Padres Have Better Unit

If there was one thing you could find a consensus opinion on in baseball the past few years it’s that Randy Johnson would be the pitcher of choice to start a must-win game.

Any manager had to smile at the thought of Johnson wearing his team’s uniform, standing on the mound and unleashing 98-mph fastballs from that 6-10 frame in October. He’d get you two-thirds of the way through a division series and halfway to a seven-game series victory all by himself.

It’s time to rewrite the book on Johnson. He’s gone from can’t-lose to can’t-win. The last five times he’s pitched in the postseason--three of them in do-or-die situations--he’s lost.

Johnson never guaranteed any victories. He didn’t call himself unstoppable. But that was the aura he built up as a Seattle Mariner at the expense of the Angels and Yankees in 1995, and it’s the ideal he’s been held to ever since.

The Houston Astros had that image in mind when they traded for him on July 31. If any one pitcher could go head-to-head with the Atlanta Braves’ formidable staff, it was Johnson.

Except Johnson couldn’t even get them to Atlanta. The Astros fell by the wayside in the division series, which the San Diego Padres wrapped up in four games with a 6-1 victory Sunday.

Here’s Johnson’s line in Game 1: Eight innings, nine hits, two earned runs, one walk, nine strikeouts. L, 0-1.

His line in Game 4: Six innings, three hits, two runs (one earned), one walk, eight strikeouts. L, 0-2.

“You give up three [earned] runs in 14 innings, you don’t feel you’re going to be on the losing end of too many ballgames,” Johnson said.

He was on the wrong side of one of the best postseason pitching performances in a long time, a 16-strikeout, one-run outing by Kevin Brown in Game 1.

Sunday, Sterling Hitchcock tore through the Houston lineup, striking out 11 in six innings.

Johnson’s only mistake was one waist-high fastball to Jim Leyritz. The other run came thanks to a ball that fell between two Astros, and an error by third baseman Sean Berry.

It sure wasn’t Johnson’s fault the Astros couldn’t get a run in the seventh inning despite situations of men on first and third with no out and the bases loaded with one out.

It was still a 2-1 game at the time. Johnson was pinch-hit for by Carl Everett, who popped up to Ken Caminiti to end the inning and Johnson’s chance at a victory.

“What more can I do?” Johnson said. “That’s always a question I’ve got to answer.

“It’s not just me. There’s 24 guys in this clubhouse. That’s kind of the bum rap, that people are going to say they beat me. Did I not go out and do my job? I go out and do my job, we came up short. If that’s the way people want to look at it, that they beat me twice, then go ahead and write that way.

“I think people have to realize that it’s not just me who went out there. You’ve got eight guys who need to play defense and hit, and they did that while I was there. That’s one reason I was 10-1 [with the Astros in the regular season]. You get in the playoffs and you can throw most stats out the window. You get in the playoffs, people are playing on a lot of emotions. People that may have had a so-so year can step it up and have an outstanding year.”

Baseball is funny that way. It’s postseason makes heroes out of guys such as Leyritz and torments the likes of Barry Bonds.

Greg Maddux is considered the finest pitcher of the decade, yet he entered these playoffs with a losing record in the postseason.

And now it’s been three years since Randy Johnson won a game that really mattered.

When the Mariners needed him to keep their season alive in 1995 he gave up three earned runs in 7 1/3 innings as Seattle lost to Cleveland, 4-0, in the sixth and final game of the American League championship series.

He lost to Dennis Martinez, who was in his 40s even then.

Last year, the Baltimore Orioles roped him for 14 hits and eight earned runs in his two starts, including the series-ender.

His worst start resulted in five earned runs. But even his best start hasn’t been enough during this streak. Maybe it’s giving up one run when his team needs a shutout, or two runs, when all he could afford was one.

He obviously hasn’t had luck on his side during this run, but he’s always made just one more mistake than he could afford. He isn’t a bad pitcher, he just isn’t guaranteed.

That takes a little value off a 35-year-old free-agent-to-be.

The ironic thing about Johnson’s game Sunday was he got better in the middle innings. The great concern coming in was he’d be impossible to hit early, in the late-afternoon shadows.

“Anything that affects a hitter in a negative way is an advantage to the pitcher,” Astro Manager Larry Dierker said.

(No kidding. It’s a good thing Dierker’s doing fine managing the Astros, because with non-insights like that he’d have a tough time getting back to his old job in the broadcast booth.)

But by the time the first pitch was thrown at 4:50, the shadow-sun-shadow effect created by the gap between the top of the stadium and the light fixtures had already moved past the mound and toward second base.

And Leyritz had no trouble seeing Johnson’s full-count fastball in the top of the second, and he launched it into the seats beyond left-center.

Leyritz is on his fourth team since the middle of last season. But whenever he gets into the playoffs he comes up with big home runs.

He has six postseason homers, and they all have either won games, or changed the momentum of a game--and even a series, in the case of his home run for the Yankees against Atlanta in ’96.

Like Johnson, Leyritz will be a free agent this winter.

You want a guy to win a game for your team in October?

You’d better sign Jim Leyritz.