Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is a baseball fan. He is a National League man, and now a fan of the Washington Nationals. (After many years of being an Atlanta Braves fan… You can only really be a fan for one team you know.) Your Maximum Leader also likes his history. He has, only in the past 5-10 years, become a fan of baseball history. He has always had a great admiration for Ty Cobb as a ball player. He’s also admired famed Senator’s pitcher Walter Johnson.

Your Maximum Leader was glad to see in today’s Washington Post a piece about the impending 100th anniversary of Johnson’s debut for the Senators. (That day was August 2, 1907.) Your Maximum Leader will share an excerpt from the Post piece that he particularly liked:

Ty Cobb later recounted the moment in his autobiography. “On Aug. 2, 1907, I encountered the most threatening sight I ever saw on a ballfield.”

Yet early that day, Cobb and the rest of the Detroit Tigers didn’t think much of Johnson as he warmed up for the second half of a doubleheader. The kid from Kansas was 19, had been pitching in a place called Weiser, Idaho, and was being rushed into the rotation of a last-place club by Manager Joe Cantillon. He had an unorthodox, slinging motion in which the ball seemed to come from behind his body. Cobb recalled that “we licked our lips” at the prospect of facing him.

“One of the Tigers imitated a cow mooing and we hollered at Cantillon: ‘Get the pitchfork ready, Joe — your hayseed’s on his way back to the barn,’ ” Cobb wrote.

They were wrong. Johnson didn’t win that day, leaving after eight innings in which he allowed six hits — three of them infield scratches — and two runs. When he was lifted for a pinch hitter in the eighth, he was headed for the first of his 279 losses. But he had left his mark.

J. Ed Grillo, covering the game for The Post, wrote: “Walter Johnson, the Idaho phenom, who made his debut in fast company yesterday, showed conclusively that he is perhaps the most promising young pitcher who has broken into a major league in recent years. . . . He had terrific speed, and the hard-hitting Detroit batsmen found him about as troublesome as any pitcher they have gone against on this present trip.”

Indeed, the Tigers were wowed. They were on their way to the American League pennant and had a fearsome lineup. But after they swept the doubleheader by beating Johnson in that second game, they knew they had seen a man who would be a rival for years.

“I watched him take that easy windup — and then something went past me that made me flinch,” Cobb said. “I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. The thing just hissed with danger. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”

That is a powerful endorsement from Cobb. “The most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.” Your Maximum Leader would love to find some film (if any exists) of Johnson pitching. He’d love to look over it and see the most powerful arm to throw a ball…

Your Maximum Leader might try and make it down to RFK to see the Nats play on “Walter Johnson Night.” The team will wear replica 1927 Senators caps in tribute to the man they called the Big Train.

Carry on.