Davey Johnson, one of baseball’s notable iconoclasts, who played in four World Series in six seasons as a second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles and who later managed the Mets to their remarkable Series victory in 1986, died on Friday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 82.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Jay Horwitz, the vice president of alumni public relations for the Mets. He did not specify a cause.
Known as one of the game’s brainier and more self-assured characters, Johnson was an unusual figure in the world of baseball, with a wide range of off-the-field interests and achievements. A scratch golfer, a wealthy real estate investor, a licensed pilot, an accomplished fisherman and a scuba diving instructor, he graduated from Trinity University in Texas with a degree in mathematics, whose precepts he brought to the ballpark. He was among the first — if not the first — to recognize that computers could be utilized in marshaling baseball’s statistics to have an impact on team building, lineup construction and game strategy.
In an oft-reported story, Johnson took a computer class at Johns Hopkins University between the 1968 and 1969 seasons and, using his teammates’ batting statistics as his data, created a program entitled “Optimization of the Orioles Lineup.” The result suggested that if specific changes were made in the preferred lineup of the Orioles’ decidedly old-school manager, Earl Weaver, the offense would be stronger. This was precisely the kind of analysis that in the intervening years has made sabermetrics, as the study of baseball statistics has come to be known, a crucial element of administering a major league ball club.
“I showed Earl how a guy could have the same type of season two years in a row, the same stats, but we’d score 40 more runs if we spotted him in different situations,” Johnson recalled after the Mets hired him for his first managerial job, after the 1983 season. “Earl threw it into the wastebasket.”
As a player, Johnson had a creditable career. Long and lean — he was heavier when he managed — he was a smooth fielder who won two Gold Gloves as part of an Oriole infield that also included Brooks Robinson at third, Luis Aparicio and then Mark Belanger at shortstop and Boog Powell at first. It has often been cited as among the best ever.
At the plate, he was solid if unspectacular, batting .261 in all or part of 13 major league seasons playing for four teams. He was an All-Star four times, three times for the American League as an Oriole and once for the National League, in 1973, after he was traded to the Atlanta Braves. His big-league career was interrupted when the Braves cut him early in 1975, and he played in Japan before returning to the National League for short stints with the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs.
It was a stout, creditable résumé, unmemorable perhaps if you weren’t aware of the oddities between the lines. Most notably, though never considered a power hitter, Johnson was the author of one of baseball history’s more eyebrow-raising statistical anomalies with the Braves in 1973, when he belted a team-leading 43 home runs, more than any second baseman had hit in any previous season, twice as many as he hit in any other season and nearly a third of his career total of 136. He and two other Braves — Henry Aaron, with 40 home runs, and Darrell Evans, with 41 — made Atlanta the first team with three teammates to hit 40 or more homers in a season.
You Could Look It Up
Beyond that, Johnson’s career was dotted with the kind of coincidence and unusual occurrence that delights the baseball obsessed and makes Johnson an answer to some good trivia questions.
Who got the last hit off Sandy Koufax? It was Johnson, a single in the sixth inning of the second game of the 1966 World Series. The Orioles would win in a sweep, and Koufax, who had chronic arthritis in his pitching elbow, would retire the next month.
Who made the last out of the 1969 World Series? Johnson again, a fly ball to left field that was caught by the Mets’ Cleon Jones, sealing the Mets’ first World Series victory. They wouldn’t win another championship until 1986, when their manager was Davey Johnson.
Who is the only player to be on the field the first two times Babe Ruth’s home run record was surpassed? Johnson was in the Atlanta lineup on the day in 1974 when Aaron hit his 715th home run; two years later, in Japan, Johnson was in the lineup of the Yomiuri Giants when his teammate, Sadaharu Oh, hit his 715th.
And who was the first player to hit two pinch-hit grand slams in the same season? Johnson? Good guess. He hit just .191 in 102 plate appearances for the Phillies in 1978, but his only two home runs were pinch hits with the bases loaded.
The statistical outline of his career as a manager is strong. With five different teams over 17 seasons, his won-lost record was 1,372-1,071, a strong winning percentage of .562. Twice, both times with the Mets, he won at least 100 games. His teams qualified for postseason play six times.
Lifting the Lowly
What most distinguished his record, however, was that he effected change for the better wherever he went. Before his arrival, the Mets had finished below .500 seven years in a row; in Johnson’s first three years at the helm, as he championed young players like Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden and spirited veteran infielders like Wally Backman and Ron Gardenhire, they went 90-72, 98-64 and, in 1986, 108-54.
The 1986 postseason was the high point of Johnson’s career. The Mets won the National League Championship Series against the Houston Astros, the clinching game a 16-inning thriller in which the Mets tied the game with three runs in the ninth and both teams scored a run in the 14th; it ended after the Mets scored three in the top of the 16th and barely held on as the Astros scored two in their half of the inning. They followed that with a seven-game World Series triumph over the Boston Red Sox, including the astonishing sixth game, one of the most memorable games in baseball history.
Three runs behind at Shea Stadium in New York and facing elimination with two outs in the ninth and nobody on, the Mets rallied to win, the deciding run coming home on a ground ball by Mookie Wilson that found its way between the legs of the Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner. The Mets clinched the Series with a victory in Game 7.
“In all the baseball October that I either witnessed or was a part of,” Johnson wrote in his 2018 memoir, “My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond” (written with Erik Sherman), “nothing ever came close to ’86.”
The Mets were Johnson’s biggest managerial success, but every other big league team he managed — the Cincinnati Reds, the Orioles (where he was responsible for moving the local hero, Cal Ripken Jr., from shortstop to third base), the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Washington Nationals — improved its season record by the second year of his stewardship.
In spite of his winning record, Johnson’s independent streak and his intellectual swagger — many called it arrogance — tended to irk his bosses. In his memoir, a showcase of self-regard, he portrayed himself perpetually in the light. “A big gust of wind must have come along at that very moment and blown the ball back in,” he wrote of his fly ball final out of the 1969 World Series, certain he had hit a home run and tied the game.
In any case, Marge Schott, the loose-lipped owner of the Reds who was prone to indulging in racial slurs, fired him after three seasons; his fraught connection with Peter Angelos, owner of the Orioles, was so discomforting that Johnson resigned after the team went 186-138 over two seasons, and just as he was named manager of the year in the American League.
His relations with Frank Cashen, the Mets’ general manager who had run the Orioles while Johnson was a player in Baltimore, were always brittle, and they began crumbling when the Mets failed to return to the World Series after 1986. Cashen fired him early in the 1990 season.
“Davey Johnson isn’t the easiest guy to get along with,” Tony Kornheiser wrote in 1997 in The Washington Post. “You wouldn’t want him living next door. He is abrasive and confrontational.” Johnson, he continued, “tends to manage from the position that he’s smarter than you and everybody else in the room.”
“His history is that he wears out his welcome rather quickly, and he’s gone, and there’s a certain relief.”
An Army Family
David Allen Johnson was born in Orlando, Fla., on Jan. 30, 1943. His mother, Florence, had been a competitive swimmer. He didn’t meet his father, Frederick, an Army tank commander during World War II and for a time a prisoner of war in Poland, until he was 2 years old. As a boy, Johnson followed his parents to military bases in Germany and in Wyoming, Georgia and, finally, San Antonio.
He was an all-around athlete in high school, competing in basketball, football, golf and track in addition to baseball, and he played basketball and baseball at Texas A&M. He left college after his sophomore year to sign with the Orioles — in his memoir he says he was eager to leave school because his basketball coach and his baseball teammates had failed him — and he spent a little more than three seasons in the team’s minor league system, switching from shortstop to second base because the Orioles had a future Hall of Famer, Luis Aparicio, at short and a future multiple Gold Glove winner, Mark Belanger, in the system.
Johnson became Baltimore’s regular second baseman in 1966, and over the next seven seasons he was an integral cog for a club that won more than 100 games three times and went to four World Series, winning twice.
Johnson’s 43-homer season in Atlanta would be his last good one; the next year, his average dipped, his runs batted in dropped to 62 from 99, and he hit just 15 home runs. The Braves, noting that his error total in Atlanta in 1973 had quintupled from his six in Baltimore in 1972 — Johnson blamed the quality of the infield at the Braves’ stadium — began playing him at first base. (“I had to learn how to play first base,” he wrote. “Nobody helped me.”) By the beginning of 1975, he was on the bench and eager to be traded.
“Sell me, trade me — just get me the hell out of here,” he told the general manager, Eddie Robinson, according to his memoir. “You guys are idiots!”
Johnson spent the next two seasons in Japan, where he was paid $160,000, double his salary in Atlanta. But he was discomfited by the unfamiliar expectations in a culture alien to him and chafed under his manager, Shigeo Nagashima, a hero in Japan. He finished his career back in the United States with undistinguished stints with the Phillies and the Cubs, after which he managed three seasons in the minor leagues before the Mets hired him.
‘’I want to thank Mr. Cashen for being the intelligent man I know he is and hiring me,” Johnson said to reporters at the time.
Married twice, he is survived by his wife, Susan; two children, David Jr. and Dawn, from his first marriage, to Mary Nan; two stepchildren, Ellie Casebolt and Jeremiah Allen; two grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren. A daughter, Andrea, died in 2005.
In addition to managing big-league teams, Johnson also briefly managed the Netherlands national team in 2003 and was its bench coach in the 2004 Olympics. He managed Team USA in the 2005 and 2009 World Baseball Classic and the 2008 Olympics. He retired from his last managerial job in 2014 after two years with the Washington Nationals, where his rising stars, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg, were reminiscent of the young Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden.
During Johnson’s final week on the job, the Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell wrote a farewell to “one of the smartest and most stubborn, loyal and insubordinate, independent and opinionated, honest and funny, patient and multifaceted men that baseball has ever seen.”
Michael S. Rosenwald contributed reporting.
Bruce Weber retired in 2016 after 27 years at The Times. During the last eight he was an obituary writer. He is at work on a biography of the novelist E.L. Doctorow.
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