Big Eunuch Needs To Show Some Guts,Take One For Team

In New York, it was Tino Martinez. In Baltimore, Harold Reynolds.

Each asked the same question Seattle players have been asking for weeks now: What’s going on with Randy Johnson?

The best pitcher in franchise history, the most dominant in baseball last season, Johnson is the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner - and a man whose personal demons have once again caught up with him.

List an ambition, the “Big Unit” has bettered it.

Once a wild-armed left-hander, he has become widely regarded as the best power pitcher of his generation.

A 6-foot-10 loner, he married and became a happy father.

A man whose potential once seemed limited by ever-changing mechanics - as late as 1989, he admitted he wasn’t certain he’d ever harness his ability - Johnson has risen to the top of his field, and won’t turn 33 for another three weeks.

And should Johnson’s left arm fly off and land in the second deck, his $5 million salary this season is guaranteed - along with a $6 million paycheck for 1997.

Respect, success, love, security.

And still, those around him in baseball cannot understand Johnson.

“I love him,” Reynolds said, “and I’d like to slap him upside the head.”

Get in line, Harold.

No one in the game embraces a slight - real or perceived - with the passion of the Unit. Wound Johnson, intentionally or imaginarily, and he bleeds for years.

He is wounded now, and angry that anyone would doubt his pain. As a pennant race has unwound all around him, Johnson has become the highest-paid middle reliever in baseball history. And a stubborn one at that.

He has been astonishingly good for a man forced to miss three months because of a painful disk problem in his lower back. Johnson has pitched 16 innings, including two in Class A, since beginning his comeback. In that stretch, he has allowed two earned runs and struck out 28 batters.

Yet from the first time he threw in the Kingdome, he has accused the Mariners of trying to rush him back into the starting rotation before he was physically ready - implying the team would risk his career for a shot at the playoffs.

After building up to four magnificent innings in his third appearance, Johnson seemed on pace to pitch five in his next outing - and manager Lou Piniella hoped they would come in a start.

Johnson said he wasn’t ready to pitch nine innings. When that was reported, and the response of teammates was “how about five innings?” Johnson completely revised his argument.

“I can’t pitch more than four innings without pain,” Johnson said.

And he said it without having tried.

Piniella shrugged, said the team would keep Johnson in the bullpen and try to find a role for him while completely retooling the rotation.

Johnson’s response? “Lou isn’t a very good communicator,” he said.

It fit the pattern.

Over the years, Johnson has become a beloved figure as much for his charming eccentricities and humor as his 99 miles per hour fastball. He has called himself a warrior, a staff leader.

And every step of the way he has been shadowed by a petulant, vindictive side filled with pettiness and self-doubt.

He publicly chastised team president Chuck Armstrong for insensitivity after the death of Johnson’s father. Bud Johnson had died at Christmas and Armstrong, out of town and out of touch, had not been told when he saw Johnson in the Mariners offices and innocently asked how his holidays had been.

For more than a year, Johnson brought that up in interviews. Mention Armstrong today, Johnson repeats the anecdote. Not once in all those interviews did he acknowledge Armstrong’s apology.

When Jack McDowell was en route to his 1993 Cy Young Award, Johnson campaigned for votes - telling Chicago writers he would have a better record than McDowell if the Mariners had scored as many runs as the White Sox.

When his teammates read those quotes, they were so angry they called a team meeting. Johnson nonetheless repeated the argument to other reporters.

After crediting idol Nolan Ryan and then-Texas pitching coach Tom House with a delivery alteration that smoothed out his mechanics, Johnson talked for months of how Ryan had called him his successor.

Then one day a writer asked Johnson about what Ryan and House had done for him and the Big Unit said angrily: “I’m tired of them getting the credit for my hard work. I’m the one out there on the mound.”

For years, Johnson envied Ken Griffey Jr. In the spring of ‘94, in a recorded interview, Johnson said Griffey was a good player who would be much better if he worked hard.

Though it was all on tape, Johnson insisted he’d been misquoted.

This is a man who once expressed outrage when he pitched in a spring training ‘B’ game and minor leaguers facing him swung hard - he said they hadn’t earned that right. He denounced baseball writers who picked Jimmy Key over Johnson as the league’s best left-handed pitcher.

Taken individually, none of these incidents amounts to much. It is the pattern that emerges, along with the personality of the man who feels so easily betrayed.

It was no surprise then, when the Mariners reached out to one of the best pitchers in baseball and asked him to start before he was at peak health, that Johnson reacted so typically.

Had Johnson started a game, come out after five innings - or one batter - in pain, not one of his teammates would have been angry. Nor would his manager. No one questions Johnson’s injury or his pain threshold.

What they wonder openly is why he won’t test it with a season hanging in the balance.

“You can’t watch him blow through hitters in relief and not wonder why he won’t try starting,” Tino Martinez said in New York. “But Randy is Randy.”

It is late August, and most of the key Mariners are pushing through pain. Edgar Martinez loses his breath with every swing and miss. Broken ribs don’t heal in three weeks.

Jay Buhner plays on a bad ankle, on aching knees. Griffey came back too soon from a broken bone in his hand, but did it on his own. Even Chris Bosio, on ruined knees, came back from the brink of retirement willing to start or relieve.

No one has demanded a thing of Johnson, but he feels the weight of expectation. It doesn’t motivate him. It angers him.

Doctors and trainers insist a five-inning start would be no more career threatening to Johnson than a four-inning relief appearance. It has been, since the beginning, Johnson’s call.

On Wednesday night, Johnson issued a media edict: He will no longer discuss the topic of starting.

He has declined to talk to several writers this month because of their negativity. When he reads this, he’ll stop talking to one more. So let these be the last words he reads here: Look at the wild-card standings, Unit.

Look in the mirror.

If not now, when?