[新聞] No Longer His Heyday, Too Early for Mayday

[leddy (耿秋)]

No Longer His Heyday, Too Early for Mayday
By TYLER KEPNER
Published: September 27, 2006
from nytimes.com

When you have known Randy Johnson for a decade, and helped him rebuild his
back and realize the enormous potential in his towering body, you can tease
him about having had bad games in the playoffs.

“I’ll use that, sometimes, in workouts,” said Brett Fischer, whose Arizona
training center is a second off-season home for Johnson. “He’s had success
in the playoffs, and he’s had nonsuccess in the playoffs. If it does
anything, it may motivate him a little bit. But he’s really good about
leaving things in the past. I guess when you’re in baseball long enough,
yesterday is yesterday.”

When Johnson experienced back spasms in his start last Saturday, he decided
to skip his final regular-season start tomorrow. It could be an ominous
development for the Yankees, who are depending on Johnson in his next
appearance, which is expected to be in Game 3 of the first round of the
playoffs, the same game that haunted him last fall.

Johnson has a long memory, of good games and bad. In two years as a Yankee,
there have been plenty of each. Ask him about his playoff failure last year —
 five runs on nine hits in three innings against the Los Angeles Angels —
 and Johnson brings up 2001. That fall, he said, he lost his only first-round
start for the Diamondbacks. But Arizona won that series, and Johnson went 5-0
during the rest of the postseason.

The implication is hard to miss: the season is not all on him, and with time,
he will pitch better more often than not. But that reality makes no
difference to the Yankees, and Johnson knows it.

“Sometimes you only get one chance, and you either fail or you succeed,”
 Johnson said during the Yankees’ last trip. “I failed. Miserably. No one
has to tell me that.”

If a pitcher has not retired by his 43rd birthday, he is usually pitching
poorly. The year he turned 43, Warren Spahn was 6-13. Steve Carlton was 0-1,
Grover Cleveland Alexander 0-3. Even Cy Young, at 43, was 7-10.

Johnson turned 43 on Sept. 10. He went 17-11 this season and exceeded 200
innings for the 14th time. He made all his starts — until now.

“To do it for so long is really a compliment to him,” said the Yankees’
 pitching coach, Ron Guidry, who retired at 38. “You don’t have too many
guys who are in that category.”

Johnson could be lauded simply for getting on the mound and pitching
competitively.

He used to make the All-Star team routinely. This year, he said, he used the
break to get a series of shots in his swollen, arthritic right knee. Two
starts later, he landed on that knee 129 times over eight innings in a loss
to the Seattle Mariners.

The start before his birthday, in Kansas City, his lower back bothered him so
much that Jeff Karstens and Jaret Wright were told to be ready in case
Johnson could not pitch. Yet Johnson took a no-hitter into the seventh inning.

“I’m proud that I’ve been able to go out there,” Johnson said. “Yeah,
there’s been games where I haven’t pitched well, but at least I was able to
get out there and do that, give the team a chance to win.”

Fischer speaks regularly on the phone with Johnson and visits him
occasionally on the road. When he watches him pitch on television, Fischer
makes a point to stick around for the postgame interviews. He noted that
Johnson never blames his body for a shaky outing.

After a complete-game loss in Seattle on Aug. 24, Johnson left the Yankees
for four days to return to Arizona, where his home had sustained flood
damage. As soon as he was settled, Johnson called Fischer. He was not on
vacation. He wanted to train.

“I told Randy, ‘You are so passionate, so professional in what you do,’
 and I love that about him,” Fischer said. “People can say he’s been up
and down the last couple of years, but he’s never lost that professionalism
of taking care of himself between starts. He does not cut one corner.”

After back surgery cost him most of the 1996 season, Johnson turned to
Fischer, who designed a workout program that Johnson swears by. The next
year, Johnson won 20 games and led Seattle to the playoffs. It was the start
of a six-year stretch of dominance and durability

From 1997 through 2002, Johnson faced 189 more batters than any other
pitcher. He had 482 more strikeouts than anyone else, with 12 more victories.
His teams made the playoffs in five of the six years, and he won four Cy
Young awards.

Now Johnson works harder and has less to show for it. In hindsight, he
appreciates his prime even more.

“That was the byproduct of what I was putting into it; it’s what I was
expecting,” he said. “Now, it’s the same thing. I still put the time and
effort into it, but I don’t get the same results all the time the way I
would like.”

Because he pitches for the Yankees and makes so much money — $16 million
this year and next — the expectations placed on Johnson are probably
weightier than they realistically should be.

When Johnson struggles, Guidry said, it is almost always because he drops his
arm angle and causes his biting slider to flatten. Johnson wrote a book on
mechanics, and he knows what is wrong. But the movements that once came so
smoothly take more effort now.

“It becomes harder to repeat it for so long,” Guidry said. “It’s not that
it’s something he can’t do; it just becomes harder to do it for a longer
period of time.”

Last season, the backup catcher John Flaherty was able to get through to
Johnson, taking over as his personal catcher July 1. Flaherty said that
working a game with Johnson requires calling for a lot of fastballs and
sliders inside.

The trick is to stay on him about mechanics, Flaherty said, to constantly
remind Johnson to do the things that once came naturally for his body. In his
efforts last season, Flaherty had help from the starting catcher, Jorge
Posada.

Posada and Johnson clashed early last season because Johnson believed that
Posada called for too many pitches down and away instead of down and in.

But Flaherty was impressed with Posada’s handling of the situation. When
Johnson pitched, Flaherty said, Posada would still watch attentively from the
dugout. Between innings, Posada passed on his observations.

“You don’t give up on anybody,” Posada said. “You just keep trying to
work and keep trying to make the team better.”

Posada’s attentiveness paid off in the final game of the playoffs, when he
guided Johnson through 4 1/3 scoreless innings of relief. The Yankees lost,
but a bond started to form.

It carried over to this season, despite the presence of a new backup, Kelly
Stinnett, who had caught Johnson in Arizona. Posada has caught 28 of Johnson’
s 33 starts, and both say they are comfortable together.

“Jorge realizes that when he catches Randy, he’s got to give him a little
bit more attention, that’s all,” Flaherty said. “Randy’s personality isn’
t that outgoing, so it probably took a little more time to figure him out.
Jorge has now.”

In his heyday, Johnson threw fastballs at 98 miles an hour and sliders at 89,
with a menacing stare that caused hitters to tremble as soon as they saw the
lineup card. The speeds are down now — though Johnson still touches 97
m.p.h. here and there — and the growling persona is fading.

“I still pitch with a chip on my shoulder,” Johnson said. “I’ve always
tried to go out there with a little bit of meanness, if you will. It’s been
tempered a little bit since I’ve been here. I’m not the same pitcher that I
once was. Why, I don’t know. But I’ve reeled back in considerably, actually.
”

Johnson can be introspective like that, despite a gruff exterior. He cares
deeply about his craft and never seems to forget a poor outing.

Without much prompting, he brings up two early-season outings when he failed
to hold 4-0, first-inning leads. He mentions his disappointment with a recent
outing against Boston, when the Red Sox scored four of their five runs off
him with two out and two strikes.

“I think about those games all the time,” he said. “I don’t think about
the games where I pitched well, because that is what I was supposed to do. I
think about the games that got away.”

Johnson is like that, he said, because he wants to learn from the poor
outings. Success is more elusive now, harder to achieve despite his effort.

But the grind of the regular season is over, and Johnson is resting for the
payoff. He has a chance to bury that game against the Angels, as long as his
troubled back will let him.

“There’s two seasons here,” Johnson said, “and I understand that.”

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◆ From: 140.130.155.141
→ leddy:以43歲而言, RJ的表現真的算很好了
推 Shauds:所以說火箭人真的已經不算人類了= =
推 iambiaggi:所以說全MLB只有一個火箭人...而RJ也是永遠的巨怪...
推 chrislux:不過季後賽...RJ有辦法嗎
推 iambiaggi:有夢最美...希望相隨 XDDD
推 fizeau:記得去年直覺小王跟RJ似乎等級差蠻多...但是今年
→ fizeau:根本是平起平坐了XD
推 zebirlin:RJ只要能在季後賽每回吃下兩場..洋基簽他的目的就達成了
推 awesomecheng:不管幾歲....對RJ來說 這種等級的先發是不夠水準的..
→ awesomecheng:講和王平起平坐太抬舉RJ今年的表現了...:P