He Turns Mound Into a Mountain : At 6-10, Batters Look Up to Seattle Left-Hander Randy Johnson

The Seattle Mariners’ Randy Johnson was on the mound, and in the casual atmosphere of a spring game, a half dozen photographers gathered behind the catcher.

It would make quite a shot: The batter’s-eye view of what it is like to face Johnson, who at 6 feet 10 is the tallest player in major league history.

Or, as Johnson deserves to be known after the events of last June 2, the tallest player in major league history to pitch a no-hitter.

“He’s so big, it looks like he’s letting go right in front of you,” Seattle catcher Scott Bradley said.

Behind the plate, the photographers were intent on the image when--Thwap!--a pitch hit the screen behind them, well above their heads.

They had just been introduced to the principle of effective wildness.

Was that a playful warning, or had they narrowly avoided serious injury to life, limb and lenses? Did Johnson do that on purpose, or--more fearsome still--is he unable to control his pitches, which often streak toward the plate at more than 90 m.p.h.?

The only clue the photographers had came from the crowd, which giggled. Johnson did the same thing as he warmed up four days earlier.

Let it be noted that the pitches thrown in the direction of the photographers were at least eight feet above their heads, and that they were not of the 90-m.p.h. variety.

“It’s not like he’s going to hit anybody,” Bradley said.

Any damage done was only to Johnson’s image, which is that of a flake.

Johnson’s image as a pitcher apart from the ordinary took root at USC, where he was known for talking to himself on the mound, shouting encouragement to his teammates and congratulating himself on good pitches.

“I did do some goofy things in college,” he said.

The image has lived on as a result of some of the things he has done as a professional player, such as putting up a yellow-tape police line around his locker when he arrived in Seattle; or buying a $150,000 condominium before last season, then living in it unfurnished--except for a television and a stereo--during baseball’s labor dispute last spring.

“I sleep on the floor with two pillows and five blankets,” Johnson said at the time. “I just don’t want to dig into my savings with the lockout in progress.”

This season, he has set himself apart from most of the clean-cut Mariner team by letting his hair grow, so that his mane and scraggly mustache and goatee make him look like a member of one of the heavy-metal bands he admires.

On days he pitches, Johnson can be so irascible that some teammates won’t even sit next to him. He has established a routine that he rarely varies when the Mariners are at home. It begins with a trip to “my favorite restaurant, IHOP, International House of Pancakes,” and continues with an hour or so in front of the television followed by a drum-banging session with the sounds of Metallica or Def Leppard blaring through his headphones.

There are enough stories to keep his image as a flake alive, even though other Mariners say it is exaggerated.

“Frankly speaking, he likes to have a good time,” Mariner Manager Jim Lefebvre said. “People have a tendency to play up those things. He looks like he’d be a goofy guy. He looks like a left-hander.”

The flake image has taken on a life of its own, and Johnson keeps it fed with such pranks as loosening up a tense clubhouse by dumping a gallon of milk over teammate Jay Buhner’s head.

“Things maybe somebody else won’t do, I’m brave enough to do,” Johnson said.

Call him an original, but don’t call him Bill Lee, who is the former Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expo pitcher nicknamed “Spaceman” for his antics during the 1970s and early ‘80s.

“My mom knows who Bill Lee was,” Johnson said. “He was a space cadet. I’m not. I just have a good time. I don’t carry clothes in a garbage bag. I’m not one to have a team meeting on the mound with no one there but myself.”

Another side of Randy Johnson is one that is just getting over being an awkward teen-ager. Another side is one that is busy thinking of ways to help Seattle’s homeless.

“Everybody sees Randy Johnson as this big, huge, tall, very mean, hard-nosed pitcher,” said Brian Holman, a Seattle pitcher who played with Johnson in the minors. “You get him one on one and he’s a very caring person.”

Johnson is a skilled photographer. During his days at USC, he took pictures for the Daily Trojan. He takes his camera on every trip, including a tour of Japan last summer with a group of major league all-stars. His idea is to put together a calender with his photographs, then sell it with proceeds to go to the homeless he often sees in the vicinity of the Kingdome.

“Being in Seattle, pitching the first no-hitter (in Mariner history), being as tall as I am, I think it’s important to give something back to the community,” Johnson said.

“The pictures I take are of nothing in particular, a lot of abstract stuff, stuff that makes a statement. I’ve been in a lot of cities I never would have been without baseball, but I don’t go out and try to take your basic skyline picture.”

Some of his best efforts have been exhibited as part of Art Expo ’90 in Los Angeles. He is proud of a photograph he took of an old man in a park, and another of some saloon doors in a building with broken windows, chipping paint and the remnants of an old newspaper. Then there was the one of a tiny English car, discarded in a dumpster.

“Usually the first question is, ‘How come you don’t shoot baseball games?’ ” Johnson said. “I don’t want to do that.

“I just enjoy getting out. It’s my way of trying to express myself. A lot of guys take golf clubs on the road. I take camera equipment.”

It helps sometimes to look through a lens at the rest of the world when all your life the world has been looking at you.

“Being 6-7, 6-8, I felt different,” Johnson said. “Everybody kind of looked at me. I felt really skinny and out of place, always different. I was shy and very quiet.

“Now I’m out there, and they’re not gawking about my height, they’re watching me pitch.”

The feeling of all those eyes on him might have been the reason for some of his quirkiness, Johnson said.

“I don’t know how many times people called me ‘long-necked geek,’ ” he said. “Maybe I started doing things so people would talk about what I did instead. Maybe it was my way of expressing myself so I’d be noticed, not because I was 6-10. Do a joke or something so they’d look at that and not at me.”

With the no-hitter last season against the Detroit Tigers, a 2-0 victory, Johnson set himself apart, even on a pitching staff that includes three other fine young pitchers.

Scott Bankhead, coming off shoulder surgery, is the veteran, with 100 major league starts. Erik Hanson qualifies as the ace at 25 after going 18-9 last year.

Holman came within one out of pitching major league baseball’s 15th perfect game, against the Oakland Athletics last April 20. But none of them have accomplished what Johnson did with the no-hitter.

“When he first joined our ballclub, he really was trying too hard,” Lefebvre said.

Johnson came to Seattle with Holman from the Montreal Expos in 1989 in the trade for Mark Langston. At the time, Johnson had been sent to the minor leagues after starting the season with Montreal, where he was 0-4 with a 6.67 earned-run average. He pitched 29 1/3 innings with 26 strikeouts and 26 walks.

The Mariners assigned him to Seattle.

“I sat him down and told him, ‘Hey you’re going to start every five days,” Lefebvre said. “Just go pitch.’ ”

Johnson won seven of 16 decisions the rest of the season, paving the way for last season, when he went 14-11 and trimmed his ERA to 3.65.

“When he threw the no-hitter, his confidence shot up,” Lefebvre said.

The no-hitter was the triumph of a pitcher who always has struggled with his control.

It was an intimidating performance. He hit 97 m.p.h. on the radar gun frequently and was still throwing 93 m.p.h. in the late innings.

But even in the no-hitter, he walked six.

That is the weakness of many of a power pitcher and particularly tall ones.

The mechanics of a delivery get complicated when there is such an expanse of arms and legs, so much opportunity for things to go wrong.

Johnson still holds the record for walks in a season at USC, giving up 104 in 1985 as a junior.

When he was pitching for Montreal’s double-A Jacksonville, Fla., team in 1987, he averaged 10 strikeouts per nine innings, but he also gave up an average of eight walks.

“He’s really matured since the time in double A, when he couldn’t throw strikes to save his life,” Holman said.

“One time when we were in A-ball, he threw a ball over a guy’s head. The guy started walking toward the mound, and Randy pointed a finger at him and said, ‘I’ll take your life.’ ”

That streak of meanness and unpredictability is part of what keeps hitters off balance against Johnson.

Bradley remembers an at-bat when Johnson thought he saw the hitter stealing Bradley’s signs.

“He thought the hitter was peeking back, and all of a sudden he got this glazed look in his eye,” Bradley said. “The next pitch he fired right behind the guy’s head, all the way back to the screen.”

Even for Bradley, it’s difficult to know what might come next.

“One pitch will be down and away on the corner, then he’ll throw a pitch over your head,” Bradley said. “Ask hitters around the league if it’s a comfortable at-bat to hit off Randy, and everyone will say no.

“Hitters have a little apprehension when they’re not sure if the ball will be over their head. Then he can come back and throw a strike.”

By last season, Johnson cut his walks to five per nine innings and averaged eight strikeouts.

He still walked a league-high 120 batters, but he also struck out 194, sixth in the league.

In one game, he did what no left-hander did before--he struck out Wade Boggs three times.

The walks persist, but Bankhead thinks Johnson is more in control of them now.

“He walks a lot, but not two, three and four in a row,” said Bradley, who caught the no-hitter. “He’s able to make adjustments. Even in the no-hitter, one inning he walked the bases loaded. It wasn’t all at once. He walked one, got two guys out, walked two more.”

Johnson knows walks are a problem.

“Obviously, to cut it to 70 or 80 would be great for me,” he said. “I’m not going to go out and guide the ball to change that. I’m not going to throw it over the plate and let them hit it so I don’t have a lot of walks.”

He will do it his way, that much you can count on. He is baseball’s Tall Man, playing a game whose proportions he doesn’t seem to fit.

As Andy Van Slyke of the Pittsburgh Pirates said when Johnson was a rookie with Montreal: “When Abner Doubleday invented baseball, he didn’t have Randy Johnson in mind. If he had, the pitching mound would be 70 feet 7 inches away instead of 60 feet 6 inches.”

How bright is his future?

“Let’s put it this way, he’s got the tools,” Lefebvre said. “What I don’t want to do is start comparing him to people. All that will do is build high expectations. He’s got such a great arm that he’ll be one of the best. And I hate to even say that.”

Johnson will withhold judgment as well.

“People say, ‘Was the no-hitter a fluke?’ ” Johnson said. “I can’t say I’m going to go get another one. But every time, I’m going to do my best.”