A Lost Moment in Time: Walter Johnson & the Baseball that Circled the Globe

By Craig: I watched some of the World Series between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros which finished up recently. To be honest with you I just couldn't get into it. First of all the games are on way too late for me. They don't start until after 8:00pm and sometimes don't finish up until after midnight. I am an early riser. I am often awake at 430am and going to bed after midnight does not fit into my schedule. Second of all, I find it hard to get into watching any professional sports these days. I don't know if it is all the money involved in it, or if it is the arrogance that some of the players present that turns me off. Maybe it is a combination of both. Not to say that these problems didn't lurk around in the past, but all the same, sports has lost its mystique with me.

The World Series did, however, bring to the surface of my mind something that I had not thought about since I was a child. My grandfather was a huge baseball fan and especially a lover of the  Boston Red Sox. However, he had a vast amount of knowledge about the history of the sport in his head that he enjoyed passing on to me and my twin brother. Some of the things that came out of his mouth, however, were totally absurd. He was a master storyteller and we would sit there for hours listening to his stories or “dreams” as he called them. He would always start one of the tales off with the phrase “I had a dream!” He would then start into the tale which was most of the time something that he would think up on the spur of the moment, but sometimes he would insert real historical figures into the tale. He would also tell us that the tales were real life events that actually occurred at a remote time in his past. During the summer of 1976 we were staying at a cottage at Wells Beach on the southern Maine coast. My grandparents came to visit us one weekend and of course my brother and I were thrilled because it meant that my grandfather was there to tell us his “dreams.”

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was almost eight years old. My brother and I started collecting things the previous year. I think it started out with bottle caps. We would scour the roadsides looking for them and were always thrilled when we came across a rare one that we had never seen before. Our collection grew and then we found comic books and baseball cards. This was back in the day when a kid could ride his bike down to the corner store and buy a comic book, pack of cards, a candy bar and a drink for under a dollar. I can remember one day I opened up a pack of cards and found one that was different from the rest. It was a black and white image of an old ball player named Walter Johnson that played for the Washington Senators in the early part of the 20th century. I had never heard about him, or the team that he played for which did not exist anymore. I took the card to Maine with me and showed it to my grandfather. His face lit up and I knew that another yarn was going to come from his mouth.
"Walter Johnson," he said. "Was the greatest pitcher to ever play baseball."
We were sitting on the porch at our cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. He pointed out at the sea and told us that Walter Johnson's arm was so strong that he once threw a baseball clear across the ocean and it landed in Ireland. I can remember thinking to myself that this was quite an impossibility, but at the same time imagining that it really did happen. However, my brother and I were quite unprepared for what he told us next. He told us that Walter Johnson could throw a baseball so fast that he once threw one at such a rate that it went into orbit around the earth. "Believe it or not." he said. "It is still traveling around the world over 50 years later." He told us that some times on a clear night you might see it streaking across the sky like a meteor.

I can remember looking up at the sky and searching for it, not really believing that I would see it, but at the same time hoping that I would. Even today when I look up on a cool crisp evening and see a meteor flashing across the heavens, I think of Walter Johnson's blazing fastball, and my grandfather's absurd but magical tale of an impossibility fit only for the realm of mystical imagination.