Free High Heat by Tim Wendel

grounder to third and 5-foot-8 Joe Judge stretched to snag the throw at first base.

    Back and forth the teams went in extra innings, with the hometown crowd cheering wildly when the Senators were at bat and becoming quietly apprehensive when Johnson was on the mound. Through it all, Johnson pitched four innings of scoreless ball. “I’d settled down to believe, by then, that maybe this was my day,” Johnson later said.
    In the bottom of the 12th inning, Washington’s glorious ending began innocently enough. With one out, Ruel, who was having a miserable series, appeared to pop up in foul territory. Giants catcher Hank Gowdy drifted back to make the catch, tossed off his mask, only to trip over it a few steps later. Given a second chance, Ruel doubled to left. That brought up Johnson. He hit the first pitch hard and when it was bobbled, he was safe at first.
    Next up was Earl McNeely, and with men at first and second base he hit what appeared to be a tailor-made double play ball directly at third baseman Freddy Lindstrom. That would have been enough to end the inning.
    For a moment, the ball appeared headed for Lindstrom’s glove. On the last bounce, though, it seemed to hit a pebble or was levitated by the baseball gods themselves, perhaps a nod to Johnson. Whatever the reason, it bounded over Lindstrom’s head and rolled into left field. Ruel rounded third and chugged for home, and the Senators and their longtime fireballer had at last won the championship.
    As the fans poured onto the field, Johnson stood at second base, tears in his eyes.
    Up in the press box, Christy Mathewson watched in disbelief. His body ravaged from being gassed during World War I, it would be the last World Series Mathewson would ever witness. “It was the greatest World Series game ever played, I’m sure,” Mathewson said. “I’m inclined to think, indeed, that it was the most exciting game ever played under any circumstances.”
    Today, a monument of bronze and granite stands in tribute to the Big Train at Walter Johnson High School, located around the corner from Shirley Povich Field, where Bruce Adams’s ballclub plays. The impressive slab, which shows Johnson pitching along with a list of
accomplishments—games won (414), shutouts (113), strikeouts (3,497), and scoreless consecutive innings (56)—was unveiled at Griffith Stadium in 1947, less than a year after his death. President Truman presided at the event, where he called Johnson “the greatest ballplayer who ever lived.”
    Every year the student body celebrates Johnson’s birthday (November 6, 1887) with sheet cake. When the high school team competes on the television show It’s Academic, the squad often brings along a baseball talisman for good luck.
    The Washington Nationals, the new professional team in town, were interested in moving Johnson’s monument permanently to the new ballpark in southeast Washington. But the high school eventually turned down the request. Instead, the Nationals commissioned a statue of Johnson, along with ones of Frank Howard and Josh Gibson, which were unveiled outside before Opening Day 2009.
    By retaining the monument, Principal Christopher Garran hopes that the memory of the Big Train will inspire future classes at Walter Johnson High. That they will even touch the slab for luck on the way to their games.
    â€œWe could have given it to the Nats, for the new ballpark,” Garran says, “but it just didn’t seem right in a way. After all, Walter Johnson is the person our school is named after. Once you learn a little about him, you realize what a hero the Big Train was.”
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    B eing able to throw a baseball at speeds of 100 miles per hour or greater is certainly a gift. But during the careers of almost every fireballer—Johnson, Feller, Nolan Ryan, Steve Dalkowki—there comes a time when this gift will ultimately be remembered as a blessing or a