Nolan Ryan was a great pitcher, unquestionably, but his stuff was greater. His aura was greater. His electricity was greater. It almost feels wrong to put him on a Top 100 list because he belongs on his own list, in his own club of which he is the only member.
The question I’ve always had, the one that he probably could not answer is this: Did it have to be this way? Couldn’t Ryan have taken five mph off his fastball and thrown more strikes? Couldn’t he have taken just a little bit of the bite off his curveball and thrown fewer wild pitches? Couldn’t he have shortened up his delivery just a little bit to prevent base stealers from running at will against him? Couldn’t he have worked on his defense just a little bit more?
Maybe the answer is: Yes, he could have done those things. But then he would not have been the most unhittable pitcher who ever lived. He would have been too much like others. And he would not have been Nolan Ryan.
Nolan Ryan was responsible for the most dominant three inning stretch of pitching THC has ever witnessed in person and with the help of Baseball-Reference.com he was able to locate the game and remind himself of the specifics.
It was Friday evening, May 6, 1977 in Fenway Park and the Red Sox, with Luis Tiant starting, were facing the California Angels with Mr Ryan pitching. We were seated maybe 30-40 rows from the field, between the visitor's clubhouse and third base. From the start it was clear that something unusual was happening even by Nolan Ryan's usual (or perhaps, unusual) standards. THC pictures Ryan only throwing fastballs like bolts of lightning (in those days they didn't show the speed of each pitch - too bad) in those first three innings, which can't be right, but that's what is remembered and it looked like they were jumping a foot as they got to home plate. We aren't talking about rising - it actually looked to us like the ball abruptly jumped and then proceeded on a new, and higher, plane. Along with the vertical movement there must have been a lot of horizontal movement harder for us to detect because of where we sat because in those three innings Ryan walked two and hit Jim Rice (my recollection is that the pitch glanced off his batting helmet).
All of that movement clearly shook up the Sox batters because no one dug in and took a full swing on any Ryan pitch. There were half swings, checked swings and swings as batters were bailing out. Eight of the nine outs were by strikeout (seven swinging). The ninth was a weak infield bouncer by Carlton Fisk on a checked swing.
Facing shook up batters was routine for Ryan in the mid-70s. You can find plenty of quotes from hitters of that era about how scared they were about facing that potentially lethal combination of speed and erratic control. This one from Reggie Jackson is typical:
Ryan's the only guy who put fear in me. Not because he could get me out, but because he could kill me.
The Red Sox knew what Reggie was talking about and some of them were probably remembering a night almost precisely three years earlier. On April 30, 1974 in another Fenway start, the second batter Ryan faced was Doug Griffin the second baseman for the Sox. Rob Goldman in his book, Once They Were Angels describes what happened next:
(Doug Griffin from FenwayPark100.org) Nolan Ryan knew the minute he dropped his arm where the ball was going. He tried to warn the batter, but once Doug Griffin froze it became a question of not whether it would hit him, but instead where and how hard. Then came the sickening thud, followed, after the game, by a gut-wrenching phone call.
"My mommy can't talk right now", said the tiny voice at the other end of the line, "She's at the hospital with my daddy".
. . . It hadn't been on purpose he told himself for the umpteenth time. The situation called for a sacrifice bunt, but when Griffin squared away, he threw up to force him to pop it up. In doing so, he inadvertently dropped his arm and the ball sailed in with disastrous results. Ryan walked towards home plate and what he saw made him physically ill. Griffin's eyes were rolled back in his head and he wasn't moving. Ryan thought he had killed him.
Griffin had been hit just behind his left ear. Don Zimmer, a Red Sox coach who witnessed it and whose own career had been shortened by a terrible beaning in the 1950s, which left him unconscious for nearly two weeks, thought Griffin would have died if he had not been wearing a batting helmet, though the lack of an ear flap contributed to his injury. Others described the impact as sounding like a grapefruit hitting a wall. Griffin ended up with a severe concussion and temporary hearing loss. In a 2009 interview he recalled:
It was like a train going through my head, a loud whistle. It went on about two weeks.
After missing two months he resumed play, facing Ryan once again shortly after returning and getting two hits off him.
What THC didn't realize until looking at the box score that after hitting Griffin, Ryan struck out Cecil Cooper and then hit Carl Yastrzemski! And Ryan struck out 15 and gave up six runs while pitching a complete game in a 16-6 Angels blow out, something that would never happen today.
At the end of those three innings on that night in 1977 we thought we might be witnessing a no-hitter with 20+ strikeouts. Then, as often happened with Ryan, the magic suddenly evaporated. He started the 4th by walking Yaz and then George "Boomer" Scott, followed by Pudge Fisk and capped by a run-scoring single by Dwight Evans. It looked to us like Ryan had lost the fluidity of his motion and he seemed labored, pausing more between each pitch.
He lasted until there were two outs in the ninth, adding seven more strikeouts to the first eight but giving up seven hits, five walks and four runs over those last 5 2/3 innings. Nolan was finally removed in the ninth when, after loading the bases, he walked Yaz to force in a run making the score 8-4 in favor of the Angels. Reliever Paul Hartzell came in to strike out Boomer Scott to end the game. Not a no-hitter but a game THC has never forgotten.
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