It's an amazing sight when you're watching great athletes compete at the highest levels in their sport and one competitor is so great that the opposition is just overmatched. I mean dominated; not just beat, not just bested, but dominated, almost completely helpless. In the realm of baseball, the greatest pitchers, at their best, will do this. Major league hitters, the best in the world, men with preternatural reflexes and freakish hand-eye coordination, are left to wave futilely at pitches or are so flummoxed they can't even swing.

I remember watching Clemens pitch against the Yanks in '97 and wondering how in the hell anyone ever hit the guy. I remember watching Pedro against the Yanks in September '99, the game he struck out 17, and feeling sorry for Yankee batters. Jorge Posada couldn't even get the bat off his shoulder. He had no idea what was coming - 96 mph fastball, or slider, or change-up or curveball. Yankee after Yankee left the plate after striking out shaking their head on the way back to the dugout, no doubt feeling the way Mickey Mantle felt after facing Koufax for the first time in the '63 World Series, when he said to the umpire as he was turning to leave the plate after striking out, "now how in the hell am I supposed to hit that shit."

But for sheer dominance, the ability to induce not only helplessness in big league batters but terror, there has perhaps never been anyone like Randy Johnson. It was sometimes like watching little league baseball, where the big kid is on the mound, the one that seemed to mature about two years ahead of the rest of the kids, and the ball is blowing by the batter before they can even think about swinging. One kid gets smoked and the next batter approaches the batters box looking like they're going to the gallows. They have no chance. When he was at his best, that was Randy Johnson on the mound.  Too big, too nasty, too fast. And that slider - Christ, you pitied lefthanded hitters who had to face Randy Johnson.

The ironic thing is that Johnson was arguably never considered the best pitcher in the game during his prime. Before you say, "hey, wait a minute...", consider this: Maddux was off the charts in '94 and '95, throwing strike after strike without ever hitting the white of the plate. Clemens was spinning back-to-back pitching triple crowns in '97 and '98. And then Pedro was dominating from '99 to '02, like a Marichal with more speed and a Hoffman-like change-up. Note that I didn't say Johnson was never actually the best during this period - he unquestionably was in 2001 when Pedro missed half the season. I said he was never considered the best. Johnson had the misfortune during his peak of '93 to '02 of always seeming to be in the shadow of another all-time great. Even in 2001 Johnson was a bit overshadowed by his loquacious and self-promoting  mound-mate, he of the Bloody Sock.

During his ten-year peak, Johnson posted seasons of 18-2 (the strike-shortened '94 season), 20-4, 21-6 and 24-5. After sulking his way through the first half of the season in Seattle in '98, he went to the National League and went 10-1 with a 1.28 ERA in eleven starts for the Astros. I remember thinking as Johnson was doing this, "man, those NL batters have never seen anything like this."

Judging just by the W-L records, Randy Johnson was as close to unbeatable for those ten years as anyone has ever been in major league baseball. He was 175-58, for a .751 winning percentage. Only Grove had a comparable winning percentage across a similar number of decisions, going 172-54 for a .761 winning percentage between '27 and '33. There was a difference, however. Grove was pitching for Connie Mack's Athletics, the team that sent Ruth and Gehrig packing for home at the end of the season in '29, '30 and '31. Grove was lavished with spectacular run support by Foxx, Simmons and Cochrane. He pitched to one of the all-time great field generals in Mickey Cochrane. He had a hell of a supporting cast. Johnson received generally good run support from his Seattle and Arizona teams, but it was actually slightly less than team average, and needless to say the overall quality of those teams didn't approach the Athletics of the 30's.

The team relative analysis for Randy Johnson yielded a number that made me go back and double-check the formulas in the spreadsheet. After those checked out, I reconsidered the whole concept of the team relative analysis as a metric for pitchers. But I think its validity still holds. I had to reconsider the concept and double-check the methodology because it produced for Randy Johnson a result so outlandish, so amazing, that it was hard to believe.

Between '93 and '02, Randy Johnson outperformed his team, after adjusting for factors other than his own performance that might have effected his W-L record and his team's W-L record, by 50%. Yeah, you read that right - 50%.

It's a figure that significantly exceeds Seaver and Maddux. And it's a figure that I'm pretty certain will exceed Koufax's figure for his peak period of '62 to '66. If I don't miss my guess, it's a figure that only Walter Johnson will be able to approach over a decade period. And even Walter won't hit Randy's mark unless either his run support was significantly worse than other Senator pitchers received or those Senator pitching staffs were better than they appear to be at first glance.

This result is not the product of any significant adjustment to Johnson's record produced by the methodology. A straight comparison of Johnson's W-L record to his teams' records in games other than those where Johnson got the decision shows that Johnson outperformed his team by nearly 46%. After adjusting for the fact that (i) Johnson's run support was slightly below team average and (ii) Johnson was outperforming a very good D'back pitching staff from '99 to '02, that figure increased to 50%.

Unless I can identify some flaw in this concept I'm forced to reconsider my opinion that Grove was the greatest southpaw in the history of the game. Hell, Randy Johnson might have been the greatest pitcher, period. True, these analyses are restricted to peak periods of about a decade, but it's not like Randy had a short career; he won 300 games, after all. And I think it unlikely that other candidates for greatest ever will have achievements outside their peak decade that will militate in their favor, although Clemens might.

In terms of sheer power-pitching dominance, we were watching Walter Johnson at his peak when we were watching Randy Johnson from '93 to '02. We were watching peak Koufax. We were watching Grove at his very peak, say from '28 to '33. I'm not sure I appreciated that at the time. In fact, I'm pretty certain I didn't. But the Big Unit was indeed that great.