Late Bloomers: Connie Johnson

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t think of someone who reached the major leagues at the age of seventeen as a late bloomer, but Connie Johnson’s story is a little bit different, and deserves to be told.

Born as Clifford Johnson in Stone Mountain, Georgia, two days after Christmas in 1922, he and his family moved to Atlanta briefly, but then came back to Stone Mountain where he attended high school for just one year before leaving to help his father work at a local quarry. As a kid he had always been able to throw hard, a fact that was witnessed by Joe Greene, a neighbor in the winter who also happened to play for the Kansas City Monarchs.

That happy accident led to Johnson being signed in 1940 at the age of just seventeen to pitch for the Toledo/Indianapolis Crawfords of the Negro American League. He wasn’t very good based on just the statistics we have from the four games he pitched that season, just a 1-2 record and 6.23 ERA, but he was chosen to play in the East-West All-Star Game anyway, a sign that some of his statistics for that season are likely missing from his official record.