Nolan Ryan: Baseball’s Ageless Treasure

ARLINGTON, Tex. —  The manager made his acquaintance--from a distance of 60 feet, 6 inches--when Nolan Ryan wore the uniform of the New York Mets. The general manager vainly batted against him when Ryan represented the California Angels. The dugout coach was a member of the opposition when Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter, on behalf of the Astros.

Even as Ryan confronts the future with the Texas Rangers, he is surrounded by memories of the past. Ryan views the aging process with some amusement. He doesn’t have much choice.

“I look across at the other dugout now,” he said, “and probably two-thirds of the coaches and managers I’ve played against or with. Guys on the team will call someone an old man and I’ll say, ‘Hey, I pitched against him.’ The standard humor of the kids is, ‘How did you do against Lou Gehrig? Did you have trouble getting Ty Cobb out?’ ”

In baseball terms, Nolan Ryan is a relic. He also is a treasure. The last active player from the Amazin’ Mets has become the most amazin’ of them all.

Others--notably Tommy John--have pitched for more years, started more games and amassed more victories. But no other pitcher in baseball history has carried his special gift with such distinction into a third decade. Twenty-three years after his major-league debut, Ryan remains what he was, a premier power pitcher. At 42, he has conceded little, if anything.

“What’s totally amazing,” said Jim Sundberg, the veteran Texas catcher who has gone against Ryan in both leagues, “is not just that he’s pitched as long as he has but that he still throws as hard as he does.” To note that he’s lost a few miles off his fastball over the years is to quibble with greatness.

Tom Grieve last swung a bat against Ryan in 1977. Drafted out of high school by the Washington (now Texas) organization a year after Ryan was selected by the Mets, Grieve retired a decade ago. Now he is the Rangers’ general manager.

“I can remember the kind of stuff he had,” Grieve said, shaking his head. What about now? “Basically,” he said, “he has the same velocity, with better control. And he has a changeup he didn’t have.”

There isn’t much doubt in Ryan’s mind that he is a better pitcher than he’s ever been in several respects. Evidence supports him. In two of his first four starts, he yielded but a single hit. He has struck out 49 batters in his first 35 innings and has allowed just 19 hits. If he has an average Ryan season, he will surpass 5,000 strikeouts late this summer. And if he is able to do that, he may well return next year in pursuit of his 300th victory. He needs another 24.

For someone to do what Ryan has done for so long demands a simple explanation. Alas, there is none. “I think people think I do something different than anyone else has done,” he said this weekend. “It’s not true. I don’t have a secret potion.”

If he had, he wouldn’t have experienced such pain in 1986, pain that made him think his career was ending. And he wouldn’t have considered retirement last season at a time when his days with the Astros were dwindling down to a precious few.

“It (retirement) became an issue toward the end of the year,” he recalled with a sly smile. “I discussed it with the family for a two-week period. They agreed they didn’t want me around the house.”

So Ryan, suddenly adrift after nine years in his hometown, began to look elsewhere. He didn’t have to look far. “Our geography was a selling point,” Grieve said. “He’s a Texan through and through.”

Previously, he had worn the label on his sleeve as well as on his feet, which were most comfortable in boots. For $2 million, he gladly accepted the opportunity to wear Texas on his shirt.

Ryan had the farm just outside Alvin, where he was raised. He had the ranch near San Antonio, Texas, where he and his family spent the holidays and he indulged himself in his boyhood dream of being a cowboy. But he also had the feeling there were more strikeouts and more victories in that remarkable right arm. After all, he had managed to lead the National League in strikeouts in each of the last two seasons. And he was healthy.

The fourth phase of his career can be traced directly to Dec. 15, 1986. He recalled the date without hesitation. “That was a big day,” Ryan said. “I woke up and my arm wasn’t hurting.”

All that season, from spring training through a heartbreaking playoff defeat to the Mets (charged to relief pitcher Charlie Kerfeld after Ryan pitched two-hit ball through nine innings), his elbow had ached. “I didn’t touch a baseball but on the days I pitched,” Ryan said. “I’d take a couple of aspirins at 4 o’clock and a couple at 7 o’clock and go out and pitch. I couldn’t pick anything up. I really thought my career was over.”

Dr. Frank Jobe, the celebrated orthopedic surgeon, was of the opinion that only an operation of the kind he performed on John would cure the problem. Ryan declined the offer. “I felt I was too old to have the surgery,” he said. “I didn’t want to go through a year of rehabilitation. My real fear was that I’d have to have surgery just to be able to live a normal life.”

But the elbow healed with rest and Ryan returned to have the most baffling season of any pitcher in recent history. He led the National League not only in strikeouts with 270 but in earned run average with 2.76. Yet, he lost 16 of 24 decisions. He was 12-11 for the fifth-place Astros a year ago.

It was an incision of a different sort that forced the break with Houston. John McMullen, the Astros’ owner who was committed to streamlining the organization, wanted Ryan to sign for considerably less than the $1.1 million he received on his last contract. A proud man, Ryan rejected the idea. Even after the team realized its mistake and appeared willing to join the Rangers in a bidding war, the pitcher was not mollified.

And no one on the Astros appreciated the Houston area more than Ryan. He grew up just south of the city and, had it not been for baseball, would not have left. He credited the opportunity to play there with prolonging his career because of the order it imposed on his family life at a time when he was hesitant to uproot his three children.

“You get real comfortable living at home,” Ryan said. “It’s good for the family. You get into a routine you can’t get anywhere else. There were a lot of things you accepted to stay there.”

One of those things was a weak-hitting team that was slipping in the hotly competitive National League West. But, he wasn’t about to accept what he felt was a snub from management. “It was pretty obvious I would have to move on if I wanted to keep playing,” he said.

No one connected with the Rangers had to be convinced he could help them. Bobby Valentine, the manager, had been an occasional opponent when he was with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the early 1970s. But he also knew Ryan as a teammate with the Angels. “He was a pretty good pitcher then,” Valentine recalled. “He was throwing no-hitters.” Two in 1973, one in 1974 and one in 1975, to be specific.

So, the manager certainly wasn’t shocked when Ryan carried a no-hit game into the eighth inning in Milwaukee in the second week of the season or into the ninth inning in Toronto last weekend. Neither was Davey Lopes, a Rangers coach and a member of the 1981 world championship Dodgers team that was victimized by Ryan’s fifth no-hitter late in the season.

“It was a real challenge facing Nolan that day,” Lopes recalled. “You wanted to bat, to be the guy who broke it up. Dusty (Baker) was the most outspoken. He was yelling, ‘I’m going to get this guy. I’m going to bust it up.”’ Baker, the last Dodgers batter, grounded to third baseman Art Howe. “He was better than us that day,” Lopes said. “He was better than all of us.”

A year ago, on April 27, he pitched 8 2-3 hitless innings against the Philadelphia Phillies before Mike Schmidt singled. Three hundred sixty-one days later, he pitched 8 2-3 hitless innings against the Blue Jays before Nelson Liriano tripled into the right-field corner. Had he completed the task in either game, he would have been the oldest pitcher to throw a no-hitter. Ryan conceded he was terribly frustrated with the outcome in Toronto.

“When you’re younger, you always think you’ll be in that position again,” he said. “When you get older, you realize that’s not necessarily the case.” For that reason, his angry reaction on the mound was atypical.

After five no-hitters and 10 one-hitters, more low-hit games than any previous pitcher in history, it might appear that such moments comes easily to Ryan. Only he appreciates fully the exertion that has enabled him to remain so competitive against another generation of hitters. “I’m not enjoying growing old,” he said. “It’s a hell of a lot of work and effort.

“For me to go out on the field and participate, I just can’t run around shagging flies. I’d probably pull something. I have to loosen up first. And I have to work so much harder between starts.” His terms of endurance include up to 2 1/2 hours in the weight room on the first and third days after each start, and extensive running. A power pitcher’s main source of strength is his legs.

The monetary rewards now are beyond anything he ever dreamed about when he was a raw youngster trying to cope with the demands of a great arm. But growth is measured in more than just salary. All he wanted out of baseball was enough time in the majors to collect a pension. First, he inspired fear, then respect, now admiration.

In a game against Deer Park, as a high school senior with serious control problems, Ryan split the batting helmet of the first hitter, then broke the arm of the second. “The third guy,” he recalled, “begged not to hit. Of course, it was a bad field, with bad lights.”

Eight years later, in Tiger Stadium, Ryan was bidding for his second no-hitter in two months. The last scheduled batter was Norm Cash, a former American League batting champion, a fellow Texan and a free spirit. Cash, who already had contributed two strikeouts to Ryan’s total of 17, walked to the plate with a table leg he had removed from a snack area in the clubhouse.

“I’ve got no chance with a bat,” he told umpire Ron Luciano. “Let me use this.”

Luciano sent Cash to the bat rack. He returned with a standard model and hit a pop-up.

Now, as something of an elder statesman and future Hall of Famer, he is treated with deference. A batboy brought a brand-new baseball, still wrapped in paper, to Ryan before Saturday night’s game. It was a request for an autograph, from Boston catcher Rick Cerone. Ryan signed.

This modest man with an immodest talent credits his wife, Ruth, and a few other true believers for his career. If it were just up to him, he said, he might have quit back in New York or even during the early days in California when he was struggling to harness the overwhelming potential of that arm. “I’d like to have had Tom Seaver- or Roger Clemens-type of control when I got to the major leagues,” he said. “You can’t pitch when you don’t have control.”

There were a few other items on his wish list that never came to pass. “I would have liked more wins and more World Series appearances,” he said. “One goal was to pitch in the Series in a Houston uniform. We didn’t get it done although we came close a couple of times. And, sure, there were times with the Angels when I thought I’d like to pitch just one year for the Big Red Machine, find out what it was like to get 6-8 runs early.”

Really, he said, “I don’t have regrets.” Oh, well, maybe one. He’s not going to be able to attend any of the 20th anniversary festivities for the Miracle Mets.

“I haven’t been invited to any of that stuff,” he said with wry understatement seldom associated with Texans. “But I don’t take it personally. I’m sure they know I’m going to be busy (this season).”

They know. Anyone who cares about baseball knows that Nolan Ryan isn’t done playing just yet.