Davey Johnson Death: World Series Titles Winner Had THESE Unique Records To His Name

A Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, incredible player, and future thinking manager, Davey Johnson died in Sarasota, Florida on Friday, September 5, 2025, and aged 82 because of a long term ailment.

The early life of Davey Johnson

Johnson was born January 30, 1943 in Orlando, Florida. He would go on to be a reliable second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. Johnson played 13 years, was an All Star three times, a Gold Glove award winner three times, and was part of the World Series Champion Orioles in 1966 and in 1970. In 1973, he hit a career high 43 home runs with the Atlanta Braves, he was only the third player of his era to hit 40 or more home runs in a season when he joined Henry Aaron and Darrel Evans on the same team.

Davey Johnson as National League manager

As soon as he was hired to manage in 1984, Johnson revamped the New York Mets and became the only National League manager to win 90 or more games during the first five years of his tenure. Johnson helped the organization to one of its most memorable World Series wins in 1986. The Mets would go on to win 108 regular season games with that team in 1986 and later, a playoff series against the Red Sox of Boston, which lasted a historic seven games. Johnson remains the greatest winningest manager in the history of Mets with 595 wins. With the Mets, Cincinnati Reds, Baltimore Orioles, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Washington Nationals, Johnson had 17 seasons and amassed an impressive 1,372 wins and 1,071 losses to give him 17 seasons with a 562 winning percentage making him one of the best managers in the history of the major leagues. Johnson was a two time winner of Manager of the Month the first with Baltimore in 1997, the second with Washington in 2012, when he managed the Nationals to the first playoff in Washington DC history.

Davey Johnson with the Mets

Johnson was not just successful with the Mets, or the other teams he managed, because players liked how he led them in a more enabling manner. Darryl Strawberry once called him one of the great baseball brains of all time, and a progressive thinker with an old school mentality. His former Nationals GM, Mike Rizzo, spoke of Johnson as someone who could connect with players by stating, ‘He could get the best out of everyone, on and off the field’. Johnson was a trained mathematician, earning his degree at Trinity University, Texas, and was among the first managers to utilize data in baseball, long before sabermetrics became a household term. He began to execute his personal computer code to run lineup indicators, and analytics to underpin his choices and that of the organization with notions of baseball modernity.

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