At Last, Bound for Glory

"I think I've got a good fix on him, on who he was and what he was like," Thomas said. "But I'd still like to sit down with him for 10 minutes -- just to get the flavor."

'The Most Powerful Arm'

Ty Cobb later recounted the moment in his autobiography. "On Aug. 2, 1907, I encountered the most threatening sight I ever saw on a ballfield."

Yet early that day, Cobb and the rest of the Detroit Tigers didn't think much of Johnson as he warmed up for the second half of a doubleheader. The kid from Kansas was 19, had been pitching in a place called Weiser, Idaho, and was being rushed into the rotation of a last-place club by Manager Joe Cantillon. He had an unorthodox, slinging motion in which the ball seemed to come from behind his body. Cobb recalled that "we licked our lips" at the prospect of facing him.

"One of the Tigers imitated a cow mooing and we hollered at Cantillon: 'Get the pitchfork ready, Joe -- your hayseed's on his way back to the barn,' " Cobb wrote.

They were wrong. Johnson didn't win that day, leaving after eight innings in which he allowed six hits -- three of them infield scratches -- and two runs. When he was lifted for a pinch hitter in the eighth, he was headed for the first of his 279 losses. But he had left his mark.

J. Ed Grillo, covering the game for The Post, wrote: "Walter Johnson, the Idaho phenom, who made his debut in fast company yesterday, showed conclusively that he is perhaps the most promising young pitcher who has broken into a major league in recent years. . . . He had terrific speed, and the hard-hitting Detroit batsmen found him about as troublesome as any pitcher they have gone against on this present trip."

Indeed, the Tigers were wowed. They were on their way to the American League pennant and had a fearsome lineup. But after they swept the doubleheader by beating Johnson in that second game, they knew they had seen a man who would be a rival for years.

"I watched him take that easy windup -- and then something went past me that made me flinch," Cobb said. "I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. The thing just h issed with danger. Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark."

Twenty-nine years later, Cobb and Johnson would be two of the five members of the first class inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Last weekend, fans clustered around their plaques. Johnson's reads, in part, "Conceded to be fastest ball pitcher in history of game."

For the 33 summers baseball was absent from Washington, that is where Johnson's legacy lived. His family remained here.

Baseball Stays in the Family

Every night there is a game, the television flickers in the Thomas house in Northwest Washington. "They're all my boys," Carolyn Thomas said. "Every single one of them."

She is speaking of the Washington Nationals, the last-place club that has replaced not only her father's Senators, but the expansion version of the Senators that followed into town when the original version departed. At 84, she is a shrewd fan of the sport and the team, wondering when first baseman Nick Johnson will return from his broken leg, wondering if pitcher John Patterson's arm will every fully recover.