A Midsummer Pitch To The Fans Johnson-Nomo Just The Cure Baseball Needs

After a year full of Selig vs. Fehr, players vs. owners and common sense vs. confusion, finally a confrontation that baseball fans really want to see: Hideo Nomo vs. Randy Johnson.

The All-Star Game got the matchup everyone wanted - and maybe one the sport needed - when the strikeout leaders were picked to start tonight’s event at The Ballpark at Arlington.

“I’d watch the game even if I wasn’t here,” Nolan Ryan, the greatest power pitcher ever, said. “So if I was down on the ranch, I would have the game on.”

Ryan, who rarely tuned into All-Star Games in which he did not play, will throw out the first ball. Then the real Texas heat comes when Nomo and Johnson meet in near 100-degree temperatures.

“I don’t know if the pitching matchup had any bearing on it, but hopefully this is something fans can feed off,” Johnson said.

Johnson, with a near-100 mph fastball and the kind of wildness that made John Kruk’s heart flutter at Camden Yards two years ago, goes first. Four of the first five N.L. batters the loose-limbed, 6-foot-10 lefty will face are left-handed - Lenny Dykstra, Tony Gwynn, Barry Bonds and Fred McGriff.

“I don’t want to get him upset,” Gwynn said.

Then the A.L. gets its first look at Nomo, the first Japanese participant in the All-Star history. Kenny Lofton will lead off, with Frank Thomas, Albert Belle and Cal Ripken soon trying to solve Nomo’s slo-mo windup and wicked, downdarting forkball.

“I watched many of them on television, even when I was in Japan,” Nomo said through a translator. “I feel like I have an understanding of them.”

Not so, probably, for the hitters he’ll face.

“It might take one pitch, one at-bat or one year to adjust to him,” Lofton said. “Or, I may never hit him.”

Despite Nomo’s 6-1 record, 1.99 ERA, 119 strikeouts and a major league-best .158 opponents’ batting average, and the kind of attention that only the likes of Fernando Valenzuela and Mark Fidrych conjured up, N.L. manager Felipe Alou admitted the Los Angeles ace was not his first choice to start.

“I am not trying to hide the fact that I would have started Greg Maddux,” Alou said. “Look what he has done this year. Look at what he’s done for several years.”

But Maddux, who had said he would step aside for Nomo if asked, injured his groin last week. So the three-time Cy Young winner, who has not missed a regular-season start since his junior year in high school, instead joined Ken Griffey Jr., Matt Williams, Mark McGwire and Ozzie Smith as injured stars on the sidelines.

A.L. manager Buck Showalter, meanwhile, put aside a feud his New York Yankees had this season after Johnson hit Jim Leyritz with a pitch. That left the All-Star Game with its most exciting meeting of starting pitchers since 1986, when Dwight Gooden, 21, faced Roger Clemens, 23, at the Astrodome.

Showalter said Johnson, already with 152 strikeouts, would pitch either two or three innings. Alou said Nomo probably would pitch two innings, but “if he strikes out the side in the first two innings, maybe he’ll pitch the third.”

No doubt, many would love to see it. The last time baseball genuinely seemed so excited was at last year’s All-Star Game, when Gwynn beat Ripken’s relay and slid home with the winning run in the 10th inning.

That victory in Pittsburgh stopped the A.L.’s six-game winning streak and gave the N.L. a 38-26-1 edge. But as soon as that game ended, all the talk turned to when the strike would start, and it began a month later.

Since then, the expanded playoffs and World Series were wiped out, a lockout disrupted spring training and led to replacement players, and the regular season was shortened and started with replacement umpires. Along the way, there’s still been no labor agreement between players and owners, there’s been no commissioner for more than two years, and ABC (which will televise tonight’s game at 5:29 PDT) and NBC said they will drop the sport after this year.

More importantly, the fans have stayed away, with attendance down almost 25 percent. Alou believes this All-Star matchup of Nomo vs. Johnson might help bring them back.

“After all the negative things in baseball, to me this is the first big positive thing that’s happened,” he said.

“This should be used as a platform, a start toward signing an agreement and getting a commissioner, a time to tell fans that there will be a World Series this year, and a spring training and All-Star Game next year,” he said. “We should take all that energy that was used to destroy the game and use it to start developing star players.”