That was just his fastball. His slider angered the gods by defining its own gravity. He was notorious for getting a batter to swing and still somehow get hit by the ball. And he could do this to a rookie or to a Hall of Famer. Between his unorthodox arm angle and the sweeping spin on the ball, it was a tsunami of unhittable chaos.

To hit him at all took extrasensory wisdom. Just as you can’t climb Mount Everest blindly without expert advice or a Sherpa at your side, you rarely could neutralize Johnson’s work by guessing. You had to have a plan, find a pattern, look for a tip and rely on the basic construct that you get three strikes and therefore three chances to pry victory from his hands.

He forced you to travel ahead in time, and tap your inner forecasting ability in a desperate effort to be a step ahead of him. You knew you were going to be in the midst of a thunderstorm when he pitched, but you were looking for where to put the lightning rods so you at least could focus on the tall order of just putting the ball in play, and not your basic safety. I eventually learned, over 43 plate appearances against him, that he liked to throw that slider over the plate on the first pitch when a runner was in scoring position. It took a few games for my plan to finally hatch in a way that I did some damage (by knocking in two runs in one swing). And then, no sooner did I start to feel like the lightning thief, he adjusted, as all great players do.

Whenever he pitched it was a performance, and throughout the performance there was no smile, no ray of light peeking through the clouds to give you a sense that he was having fun or that he could be appeased into having mercy. He was on the hill to eradicate your opportunity, to squash the puerile idea that the sun would come out tomorrow. He barked, he cursed himself if necessary, and he competed with anyone and everyone around him to the bitter end.

In one game when he was pitching, words were exchanged between our clubs, putting him in a position to have to defend his teammates. In baseball, that usually means the pitcher will hit the next batter. On this day, I was the next batter. As I watched him jawing at our dugout, I wondered whether this would be the last at-bat of my career, or life. Then I thought: he must know that he could kill someone with his fastball, and being that good and accurate, he would also be responsible. And, thankfully, he was. But I had absolutely no confidence that I could have gotten out of the way had he thrown at me.