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Despite never winning a Cy Young Award, he started more games than anyone except Cy Young. Though he played mostly for mediocre teams, his 3.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks at the Department of State's Foreign Affairs Day Memorial Plaque Ceremony.
Don Sutton, who pitched for four pennant winners and just missed a fifth. Yet Ryan’s dominance—his 5,7. Sutton and 1,5. 00 better than Steve Carlton, whom he once trailed in the all- time K race—puts The Ryan Express head and shoulders above almost any other pitcher since 1. His longevity—winning a strikeout crown and throwing a no- hitter while being the oldest player in the game at the age of 4. And in one day in 1.
Ryan’s change of coasts became the best trade the California Angels ever made and the worst deal in New York Mets history. He may have walked more batters and thrown more wild pitches than anyone else in the game’s history, but that just proved he was human. Born on January 3. Refugio, Texas, Lynn Nolan Ryan was the son of Robert Ryan and Martha Lee Hancock Ryan (a descendant of John Hancock, first signer of the Declaration of Independence). The youngest of six children, he had a brother and four sisters. The Ryans moved from Refugio to Alvin, Texas, when Nolan was six weeks old because his father was transferred to the Alvin area. His father was plant supervisor at Hastings plant for Stanton Oil Company, which became Pan American Petroleum.
Nolan began playing baseball at seven with his father in their front yard. From there, the boy decided on his own that he loved playing the game and he started playing on a nearby vacant lot, where neighborhood kids built a diamond. Little League baseball had only recently come to Alvin, and it soon provided the official start to Nolan Ryan’s career at Schroeder Field, where he became an all- star for the first time. Between the ages of 8 and 1. Nolan spent every morning between 1 and 4 a. Nolan rolled the newspapers into tight cylinders and delivered them to residents long before the sun rose.
The paper route instilled a sense of personal responsibility and maturity that would lead to his becoming a team leader in high school and a professional ballplayer immediately thereafter. It also didn’t hurt his arm. Nolan Ryan’s ability to throw hard and throw often was a gift, but one honed by a strong work ethic both in the quiet predawn hours in Alvin and before the dropped jaws of midday onlookers on the playing fields in town. By the time he reached junior high, Ryan had the arm strength to stand on the goal line of a football field and throw a softball over 1. In the ninth grade, he became even more focused on baseball after abandoning his short- lived football career in the aftermath of a head- on collision with future NFL running back Norm Bulaich; the impact produced a dazed and embarrassed Alvin cornerback and a La Marque Junior High touchdown. Ryan pitched for the Alvin High School varsity as a sophomore in 1.
He started attracting major league scouts in his junior year by averaging two strikeouts per inning, including 2. La. Porte. Because of Alvin’s close proximity to Houston, where the Colt .
National League, scouts frequented Ryan’s Alvin starts and in the pre- radar gun days tried to gauge how fast the kid threw. New York Mets scout Red Murff remembered the first game he saw Ryan pitch: “The night before, I had seen the two fastest pitchers in the National League at that time, Jim Maloney and Turk Farrell. Nolan Ryan was already faster than both of them by far.”The arrival of the major leagues in Houston helped Ryan in another way: it gave him the opportunity to observe first- hand the pitching performances of his baseball hero, Sandy Koufax, whose strikeout and no- hit records the Alvin teenager would later break. While watching Koufax, Ryan became so mesmerized that he would not speak to Ruth, his girlfriend, who later became his wife.
During his senior year, Ryan dominated Gulf Coast baseball, posting a 1. Alvin Yellow Jackets into the Texas high school state finals in Austin. During that 3. 2- game season in the spring of 1. Ryan pitched in 2.
Alvin head coach Jim Watson and the other players on the ’6. Ryan’s senior year performance with the same term: “wheel horse.” That meant the horse closest to the wagon who pulls the heaviest share of the load—and Ryan’s statistics proved it. On March 2. 5, 1. Ryan pitched a seven- inning, complete- game shutout. The next day, in a doubleheader, he appeared as a reliever in the opener and threw three innings, giving up one run and striking out five. In the nightcap, he started the game, pitched five innings, gave up one hit, and struck out 1.
On April 1 and 3, in a space of 4. Ryan pitched back- to- back complete- game victories. Then he kicked it up a notch.
To reach the state playoffs, Ryan pitched a no- hitter against Brenham on June 1. His inside fastballs caused opposing hitters’ bats to break with such frequency that fans complained, genuinely believing his pitches had razor blades attached to them. Five days later, in the state semifinals, Ryan threw a two- hit shutout against Snyder, striking out nine. The stories behind Nolan Ryan’s senior year exceeded his statistics. In the first inning of a March 2.
Deer Park, after he cracked the batting helmet of the leadoff hitter, then hit and broke the next batter’s arm, the third hitter decided he had seen enough, and refused to enter the batter’s box until his coach finally shamed him into an at- bat that produced the season’s quickest three- pitch strikeout. As the 1. 96. 5 season progressed, Alvin catcher Jerry Spinks observed a tear that soon developed into a sizeable hole in his mitt caused by the force of receiving Ryan’s fastball. The sound of ball, glove, and Ryan force led scout Red Murff to compare it to a “muffled rifle shot.” The bullet- holed mitt produced a side effect—Spinks’s underwhelming batting average during his senior year. New York Mets scouting director Bing Devine finally responded to Red Murff’s pleas by making an unexpected appearance to see Ryan pitch against Channelview on May 2.
Murff’s top prospect reluctantly took the mound that afternoon, less than a day after Coach Watson had death- marched the Yellow Jacket team through endless windsprints over a perceived lack of concentration in practice. With his strength depleted, Ryan simply could not perform with distinction in front of his most important audience, causing his stock to plunge on the eve of the baseball draft. In the spring of 1.
Murff, the Mets selected 1. Nolan Ryan in the 1. Ryan left Alvin that summer, taking the first airplane trip of his life, on the way to Marion, Virginia, where he began his professional career in the Appalachian League. Ryan fanned 3. 13 at three stops in 1. Shea Stadium on September 1. He made his first major league start a week later in front of his hometown folks at the Astrodome on September 1. He struck out the side in the first, but he also allowed four runs and four hits, plus two walks, in the only inning of his first decision in the big leagues, a 9- 2 loss.
He was a little green for the majors, but as per Murff’s prediction, Ryan’s fastball overpowered minor league hitters as if they were Texas high schoolers. In 2. 91 innings, he struck out 4.
Aside from his staggering power numbers, Ryan demonstrated unusual maturity during his brief time in the minors. In 1. 96. 7, he suffered an arm injury.
Though the team doctor recommended surgery, Ryan refused, preferring to rehabilitate the arm on his own. The 2. 0- year- old pitcher already knew enough to realize that no one should cut prematurely on what Murff had already described in his Mets scouting report as “the BEST arm I ever saw ANYWHERE in my life!”By 1. Mets could no longer hold Nolan Ryan down on the farm. In spring training, his fastball earned him a spot in new manager Gil Hodges’s starting rotation. In Ryan’s first start of the year, on April 1.
Houston—the young right- hander got his first major league win by holding the Astros hitless for the first five innings. He left the game because of a blister on his pitching hand after 6 2/3 shutout innings. In the first six weeks of the 1. Ryan pitched a shutout for seven innings against the Philadelphia Phillies, threw his first complete game to beat the world champion St. Louis Cardinals, and hurled a four- hitter while striking out 1. Cincinnati Reds. The national news media took immediate notice of the rookie sensation, highlighted by Life magazine’s feature on him in its May 3.
The National League’s best hitters already rated Ryan ahead of Sandy Koufax in the speed of his fastball, and 1. MVP Orlando Cepeda observed, “Nolan Ryan is the best young pitcher I’ve ever seen in the major leagues.”Injuries, finger blisters, and a continuing military obligation prevented Ryan from maintaining his dominant pace for the remainder of 1. Because of his military obligation, the 1. And he still had 9. The ’6. 9 season, of course, ended on a happy note for both Ryan and his club. Ryan got the win to clinch the first National League Championship Series with seven innings of relief in Game Three against the Atlanta Braves at Shea Stadium.
Fellow Texan Jerry Grote, whom Ryan would later name as a key influence in his Hall of Fame speech, rushed into Ryan’s arms as the Mets became the first expansion team to ever win a pennant. Ryan followed that with what would prove to be the only World Series appearance of his career, helping the Amazin’ Mets win a championship over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles by saving Game Three with 2 1/3 innings of shutout relief pitching.
The first batter he faced, Paul Blair, blasted a drive to right- center with the bases loaded that turned into Tommie Agee’s second remarkable catch of the game. Ryan made some strides in 1. ERA. The next year, despite reaching 1. There was plenty of frustration to go around.
By the end of the 1. Ryan had fulfilled his early career goal of pitching long enough in the majors to earn a pension, but he had not fulfilled the many predictions of greatness due largely to inconsistent control.