The young right-handed-hitting outfielder needed fewer than three minor league seasons, over which he hit .320/.380/.550, 61 HR, and 259 RBI, before he was promoted to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1964. In spring training 1965, coach Peanuts Lowrey, himself a former major league outfielder, told the 22-year-old to catch fly balls by cupping his hands together at the heels. It offended the kid, who hit .303/.345/.495 in his rookie year. Naturally, he dropped the first ball hit his way. “But there was no way I could catch the ball the way they wanted me to,” the outfielder would tell Jim Hawkins of The Detroit Free Press years later. “I lost a little respect for them right there.”
Recalcitrant. Stubborn. Uncoachable. Inscrutable. Temperamental. Moody. Those words would be used to describe Alex Johnson throughout his major league career. But he could run and hit a baseball, as he proved by hitting .288/.326/.392 over a 13-year career during which he toiled for the Phillies (1964-65), St. Louis Cardinals (1966-67), Cincinnati Reds (1968-69), California Angels (1970-71), Cleveland (1972), Texas Rangers (1973-74), New York Yankees (1974-75), and Detroit Tigers (1976). It was with the Angels that he had his finest season, winning the American League batting title in 1970 with a .329/.370/.459 slash line while making his only All-Star team and garnering Most Valuable Player votes. It was also where his troubles worsened.
“I Have to Conserve My Energy”
After his rookie season, the Phillies wanted Johnson to play winter ball. He didn’t want to go. “Finally,” he told Hawkins, “Just to get them off my back, I told them I would. But I told myself if I didn’t like it down there, I’d quit and come home after a couple of weeks.” Johnson probably didn’t feel much different about the subject than most major leaguers. However, he said the quiet part out loud to a reporter who wrote that Johnson was planning to defy the Phillies. Ever since then, Johnson never trusted reporters.
In 1965, manager Gene Mauch sat Johnson against certain right-handed pitchers, but by the end of July, he was hitting .324/.367/.477. In August, Mauch told Stan Hochman of the Philadelphia Daily News, “If I said I wasn’t toying with the idea of playing him every day, I’d be kidding you.” Soon, however, Mauch got fed up with Johnson’s poor defense and tendency not to run hard to first base on grounders. Johnson’s defense in left field would never be great. He finished his career with -33 Fielding Runs Above Average (or is that 33 Fielding Runs Below Average?) and 84 errors, leading the majors in errors five times.
As for a perceived lack of hustle, Johnson was never going to change. Oddly, he thought the umpires were against him and were going to call him out on ground balls anyway. Besides, “I think it’s to my benefit to conserve myself a little bit,” he told Hawkins. “I don’t take pep pills the way some players do, so I feel like I have to conserve my energy. I make sure I don’t need them.” But Johnson was too much for the old-school Mauch. After the 1965 season, the Phillies traded Johnson, Pat Corrales, and Art Mahaffey to St. Louis for Dick Groat, Bob Uecker, and Bill White.
Mr. Personality
With the Cardinals, Johnson frequently clashed with manager Red Schoendienst, who wanted to change the way Johnson hit. Johnson wasn’t having any of that. He hit .186 in 25 games in 1966 and was sent to Triple-A Tulsa. In Tulsa, manager Charley Metro left him alone, and Johnson hit .355/.371/.631, earning him a spot on the Cardinals’ roster for all of 1967. But he hit just .223 that season, and before the 1968 season, he was traded to the Reds straight up for Dick Simpson, a reserve outfielder thought to have little trade value. “I made them trade me in St. Louis by my actions,” Johnson boasted to Hawkins. “When they realized I wasn’t going to do what they wanted me to do, they got rid of me. I made them.”
Johnson appeared to have found a home in Cincinnati. Teammates accepted his quiet, moody ways. Reds second baseman Tommy Helms jokingly called him “Mr. Personality.” Manager Dave Bristol left Johnson alone, perhaps getting the idea from Metro, who’d worked for the Reds as a super scout in 1967. “I just put him in the lineup, and he goes out and does his job,” Bristol explained to Ritter Collett of the Dayton Journal Herald. When Collett pointed out some of Johnson’s mistakes – getting picked off first base three times during the season’s first five weeks and leaving third base too early when he represented the tying run in Los Angeles – Bristol defended him. “Sure, he’ll make mistakes and so will the other guys on the club,” he said. But in 1970, by which time Johnson had moved on to his next destination, Bristol admitted to Dave Distel of The Los Angeles Times, “I have to represent 25 players, so I can’t look the other way. If Alex didn’t run out ground balls, I’d take him out of the lineup.”
Even so, Johnson played better for Cincinnati more consistently than he would anywhere else, hitting .313/.346/.426 with 19 HR, 146 RBI, and 119 OPS+ while being worth 6.5 WAR across 1968 and 1969. Unfortunately, he found himself a victim of a numbers game. The Reds also had Pete Rose and Bobby Tolan, and with young Bernie Carbo and Hal McRae coming up, they had a surplus of outfielders and a dire need for pitching. So, after the season, Johnson was traded to the Angels along with Chico Ruiz, who would play a role in Johnson’s troubles there, for pitchers Pedro Borbon, Vern Geishert, and Jim McGlothlin.
“You Have to Go Along with the Pluses and the Minuses”
When Johnson won the batting title for the 1970 Angels, everybody seemed happy. His manager, Lefty Phillips, told Distel, “You have to go along with the pluses and the minuses. He has gone about his work and done a good job in the outfield – much better than the left fielder we had last year. [It was Rick Reichardt. I just had to look.] Sometimes he doesn’t run to first base as well as I’d like him to. That’s the only thing I’ve talked to Alex Johnson about.”
Now that Johnson was a batting champion, the press was trying to get to understand him better. Tigers outfielder Willie Horton, who grew up with Johnson in Detroit, told Distel, “Deep down inside, Alex Johnson is a beautiful person.” How many know him deep down inside? “I guess just the guys he grew up with,” Horton said after some thought. “Alex didn’t care to talk to newsmen when he was here,” said Schoendienst, “and he never made any bones about it.” “Alex just doesn’t talk to too many people,” said his father, Arthur. “He’s always been quiet, even around me.”
About reporters, Johnson said, “I respond to writers according to what I call consideration. Some of them tell lies, and some of them are without common sense. Once I judge a certain writer, I treat him according to what I think about him.”
“I don’t want to waste time running up and down the bench, shaking hands for everything that happens,” he said, explaining why he returns to the bench after hitting a home run and skips the usual congratulations from his teammates. He didn’t care that it made him seem as though he was disliked.
Suspended
The honeymoon ended quickly. The 1971 Angels were thought to have a legitimate chance to win the pennant. However, several players entered the season bitter over how general manager Dick Walsh handled offseason contract negotiations, and injuries wracked the team. Players broke curfew. Suddenly, Phillips wasn’t so tolerant of Johnson anymore. Phillips told Don Merry of the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram that he’d fined Johnson “somewhere between eight and 10 times – I lost the actual count.” The fines exceeded $1,000 in total. Finally, in June, Johnson was suspended indefinitely by Walsh for lack of hustle, but not before accusing Ruiz of pulling a gun on him in the clubhouse. The gun was confiscated and hidden in the office of the director of stadium operations. Johnson headed home to Detroit, having hit .260/.308/.318 for 1971. His season was over as Walsh tried unsuccessfully to trade him.
“I bent over backwards for the man,” Phillips said to Merry. “I said before the season we could not win without his bat so he was given every opportunity to straighten out his problems – and I, to this day, do not know what they are.” Nobody did.
Grievance
Then Walsh made a critical mistake. Even though he was no medical expert and had no medical report to go on, Walsh told Johnson’s pregnant wife that Johnson needed psychiatric treatment. Oops! In August, Johnson and the Players Association filed a grievance against the Angels for back pay, claiming that Johnson was obviously suffering from a mental illness, which should have been treated the same as a physical illness. Thus, instead of being suspended, he should have been placed on what today we call the injured list, which would have entitled him to be paid. Bill Veeck, writing a guest column, called it a “rather bizarre theory.” Then again, what would one expect a former owner to think about it? The hearing took place before an arbitrator in the fall of 1971.
Walsh couldn’t get out of his own way. When he suspended Johnson, Walsh inadvertently cited a provision in the league contract that permitted suspension for gambling. It was a case he couldn’t make at the hearing. He also had to admit that the gun story was true, after having previously been involved in the cover-up. The attorneys for Johnson used that to show that Walsh was intentionally trying to make Johnson look like a liar. (Ruiz, who died in a single-vehicle car crash the following February, always denied the gun story.)
The arbitrator ruled in favor of Johnson on September 28, 1971, ordering the Angels to pay him $29,970 in back pay, retroactive to June 29, when he was placed on the restricted list. The ruling angered Walsh, who thought it was inconsistent that the arbitrator allowed the fines for non-hustle to stand – it turned out there were 29 in total – while not allowing the same to be the basis for the suspension. Psychiatrists for both sides testified that Johnson would be able to resume his baseball career after receiving treatment.
Afterward, Johnson told the press, “I don’t consider it a victory at all. It was an obstacle. I signed a contract, and they are supposed to honor it. Maybe they learned something by this.” He was sure he could resume his baseball career. “I’m not worried about that,” he stated. The next month, he was traded to Cleveland for Frank Baker, Alan Foster, and Vada Pinson.
“Work is Work”
Johnson hit just .239 in 1972, his only season in Cleveland. In the spring of 1973, Rangers owner Bob Short, who seemed more concerned about gate attractions than winning and had tried unsuccessfully to land Johnson when he was an Angel, finally got his man when Cleveland agreed to a trade. Texas gave up Vince Colbert and Rich Hinton in the swap. It seemed a desperate move by the Rangers, who finished 54-100 in 1972. According to Rangers beat reporter Mike Shropshire’s book, Seasons in Hell, Texas manager Whitey Herzog, never one to mince words, said of the Johnson deal, “A guy like that can poison a ball club. But how do you poison this club?” Shropshire later had a chance encounter with Johnson, introduced himself, and asked him how he felt about the trade. “Work is work. It doesn’t matter where,” said Johnson. Shropshire wrote that it was “the most extensive interview he would conduct in a season and a half with the Rangers.”
Still, Johnson was actually one of the Rangers’ more consistent performers, hitting .289/.329/.370 during his time there. He remained aloof, but there were no further reported issues with managers or front offices. He played for the Yankees and his hometown Tigers and took one final shot at the game with the Mexico City Reds of the Mexican League in 1976. Then he returned to Detroit, where he took over his father’s trucking business until he passed away in 2015.
How does one summarize the mysterious Johnson? In 1971, Angels owner Gene Autry gave it a try when he told the Associated Press, “Off the field, you cannot find a finer guy. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or carouse at night. It just seems that when he gets into a uniform, he is a different guy entirely.”
