A three-time Rawlings Gold Glove Award winner, he was selected to four All-Star Game teams during his playing career.

Johnson managed teams to their respective League Championship Series in three consecutive years  – the Cincinnati Reds in 1995 and the Orioles in both 1996 and 1997.

He led the United States national team to its first medal finish in a World Baseball Classic, taking third place at the 2009 edition.

After one season playing baseball at Texas A&M University, Johnson signed with the Baltimore Orioles as an amateur free agent in 1962.

Johnson then hit for a .257 batting average, seven home runs and 56 RBIs to finish third in American League Rookie of the Year balloting for 1966.

[citation needed] Third baseman Brooks Robinson also was in the middle of his record 16 straight Gold Glove streak when Johnson and Belanger won their awards.

Upset after being replaced as the starting second baseman by Bobby Grich, and with the Orioles in need of a power-hitting catcher, Johnson was traded along with Pat Dobson, Johnny Oates and Roric Harrison to the Atlanta Braves for Earl Williams and Taylor Duncan on the last day of the Winter Meetings on December 1, 1972.

Johnson was the Giants' first foreign player of note in more than 15 years, and faced a lot of pressure to perform in Japan.

He struggled in his first season, battling injuries, and incurred the wrath of the Giants' manager (and former Hall of Fame player) Shigeo Nagashima.

[6] (Four other players, Mike Ivie (1978), Darryl Strawberry (1998), Ben Broussard (2004), and Brooks Conrad (2010), subsequently equaled Johnson's feat.

)[7] Shortly afterwards, Philadelphia dealt him to the Chicago Cubs, with whom he played the final 24 games of his career before retiring at the end of the season.

A trade to acquire Keith Hernandez and Johnson's decision to suggest bringing up Dwight Gooden helped turn them into a winner of 90 games for the 1984 season.

Schott named former Reds third baseman Ray Knight (who had played for Johnson on the Mets championship team) as bench coach, with the understanding that he would take over as manager in 1996.

The Orioles had gone 71–73 the previous year, but the team had promising talent to go with future Hall of Famers Cal Ripken Jr., Mike Mussina, Eddie Murray, and Roberto Alomar.

The Orioles met the Cleveland Indians in the Division Series, the defending champion of the American League who had won 99 games, the best in the majors that season.

The Orioles did even better in the following season, as they went 98–64 to finish with the best record in the American League while retaining the key core from before (albeit with the loss of Murray while acquiring future Hall of Famer Harold Baines mid-season).

All four losses in the series to the Indians were by one run, with two of them happening in extra innings (Game 3, for example, was lost on an alleged missed call of a foul tipped bunt).

The end reportedly came when Johnson fined Roberto Alomar for skipping a team banquet in April 1997 and an exhibition game against the AAA Rochester Red Wings during the 1997 All-Star Break.

Johnson ordered Alomar to pay the fine by making out a check to a charity for which his wife served as a fundraiser.

In negotiations after the season, Angelos let it be known that he considered Johnson's handling of the Alomar fine to be grossly inappropriate, enough to be a firing offense.

[13] Johnson did not express bitterness with his time in Baltimore, although Angelos released the text of his response letter to the resignation, stating that Johnson's letter "fails to recognize the real issue posed by your imposition and handling of the Alomar fine and your divisive statement to the press in July that unless the Orioles got to the World Series, you would not be permitted to return ...

[19] Johnson suffered the only full losing season of his managerial career, finishing in third place eight games under .500 with 77 wins.

A subsequent 9–0 loss to Nicaragua put the Americans into the seventh-place game with Puerto Rico, where they prevailed with an 11–3 win.

[23] Johnson first joined the Washington Nationals front office on June 7, 2006, when he was appointed as a consultant by vice president/general manager Jim Bowden.

[25] On October 1, 2012, Johnson led the Nationals to the franchise's first division title since 1981 (when they were the Montreal Expos), eventually achieving a franchise-record 98 wins—the most wins in baseball that year, headlined by rising stars in Stephen Strasburg, Gio Gonzalez, Ian Desmond, and Bryce Harper.

However, the team would be without Strasburg for the postseason, as the organization had decreed he would only pitch 160 innings for the whole year (owing to recovering from UCL surgery that limited him in 2011), which he reached in his final start on September 7 (he finished with a 15–6 record and a 3.16 ERA).

The Division Series marked the first playoff game in the District of Columbia in 79 years, and they faced the defending champion St. Louis Cardinals.

[31] Johnson is known for taking a statistical approach to baseball that started with his playing career, when he earned the nickname "Dum Dum" for his attempts to advise his pitching teammates to throw for the middle of the plate instead of the corner; he made computer printouts for manager Earl Weaver to use to optimize the lineup, but they were not used.

[32] Johnson met his future wife, Susan, in 1993 (they married the following January) while she was organizing a golf tournament for her deaf-blind son Jake and his learning center (she also specialized in charity for Johns Hopkins Hospital).

In 2018, he, alongside Erik Sherman, wrote his autobiography My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond, with the proceeds going to his wife Susan's nonprofit organization, Support Our Scholars.