Troy Johnston’s pitching debut in the big leagues came with the kind of weird little twist that only baseball can deliver: a position player on the mound, the Dodgers in the other dugout, and Shohei Ohtani walking away before he could launch one of those moonshots.
By the time Johnston took over for the ninth inning of Colorado’s 11-5 loss to Los Angeles on Monday night at Coors Field, the game was already headed for the kind of finish that turns a crowd restless. Johnston, usually an outfielder or designated hitter and sometimes a first baseman, got the call to handle the final frame and ended up recording a scoreless inning in his first pitching appearance since high school.
The command wasn’t clean. He hit a batter and issued a walk. But the Rockies got the inning over without allowing another run, and Johnston walked off with the sort of souvenir he’ll probably remember more than any baseball he could have taken home from the night.
With two outs, the Dodgers pulled Ohtani for pinch-hitter Ben Rortvedt, who bounced out. Johnston immediately raised his glove to ask first baseman TJ Rumfield for the ball.
That part made him grin.
“That’s probably the funniest part,” Johnston said. “Just to be able to go up and do that in a Major League game … and say that I’m a Major League pitcher. That’s kind of funny, and kind of cool and quirky.”
Johnston is 29 and in his first full Major League season, but this wasn’t a moment he chased. It came to him. Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer said he usually leans on catcher Brett Sullivan to soak up blowout innings, but that route was off the table Monday because Sullivan was behind the plate with two-time All-Star Hunter Goodman sidelined by a sore left shoulder.
Putting Sullivan in the game to catch Sullivan, Schaeffer said, “would probably be malpractice,” Schaeffer said.
So Johnston got the nod instead, and Schaeffer came away pleased enough with the emergency work.
“Troy’s next man up,” Schaeffer said. “I thought he did a really nice job. He got to pitch in the big leagues.”
Johnston said he got “an inning or two” of warning before heading out there, enough time to settle into the moment and enjoy how strange it all felt. He said it had the feel of a debut.
“It was almost like a debut kind of moment for me,” said Johnston, who broke in with the Marlins last year after a long Minor League apprenticeship, then was claimed off waivers by the Rockies. “I looked up in the stands.
I looked around. I thought it was pretty cool.”
He also wanted to make it a little more interesting, until Sullivan shut that down.
“Sully said, ‘Absolutely no offspeed,'” he said.
In the end, Johnston didn’t need much of a pitch mix anyway. His throws as a position player sometimes cut, so Statcast identified some of them as sliders and cutters, while the ones that floated the other way registered as changeups. Tommy Edman, the second batter he faced, was hit by a pitch.
“If you’re getting thrown by a position player, you almost want to get hit because you don’t want the at-bat, especially with the way I was throwing,” Johnston said. “I was all over the place. I never really throw too many strikes.”
He never got the matchup he really wanted. Ohtani was out of the game before Johnston could face him, and that was the one part of the night he said he would have loved to test.
“That would have been great,” Johnston said. “I would have loved to see him hit a 500-foot home run off me -- because that’s all he’s going to do.
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