The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

During that season, Walter Johnson became the first Major League pitcher to reach 3,000 career strikeouts. If you don't think that was a major achievement, consider this: it took more than 50 years for another pitcher to reach that plateau. Johnson not only turned that figure into one of baseball's magic numbers but also was the sole member of the club for half a century.

So where's the celebration? Well, it would help if the Washington Senators were still in existence, but both clubs that once represented the nation's capital now play elsewhere.

Johnson's old team left the District of Columbia for the Twin Cities and became the Minnesota Twins in 1961, the same year that the American League expanded and put a second Senators team in Washington. That franchise moved in 1972 to the Arlington region between Dallas and Fort Worth and became the Texas Rangers.

The current Washington Nationals used to be the Montreal Expos. No connection there. So it is up to us to do as much justice as possible to Johnson as the Yankees are paying to their hallowed ground.

This is not to say that any injustice has been done to Johnson. He is, after all, part of the game's "Mount Rushmore," the original class elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936 along with fellow pitcher Christy Mathewson, shortstop Honus Wagner and outfielders Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. It doesn't get better than that.

Yet Johnson's Hall of Fame plaque contains merely four lines to summarize his career, which seems awfully puny for someone who was such a bar-setter for pitchers. Every once in a while, a newspaper or magazine will do an exhaustive study on the history of pitching, and the majority of the time, the same conclusion is reached -- that Walter Johnson was probably the greatest pitcher who ever lived.

The statistics Johnson compiled are so remarkable regardless of whatever context they are placed that to debate his stature is an effort in futility. Take his 3,509 career strikeouts as an example of his greatness. That total stood unsurpassed for 55 years.

Think of it. Ruth's home-run total wasn't eclipsed for 38 years before Hank Aaron broke it in 1974. It took 48 years for someone, Lou Brock, to pass Cobb's total of stolen bases. Johnson's strikeout total lasted just one year shy of Cobb's hit total that Pete Rose finally exceeded in 1985.

And more than 500 strikeouts before he hung up his glove, Johnson attained a level that was rarefied air for the better part of the 20th century. When future Hall of Famer Jim Bunning retired after the 1971 season, his 2,855 strikeouts ranked second on the career list. He now ranks 17th.

It wasn't until Bob Gibson got to his 3,000th strikeout in 1974, his next-to-last season with the St. Louis Cardinals, that Johnson had company on his cloud. Gaylord Perry reached 3,000 in 1978, the year he won his second Cy Young Award, and would keep on going until he was one of three pitchers that finally bettered Johnson's career strikeout total in 1983.

That was a tough year for Johnson. At the beginning of the season, he was still the game's strikeout king. By the end, he had fallen into fourth place. Nolan Ryan, who reached 3,000 strikeouts in 1980, and Steve Carlton, who made it to 3,000 in 1981, dueled each other with Perry trailing them and leaving Johnson in their wake.

Ryan went on to the current record total of 5,714 with Carlton second at 4,136 before he was overtaken in recent years by Randy Johnson, now in second place, and Roger Clemens, in third. Three other pitchers also went past Walter Johnson in the 1980s -- Tom Seaver in 1985, Don Sutton in 1987 and Bert Blyleven in 1989 -- but the "Big Train" remains in the top 10 to this day and will likely stay there for quite some time.

Johnson ranks ninth in strikeouts, ahead of Phil Niekro, with 11th-place Greg Maddux some 180 strikeouts away. That's a high total for an aging pitcher to register. Maddux may break into the top 10 by hopping over Niekro but he's still a long shot to match Johnson.

Following Fergie Jenkins in 12th place and Gibson in 13th are active pitchers Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz, who have cracked the 3,000 level though none has more than Schilling's 3,116. Each is decidedly in the autumn of his career, so getting to Johnson's 3,509 appears a decided chore.

There is so much more to Johnson's legacy, of course. He had 417 victories, second only to Cy Young's 511, and 110 shutouts, second to no one. Johnson's 1.14 ERA in 1913 when he was 36-7 was the record Gibson broke with his 1.12 ERA in 1968. Johnson's scoreless string of 56 innings was the record Don Drysdale broke with 58 in 1968 (eventually broken again by Orel Hershiser with 59 in 1988). Johnson was a 30-game winner twice, a 20-game winner 12 times and the star of the Senators' only World Series championship in 1924.

During a career spent entirely in Washington that spanned 1907 to 1927, Johnson built a reputation as one of the game's gentlemen, a great example to America's youth. This model of decorum -- who did not drink, smoke or cuss -- single-handedly made the strikeout statistic "sexy."

Home runs and strikeouts sell tickets, it has long been asserted, and while the Babe was taking care of parking the ball beyond outfield fences, the Train was mowing down hitters with regularity and usually with one pitch, the most devastating fastball in the sport before Bob Feller arrived on the scene in the late 1930s.

There are 23 pitchers with 300 or more victories and 21 relievers with 300 or more saves. There are 24 players with more than 500 home runs, 27 players with 3,000 or more hits and 34 players with career batting averages of .330 or higher.

That only 16 pitchers have recorded more than 3,000 strikeouts makes this the most exclusive club of the magical numbers often associated with Hall of Fame certainty. The charter member who stood alone for so long is the man who perfected the art of making batters swing and miss.

In doing so, Johnson fulfilled one of the most famous scouting reports of all time, that of Washington catcher Cliff Blankenship, who reported in 1907, "You can't hit what you can't see. I've signed him, and he is on his way."