The Nationals’ decision to shut down pitcher Stephen Strasburg in 2012 will be debated around Washington as long as there are bar stools and sports talk radio stations. Even though we’re nearly a half-dozen years removed from the controversy that enveloped the District and much of the baseball world, we’re still adding names to the list of those who questioned the team’s decision. The latest: Davey Johnson.
The club’s manager defended the organization publicly that summer, but he writes in a new book that he “adamantly disagreed” with the call, and that the decision by the front office and team doctors “was hard to swallow.”
“I felt we would have gone to the World Series with Strasburg in the rotation during the playoffs,” he writes in “My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond,” an autobiography that hits bookshelves next week. “I really don’t know how the team doctors came to the conclusion to keep Stephen under a given number of 160 innings. That was their deal, not mine.”
The book covers Johnson’s charmed baseball life, from a brief boyhood stint as a Washington Senators batboy through his playing career and into his final days as the Nationals’ manager. Along the way, he recounts encounters with legendary players such as Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken Jr., finicky owners such as Marge Schott and Peter Angelos, and championship teams such as the 1970 Baltimore Orioles and the 1986 New York Mets.
Johnson is subdued and folksy, and his book isn’t about settling scores, burning bridges or stoking controversies. But he kept his feelings on the Strasburg shutdown mostly close to the vest until now.
“I just tried to tell the truth about situations,” Johnson said in an interview this week.
Strasburg underwent Tommy John surgery in 2010 and missed most of 2011, and the organization wasn’t willing to let him pitch into the postseason the following year, even though Washington had the talent for a deep playoff run. The Nats had similarly shut down pitcher Jordan Zimmermann a year earlier, and Johnson said there wasn’t much internal debate about whether they would handle Strasburg differently.
“I didn’t agree with Zimmermann and I didn’t agree with Strasburg,” Johnson said in the interview. “As long as you don’t overuse a guy or abuse him. It wasn’t like I was Tommy Lasorda in the ’88 Series with [Orel] Hershiser. … I always said, pitchers need to throw a lot. If they throw a lot, they never have arm problems. I think Strasburg would’ve been fine, same as I think Zimmermann was. But those are decisions that I got handed down to me.”
Strasburg has averaged 170 innings per season since the 2012 controversy, making two all-star teams and emerging as one of baseball’s best pitchers. The former No. 1 overall pick signed a seven-year extension with the club in May of 2016, worth $175 million. Defenders of the shutdown often compare his success to the slide of former Mets ace Matt Harvey, who dramatically regressed after throwing 216 innings the season following his own Tommy John surgery. Harvey lost his spot in the Mets rotation this spring and was traded this week to the Cincinnati Reds.
In the book, Johnson notes that he had never had an issue with a pitcher’s arm, going back to his days with young phenom Dwight Gooden in New York. But attitudes and philosophies about preserving a pitcher’s arm changed over time.
“Now they come up with this new technology, telling you that you can’t throw more than 160 innings after throwing fewer than 100 or after surgery,” he writes. “I really don’t know where it all comes from. But I do know it weakened our Nationals team heading into the postseason without our ace.”
History will forever show that Strasburg was benched in early September, with the Nats turning to Edwin Jackson in Game 3 and Ross Detwiler in Game 4 of the NLDS against the St. Louis Cardinals. In the decisive Game 5, the Nats blew a 6-0 lead and held a 7-5 advantage in the ninth inning. Closer Drew Storen allowed four runs and the Nats lost, 9-7. Johnson allowed Storen to pitch the entire ninth.
“Of course, I got criticized for that after the game, but I didn’t second-guess my decision,” Johnson writes.
Johnson, 75, said he wasn’t particularly eager to sit down and revisit all these old memories, but his wife encouraged him to share his full story. The proceeds of the book, co-written with author Erik Sherman, are going directly toward Susan Johnson’s nonprofit organization, Support Our Scholars.
“I’m not someone who lives in the past, so it was hard for me to go back and look at it all,” he said. “I’ve never worried about what happened yesterday; it’s always what can I do today and tomorrow. Some of it was easy to look back on, but the firings and some of the problems that you have with the players, that’s kind of painful.”
Despite a career .562 winning percentage as a manager, Johnson notes that he never left a team or franchise on his own terms, and that those teams usually struggled following his departure.
He says Angelos was “arguably the worst owner I ever worked for,” and shares stories that reveal Schott as the most bizarre. For example, she’d send notes down to the dugout, purportedly from her dog, Schottzie. One read, “Good luck. We need a win. Woofs and licks.” After the Reds started the 1995 season 1-8, Johnson says, Schott walked around batting practice with clumps of hair from the dog she’d had during the Reds’ last title run five years earlier.
“As she neared the batting cage, she took some of the hair and started rubbing it on some of my players’ chests and legs for good luck,” he writes. “Then she put some clumps in my pocket. I’m thinking, she can’t be serious.”
He also reveals details about the end of his run with the Nats. The team had just wrapped up its 98-win season in 2012. Despite the postseason disappointment, Johnson was excited about the future. But “then something sort of bizarre happened,” he writes. It was no secret that Johnson would have preferred to continue managing the Nationals, but he describes in the book just how the franchise left him with no option.
Three days before Johnson was named the National League’s manager of the year, he says, General Manager Mike Rizzo and team owner Mark Lerner “presented me with a document they wanted me to sign stipulating that I would retire after the 2013 season.”
“My contract was up after ’13 anyway, so this was completely unnecessary,” he writes. “They could have simply not offered me a contract. I thought, fine, I don’t know why they want it in writing, but I’ll do it if that’s what they want. So I had to say in interviews every day, ‘This is my last year. I’m retiring following the season.’ It was kind of a weird thing, but since that’s what they wanted, I did it. The only reason I could think of was that I was making around 4 million dollars a year and, had we won the World Series in ’13, I would have been able to really cash in. They may not have wanted to pay me what I would have been worth. What else could it be?”
Johnson lives in Winter Park, Fla., where he continues to dabble in real estate. He follows the game closely and still feels connected to the Nats. He is friends with Rizzo, is a fan of Dave Martinez — the team’s third manager since Johnson’s departure in 2013 — and said he still roots for his former players.
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