Randy Johnson’s Western New York Roots
This article was written by Danny Spewak
This article was published in The National Pastime: Baseball on Lake Erie (2026)
During the summer of 1985, a towering, 6-foot, 10-inch tall pitching prospect out of the University of Southern California arrived in Jamestown, New York, for his very first stint in professional baseball. The Montreal Expos’ second-round draft pick, who had never lived anywhere outside of the West Coast, now found himself on the opposite end of the country, about 25 miles inland from Lake Erie, playing for the short-season, Class-A Jamestown Expos.
This imposing southpaw commanded the attention of Jamestown from the start. “No question, that was the conversation. Oh my God, you can’t believe this,” said Greg Peterson, a longtime Jamestown attorney. “He’s a string pole, but a tall guy that could throw fast, with little or no control.”1 Jeff Brucculeri, who worked in the Jamestown Expos’ front office in 1985, spotted this pitcher’s talent from his earliest bullpen sessions. “I went down there and stood behind the catcher and started taking pictures. I realized then, how fast this guy could throw, how hard he was throwing,” Brucculeri said. “That was my introduction to Randy Johnson.”2
Long before the “Big Unit” established himself as one of the most feared pitchers in baseball history, he toiled in relative obscurity for a few months in Jamestown, during a mostly forgettable debut in which he failed to register a win over eight starts. Ninety-one-year-old Durwood Swanson, who has followed professional baseball in Jamestown since before World War II, can still recite Johnson’s statistics from 1985: 0-3 with a 5.93 ERA and 24 walks in 27.1 innings. “Those are the stats I have on him, but from what I saw, they would seem even worse than that in my own mind,” Swanson said. “My memories of seeing him pitch one night, he threw two over the backstop. He threw two over the head of the catcher. It went all the way back to the backstop. I mean, that’s how wild he was.”3
Despite the lackluster statistics, Johnson’s early experience in Jamestown in 1985 set a foundation for the rest of his Hall of Fame career, and remains an immense source of pride in this Western New York town of roughly 30,000 people. Nestled on idyllic Chautauqua Lake near the Pennsylvania border, about an hour and a half south of Buffalo, the city of Jamestown has a rich tradition of minor league baseball dating back to 1939, and counts Randy Johnson as one of the few future Hall of Famers to ever come through the city, along with Nellie Fox and Jim Leyland. “To Jamestown, that’s a huge deal,” Brucculeri said. “For him, it was probably a bit of a culture shock coming to Jamestown, but the city certainly embraced him and that entire team.”4
Johnson reported to Jamestown that summer as a curiosity in the Expos organization. A former top high school prospect out of Livermore, California, Johnson showed flashes of dominance at USC but still managed to issue 104 walks during his senior year. “Montreal’s second choice, Randall Johnson, is more remarkable for his height, which is 6-foot-10, than his pitching statistics,” Canadian sportswriter James Davidson wrote that summer. “The Expos signed the University of Southern California student because of his extremely strong arm.”5 Jim Fanning, the vice president of player development for the Expos, said Johnson’s velocity registered in the “high 80s” out of college, although other sources indicated his fastball reached the 90s at that point in his career. “He’s a big and strong mature guy,” Fanning said, “who needs some polishing up. We feel he can become a strikeout pitcher.”6 After the Expos selected Johnson 36th overall, behind the likes of Will Clark (second overall), Barry Larkin (fourth overall), Barry Bonds (sixth overall) and Rafael Palmeiro (22nd overall), the raw but gifted lefty went directly to Jamestown in mid-June to participate in the Montreal Expos’ minor-league camp with more than two dozen other players.
As he prepared for the start of the New York-Penn League schedule on June 17, Jamestown Expos general manager Frank Wren couldn’t quite get a read on his new flame throwing pitcher, who reported at less than full strength with a sore arm. “He was different, a different kid. Very introverted,” Wren later said. “He was self-conscious about his height, self-conscious about his looks, he was self-conscious about a lot of things. He had some problems he had to get over.”7 Brucculeri, who held various jobs with the Jamestown Expos over the years including public address announcer and team mascot, got to know Johnson during the summer of 1985 and said elbow troubles likely contributed to his lack of control. “Batters were stepping out of the batter’s box when he was releasing the pitch,” Brucculeri said. “They didn’t know what to think of the guy. The good thing is, Montreal saw some potential in him.”8
Johnson acknowledged in his 2015 Hall of Fame acceptance speech that his minor-league performance in the Expos organization was “not stellar.”9 Statistically, his first stop in Jamestown at the age of 21 was by far the worst. “If I’m standing on the on-deck circle and I’m watching me warm up in 1985, yeah, I’m nervous,” Johnson admitted in 2002. “Any time you watch a pitcher who’s got control, you’re not leery about stepping into the box. But back then, I was a little more erratic. I honestly didn’t know where the ball was going all the time. I’d have been…apprehensive.”10
Still, Johnson was fortunate to have a strong nucleus of teammates surrounding him. With two other future big-leaguers, Mark Gardner and Jim Hunter, on the pitching staff, the 1985 Jamestown Expos won their division and electrified their home crowd at the facility now known as Russell E. Diethrick, Jr., Park, located on the campus of Jamestown Community College and named for the city’s former parks and recreation director. Like most players, Johnson lived with a local host family—in his case, an older woman as he later remembered—and blended into Jamestown seamlessly.11 “It’s a good place for new pro players who are away from home for the first time,” Diethrick himself said in 1985, about a decade before the Jamestown baseball stadium was renamed in his honor. “People in Jamestown have been taking in pro players for years.”12 Brucculeri offered similar recollections. “Jamestown Expos fans were extremely loyal fans. A lot of players were living in apartment houses owned by people who came to the games. The season-ticket holders, some of them would take players into their own homes if they had extra room,” he said.13
Despite the fan support, Johnson never found his groove on the mound in Jamestown. Although box scores from the 1985 New York-Penn League are difficult to find, a typical line for Randy Johnson looked something like his outing against Oneonta on August 3, 1985, when he walked four batters and allowed four hits over two innings before manager Ed Creech pulled him after three hitters in the third.14 As general manager, Wren said the uncertainty around Johnson’s performance prevented the organization from providing him with his bonus check for several weeks.15 Still, the southpaw’s skill on the mound was obvious. Buck Showalter, who later managed Johnson in the majors with the Arizona Diamondbacks, crossed paths with Johnson in 1985 as an opponent while coaching the New York Yankees’ affiliate in the New York-Penn League. “I really got to see him evolve,” Showalter said, “from those days in Jamestown right out of college to the dominant pitcher he came to be.”16
After a few months of traversing the back roads of upstate New York and northwestern Pennsylvania, Johnson left the New York-Penn League after the 1985 season and soon advanced rapidly through the Expos system. Although he continued to struggle with his command at Single-A West Palm Beach in 1986 and Double-A Jacksonville in 1987, Johnson cut his walk rate significantly at the Triple-A level in Indianapolis in 1988 and eventually earned a call-up to the majors later that season, making history as the tallest player to ever appear in a major-league game. In 1989, the Expos traded Johnson to the Seattle Mariners in a deal that involved All-Star pitcher Mark Langston, setting in motion the rest of Johnson’s Hall of Fame career that included 10 All-Star appearances, five Cy Young Awards and 2001 World Series MVP honors. “He had some control issues early, but he really evolved once he got to Seattle,” Showalter said. “It’s such a hard thing, being 6-10 and throwing from way out there from the release point he had. With him, you really had to throw out the blueprint. He was a break from anything you ever had in terms of managing and dealing with a pitcher.”17
Johnson’s achievements in the majors astonished some of his old fans in Jamestown, who never could have predicted that the wild young lefty out of USC would someday rank second all-time in strikeouts behind only Nolan Ryan. “Nobody was more surprised with his success than I was, from my memories of seeing him pitch that one night,” Swanson said. “I almost couldn’t believe what he established for himself.”18 Over the years, as Johnson’s fame and pedigree grew on a national level, so did the legend of those early days in Jamestown. Although the Big Unit himself rarely mentioned Jamestown during the course of his career, it appears he looked back on that 1985 season with fondness. According to R.L. McCray of the Corry Journal, a publication covering northwestern Pennsylvania less than 30 miles from Jamestown, Johnson gladly answered a question about Jamestown during an interaction at the MLB All-Star Game in Cleveland in 1997. McCray wrote:
He directed me into the dugout where he said I was the only one with a question he had not been asked 100 times, and something refreshing to him. He told me all about that first season with the NYP Expos, living with an older lady not far from the ballpark. “I could take you there, though it’s probably not there anymore,” he claimed. He talked about going to Johnny’s Lunch with other players.19
The restaurant Johnny’s Lunch—a historic community gem in Jamestown that traces its history back to 1936—supposedly left an unforgettable mark on Randy Johnson. To this day, it is widely believed across Jamestown that Johnson asked Johnny’s Lunch to ship him their famous hot dog sauce while playing at various stops in the major leagues. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Brucculeri, who was born and raised in Jamestown but now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I’ve done the same thing. Johnny’s Lunch, where you have these great hot dogs with this unbelievable sauce that nobody can seem to duplicate, became extremely famous and popular, and anyone who has ever visited Jamestown, or has lived there and moved away, always wants it.”20
Greg Peterson, the Jamestown attorney who has helped document Randy Johnson’s 1985 season, said he’s also not sure if the story is true. “According to urban legend, he would have asked for, over time, containers of that sauce and it was sent out to him. I’ve tried to confirm it, but everybody just sort of smiles and says, ‘oh yeah, oh yeah.’ Be that as it may, he’s always been locally affiliated with Johnny’s Lunch. That’s a big piece, and so, we take great pride in the fact that Randy Johnson played in Jamestown in his first year,” Peterson said, “and went to Cooperstown.”21
DANNY SPEWAK is a journalist and author who has written two nonfiction books on sports history. A native of the St. Louis area and lifelong fan of the Cardinals, Spewak graduated from the University of Missouri with dual degrees in journalism and political science. He joined SABR in 2022 while working on his second book, Cardinal Dreams: The Legacy of Charlie Peete and a Life Cut Short, which tells the story of a top St. Louis Cardinals prospect whose promising career was cut short in a 1956 commercial plane crash. Spewak’s first book, From the Gridiron to the Battlefield, was a finalist for the Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction.
Sources
In addition to the sources named, the author also utilized Baseball Reference and baseball-almanac.com.
Notes
1. Author interview with Greg Peterson, January 21, 2026.
2. Author interview with Jeff Brucculeri, January 26, 2026.
3. Author interview with Durwood Swanson, January 27, 2026.
4. Author interview with Jeff Brucculeri.
5. James Davidson, “Jays Pick Catcher in Opening Round,” The Globe and Mail, June 4, 1985: S1.
6. Peter Hadekel, “Expos After ‘Offensive Player’ Draft Top U.S. College Slugger,” The (Montreal) Gazette, June 4, 1985: 59.
7. “Frank Wren (1998) Remembers,” provided by Greg Peterson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c08Q5b1Aqqg, accessed July 5, 2026.
8. Author interview with Jeff Brucculeri.
9. Steve Gilbert, “Humbled, Emotional Johnson Enters Hall,” MLB.com, July 26, 2015, https://www.mlb.com/news/randy-johnson-emotional-in-hall-of-fame-speech-c138906706.
10. Dave Stubbs, “Big Unit Has Mastered Control,” The Gazette, August 3, 2002: D1.
11. R.L. McCray, “Randy Johnson Almost Wasn’t One of the Best Ever,” Corry Journal, January 10, 2015, https://www.thecorryjournal.com/sports/article_59d50128-9842-11e4-85be-8b8a460378c1.html.
12. Brian Gleeson, “In Jamestown, Baseball Is a Priority,” Stamford Advocate, August 29, 1985, D8.
13. Author interview with Jeff Brucculeri.
14. Press and Sun Bulletin, August 4, 1985: 13.
15. “Frank Wren (1998) Remembers” and author interview with Greg Peterson.
16. Eduardo Encina, “Buck Showalter Had Unique Perspective in Watching Randy Johnson Evolution,” Orlando Sentinel, January 6, 2015, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2015/01/06/buck-showalter-had-unique-perspective-in-watching-randy-johnsons-evolution/.
17. Encina, “Buck Showalter Had Unique Perspective.”
18. Author interview with Durwood Swanson.
19. McCray, “Randy Johnson Almost Wasn’t One of the Best Ever.”
20. Author interview with Jeff Brucculeri.
21. Author interview with Greg Peterson.