Johnson Stands Tall in His Biggest Game : Mariners: He comes through under pressure and overpowers Angels with 12 strikeouts.

Randy Johnson reached back and fired a fastball past Tony Phillips, pounded his chest with his glove and strode off the mound, raising his arms in a Charles Atlas flex to the crowd behind the Mariner dugout.

Fifty thousand fans, who had stood and screamed every time he had two strikes on an overmatched Angel batter, responded with a new decibel level of eardrum-numbing crescendo.

Johnson had just recorded his 10th--and most important--strikeout of the game, stranding Rex Hudler, who had squirted a ground ball through the right side of the infield for the Angels’ first hit and then stole second.

The man they call the Big Unit, who had a perfect game through 5 2/3 innings, had come up very big indeed, preserving Seattle’s 1-0 lead. And the show of emotion just erupted from somewhere within.

“I pitch on adrenaline,” he said very softly after the 9-1 victory, after the emotion had been drained from him and several bottles of champagne drained over him. “A lot had built up inside and it just came out of me then.

“I was working on three days’ rest and I knew I would show up, I just didn’t know how I would pitch.”

You would never know it by looking at him standing tall--6 feet 10 inches tall--on the mound, glowering down toward home plate, pounding his chest and pumping his fist, but even Randy Johnson has his moments of doubt.

Sunday night, as he was in bed with the baby monitor on the nightstand next to him, stirring every time his 10-month-old daughter Samantha “chirped,” he fretted about the responsibility that awaited him.

Manager Lou Piniella says the Mariners have been riding on Johnson’s shoulders all year, and on this night, Johnson was feeling the weight of his teammates, of an organization that had never seen postseason play, of a city.

“If I would’ve lost this game, I would’ve been hurting,” Johnson said. “I would’ve felt like I had let down a whole lot of people who were depending on me.”

But in the hours before the game, he came to realize that this was a pressure situation to be embraced, not dreaded.

“I thought about how it was fitting that it had come down to one game at home in front of our fans,” he said, “how you couldn’t have written it better in a story and how if I was the author I would’ve made sure I was the pitcher.

“Sure, there was a lot of pressure, but I kind of thrive on that.”

The last time he faced the Angels, they scored seven runs and handed Johnson one of two defeats he suffered all year. “They roughed me up pretty good,” he said.

Monday, however, he sucked in the atmosphere of the Kingdome and spat out fastballs and faster balls, winning his 18th game of the season and the most important of his career. He struck out 12 and gave up only three hits as the Mariners won the one-game playoff for the American League West title.

“Forget the final score,” Piniella said. “For three-quarters of the game, this was a nail-biter and today Randy proved why he should win the Cy Young Award.”

For 6 1/2 innings, it was a one-run game, one that Johnson was making look like plenty enough.

“He was as good as ever, which is great,” said Angel right fielder Tim Salmon, who struck out four times in a row. “You get the crowd behind him like that and it just pumps him up even more. You could actually feel the momentum he had.”

“What a force,” Angel shortstop Gary DiSarcina said. “For the first six innings, every pitch was a great pitch. We’ve seen him a lot, but today he was really in a zone.”

Johnson momentarily lost his concentration in the eighth and ninth innings after his teammates scored four runs in both the seventh and eighth. He walked Chili Davis and gave up a double to pinch-hitter Rene Gonzales in the eighth before getting Hudler to ground out to end the inning. And he hung a slider to Phillips, who homered to left, in the ninth.

“I was extremely focused in the beginning,” Johnson said. “It was a very close game and I maintained my focus until after the floodgates had opened up a bit.

“It was the biggest game of my career and I knew I had to rise to the occasion. This is the kind of game when you really find out a lot about yourself.”

He wasn’t the only one. The Angels found out much more about him than they cared to know.