorthodox sidearm delivery that became one of his trademarks. His main asset was a fastball that by virtually all accounts was the best of his age, and arguably of all time.
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