"When the Montreal Expos traded a gangly left-hander named Randy Johnson to the Seattle Mariners in May 1989, they were unloading a 6-foot-10 mountain of hyperbolic contradiction.

Johnson's fastball touched 100 mph, but he rarely knew where it was going. He stepped toward the plate with swirling aggression, his scraggly mullet and moustache framing a permanent scowl. In his first no-hitter, for the Mariners in 1990, Johnson struck out eight and walked six -- the latter being the statistic his father, Bud, harped on in a phone call that night.

Johnson pitched Thursday looking as different as the franchise that traded him away all those years ago. The team had been threatened with contraction, played 22 games one season in Puerto Rico and moved to the District; Johnson's stirring career included a perfect game, multiple surgeries, five Cy Young Awards, more than 4,800 strikeouts, one of the most memorable performances in World Series history and a dead dove.

Pitching for the San Francisco Giants and going for his 300th win against the Washington Nationals, Johnson's fastball was 92 mph (at best). His slider, once so devastating that it swept behind the back foot of right-handed hitters, had lost some bite.

But at 45 years and 266 days, the left-hander finally finished his adventurous path to one of baseball's most exclusive clubs. Johnson won his 300th game in the Giants' 5-1 win, adding one of the final significant accomplishments to his Hall of Fame career.

"To me, wins have always outweighed strikeouts because strikeouts are something that just kind of happen," said an introspective Johnson, who conducted a 23-minute news conference with his wife, Lisa, and four children sitting in the front row. "Pitching in a game like today, I get more gratification out of that because of the way I'm doing it now and the way I did it 10 years ago. I'm actually going out there and pitching [now]."

He became the 24th pitcher to win 300 games, the second oldest behind Joe Niekro and possibly the last to do it. In the run-up to Johnson's historic day, there had been plenty of talk about the dearth of young pitchers in line to reach 300 because they're handled with such caution. "