Johnson’s Place Among Best LHPs

At 6-foot-10, Randy Johnson always has stood above the crowd. He doesn’t stand out just because of his height, though. When we line up all the left-handed pitchers the game has seen, Johnson is the first one we notice. His career is unmatched by that of any other left-hander, and he is the most dominant lefty ever to take the mound.

The career strikeout leaderboard for left-handed pitchers drives this point home. Johnson is the leader (and second among all pitchers behind right-hander Nolan Ryan) with 4,875 strikeouts. Steve Carlton is second, trailing Johnson by 739 punchouts despite pitching nearly 1,100 more innings than the Big Unit. In third place stands Mickey Lolich with 2,832 strikeouts, a mere 58 percent of Johnson’s career total.

There isn’t another MLB category in which one guy stands so far above his peers. Baseball has literally never seen anything like Johnson, a power left-hander who blew hitters away and single-handedly won games for his team. There had been some great left-handers before him, but none matched his dominance.

Carlton is within shouting distance of Johnson in career strikeouts only because of the number of innings he pitched. He never averaged more than a strikeout per inning in any season and led the league in K/9 only twice in his 24 seasons of big league action. Johnson, on the other hand, led the league in K/9 on nine different occasions and has the highest career strikeout rate per nine innings (10.61) of any starting pitcher in baseball history.

Sandy Koufax won’t show up on many career leaderboards because arthritis abbreviated his career, but he certainly had a great run of dominance from 1962 to 1966. In that five-year span, Koufax won 111 games, had an ERA 67 percent better than league average, struck out 9.4 batters per nine innings and won three Cy Young Awards.

If we are going to focus on Koufax’s best five years, though, we also must look at the best five-year run that Johnson had. From 1998 to 2002, the big man won 100 games, had an ERA 75 percent better than league average and struck out 12.3 batters per nine innings while winning four Cy Young Awards. Johnson’s peak was just as high as Koufax’s, but he had 22 years of longevity as well.

Warren Spahn, great as he was, was never the dominant force that Johnson was. He simply compiled tremendous career statistics through endurance, throwing 5,243 innings over 21 seasons. His career 3.09 ERA is nice, but only 18 percent better than the league average given the era in which he pitched. He had two legitimately tremendous seasons (1947 and 1953), but was more often just a good, healthy starting pitcher. Longevity is terrific, but it isn’t dominance. Spahn can’t hold a candle to Johnson’s peak.

Lefty Grove’s career is generally held up as the pinnacle by which all left-handers have been measured. With 300 wins and a career ERA that’s 48 percent better than league average, he’s certainly in the discussion for the best lefty of all time, but Grove got a lot of help from his defenders. He averaged just 5.2 strikeouts per nine innings for his career — above-average for the time, but not historically great.

Johnson dominated at a time when even flimsy middle infielders were driving balls out of the park with regularity, and he did it by sending them back to the dugout shaking their heads. The Big Unit stands alone as the best left-handed pitcher the game has seen.