April 27, 1983—With his strikeout of Montreal Expo pinch-hitter Brad Mills, Houston Astros pitcher Nolan Ryan not only broke one of the most venerable baseball records—Walter Johnson’s record of 3,508 career K’s—but gave Mets fans one more reason to curse their front office for trading the young Texan a dozen years before to the California Angels for Jim Fregosi.
Typical of the reaction to this famously lopsided trade comes from the fine new book Mets by the Numbers, by my friend and former co-worker Jon Springer and co-author Matt Silverman: “It cost them (the Mets) a pitcher who could have complemented Seaver-Koosman-Matlack in the ‘70s, and Gooden-Darling-Fernandez in the ‘80s, and maybe even Gooden-Cone-Fernandez in the early ‘90s…that Ryan kid sure pitched for a while.”
Ah…woulda, shoulda, coulda!
A Good Idea at the Time?
With all due respect to these estimable authors, I’m not sure that Ryan would have worked out quite as well for the Mets if they’d held onto him. Ryan didn’t have a problem with the ballpark—Shea is famous as a pitcher’s park. And he didn’t have a problem with his mentors—Rube Walker developed one of the premiere starting rotations of the game, and Jerry Grote was one of the most astute backstops working in the game. With all his problems in mastering control, Ryan was the baseball counterpart to Lonnie Shelton, a young center hailed as the second coming of Willis Reed for the New York Knicks but utterly unable in his first two seasons to overcome his problem with personal fouls.
No, what I think happened was simply this: New York—and especially its media—can be tough to the point of cruelty on players, especially still-developing pitchers. (Sandy Koufax, another famous young fireballer who started out with a New York club, did not develop his control until he headed west with the rest of the Dodgers—and even then, it took a couple of years.) Even Tom Seaver, a pitcher almost as famous for his maturity as for his mastery of pitches, requested a trade immediately after Daily News sportswriter Dick Young published a speculation-packed, fact-free column about The Franchise’s being goaded by his wife to press for a higher salary because he wasn’t making as much money as Ryan.)
A country boy at heart, Ryan requested the trade because he felt out of sorts in the Big Apple. The Mets learned that Fregosi was available. It seemed like a good idea at the time. They had had problems at third base for a long time. A star with the Angels, Fregosi seemed like a good veteran anchor at the hot corner, the way Ray Knight would prove in the Mets’ 1986 championship season. Little did they know that he was on the downside of his career.
Ryan, of course, went on to play into the early 1990s with the Angels, Astros and Texas Rangers, amassing 48 career records by the time he was through.
A Tough Competitor Flying Under the Radar
Ryan’s landmark achievement on this date illustrated two major factors about his career, in my opinion: 1) the way in which achievements that would have drawn massive attention elsewhere attracted relatively little notice for him, and 2) the determination and competitiveness that enabled him to keep going and notch one milestone after another long after other, lesser players had decided to call it a day.
Let’s start with the lack of attention. Only 19,309 people turned out at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium for the chance to see Ryan make history. Not only did baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn not show up, but nobody else from his office did. (But then again, Bowie was a clueless jerk who couldn’t be bothered to show up for the game in which Hank Aaron surpassed Babe Ruth’s career home-run mark. He was, as one of his successors, Fay Vincent, rightly observed, utterly undeserving of election to Cooperstown this past year.) And this really got me—even the Astros’ front office couldn’t make it.
But Ryan had the mark within his grasp, and he’d pursue it come what may. And “come what may” was precisely what was happening to him now.
Fifteen strikeouts shy of the “Big Train’s” mark as the season opened, Ryan had only recently been treated for an inflamed prostate gland. His first start after coming back, against the Expos, had gone well, but he’d struggled in his second. Now, on this Wednesday afternoon, a blister on his right pitching hand would have to be drained, because it was slowing his fastball and making his curve miss.
But as he pulled into the middle innings, Ryan began to reach back for something extra. His fourth strikeout of the game, against pinch-hitter Tim Blackwell, tied him with Johnson. Then Mills came to the plate.
Ryan jumped out ahead of the batter with two quick strikes. A third pitch, a ball, brought the entire Astros bench to its feet—something noticed by Mills, who quickly realized that that he was might be about to become a footnote to history, like Tracy Stallard and Al Downing.
The realization was fatal. Ryan uncorked his second curveball in a row, a bit high, Mills thought. But unlike early in his career, when a similar close pitch might have been judged a ball by an umpire, this one was a called strike three. The Astros’ righthander was on his way to a 4-2 victory, and in the record books.
Would-Be Rivals, Then and Now
How long or even how firmly he’d be in the record books was anyone’s guess at that point. Steve Carlton would shortly trade places with Ryan in overtaking Johnson, and—with his relentless workout regimen—the 38-year-old southpaw seemed like a good bet to stick around for awhile. Only the year before he’d won 23 games, and in 1983 he would notch another 275 strikeouts.
But Carlton’s time was drawing to a close. After the 1983 season, he would never surpass 200 strikeouts again, and his attempt to rekindle his magic with four different teams finally ended, after a stubborn, embarrassing run, in 1988.
And the Ryan Express, remarkably, just kept going, throwing his seventh and last no-hitter at age 44 in 1991. By the time he was done after the 1993 season, Johnson and Carlton were both in his rear-view mirror.
I doubt that Ryan’s career strikeout record of 5,714 will be surpassed anytime soon. Roger Clemens, now in second, has called it a day (and this time undoubtedly for good—he looked out of gas in his last half-season with the Yankees, and, of course, steroid accusations are dogging him now). Randy Johnson, in third place, has experienced health problems over the last few years that have limited his effectiveness. Just as important, with five-man rotations and middle relievers and closers being used far more extensively, there simply isn’t the opportunity for a pitcher to accumulate the innings necessary to gain strikeouts.
Typical of the reaction to this famously lopsided trade comes from the fine new book Mets by the Numbers, by my friend and former co-worker Jon Springer and co-author Matt Silverman: “It cost them (the Mets) a pitcher who could have complemented Seaver-Koosman-Matlack in the ‘70s, and Gooden-Darling-Fernandez in the ‘80s, and maybe even Gooden-Cone-Fernandez in the early ‘90s…that Ryan kid sure pitched for a while.”
Ah…woulda, shoulda, coulda!
A Good Idea at the Time?
With all due respect to these estimable authors, I’m not sure that Ryan would have worked out quite as well for the Mets if they’d held onto him. Ryan didn’t have a problem with the ballpark—Shea is famous as a pitcher’s park. And he didn’t have a problem with his mentors—Rube Walker developed one of the premiere starting rotations of the game, and Jerry Grote was one of the most astute backstops working in the game. With all his problems in mastering control, Ryan was the baseball counterpart to Lonnie Shelton, a young center hailed as the second coming of Willis Reed for the New York Knicks but utterly unable in his first two seasons to overcome his problem with personal fouls.
No, what I think happened was simply this: New York—and especially its media—can be tough to the point of cruelty on players, especially still-developing pitchers. (Sandy Koufax, another famous young fireballer who started out with a New York club, did not develop his control until he headed west with the rest of the Dodgers—and even then, it took a couple of years.) Even Tom Seaver, a pitcher almost as famous for his maturity as for his mastery of pitches, requested a trade immediately after Daily News sportswriter Dick Young published a speculation-packed, fact-free column about The Franchise’s being goaded by his wife to press for a higher salary because he wasn’t making as much money as Ryan.)
A country boy at heart, Ryan requested the trade because he felt out of sorts in the Big Apple. The Mets learned that Fregosi was available. It seemed like a good idea at the time. They had had problems at third base for a long time. A star with the Angels, Fregosi seemed like a good veteran anchor at the hot corner, the way Ray Knight would prove in the Mets’ 1986 championship season. Little did they know that he was on the downside of his career.
Ryan, of course, went on to play into the early 1990s with the Angels, Astros and Texas Rangers, amassing 48 career records by the time he was through.
A Tough Competitor Flying Under the Radar
Ryan’s landmark achievement on this date illustrated two major factors about his career, in my opinion: 1) the way in which achievements that would have drawn massive attention elsewhere attracted relatively little notice for him, and 2) the determination and competitiveness that enabled him to keep going and notch one milestone after another long after other, lesser players had decided to call it a day.
Let’s start with the lack of attention. Only 19,309 people turned out at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium for the chance to see Ryan make history. Not only did baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn not show up, but nobody else from his office did. (But then again, Bowie was a clueless jerk who couldn’t be bothered to show up for the game in which Hank Aaron surpassed Babe Ruth’s career home-run mark. He was, as one of his successors, Fay Vincent, rightly observed, utterly undeserving of election to Cooperstown this past year.) And this really got me—even the Astros’ front office couldn’t make it.
But Ryan had the mark within his grasp, and he’d pursue it come what may. And “come what may” was precisely what was happening to him now.
Fifteen strikeouts shy of the “Big Train’s” mark as the season opened, Ryan had only recently been treated for an inflamed prostate gland. His first start after coming back, against the Expos, had gone well, but he’d struggled in his second. Now, on this Wednesday afternoon, a blister on his right pitching hand would have to be drained, because it was slowing his fastball and making his curve miss.
But as he pulled into the middle innings, Ryan began to reach back for something extra. His fourth strikeout of the game, against pinch-hitter Tim Blackwell, tied him with Johnson. Then Mills came to the plate.
Ryan jumped out ahead of the batter with two quick strikes. A third pitch, a ball, brought the entire Astros bench to its feet—something noticed by Mills, who quickly realized that that he was might be about to become a footnote to history, like Tracy Stallard and Al Downing.
The realization was fatal. Ryan uncorked his second curveball in a row, a bit high, Mills thought. But unlike early in his career, when a similar close pitch might have been judged a ball by an umpire, this one was a called strike three. The Astros’ righthander was on his way to a 4-2 victory, and in the record books.
Would-Be Rivals, Then and Now
How long or even how firmly he’d be in the record books was anyone’s guess at that point. Steve Carlton would shortly trade places with Ryan in overtaking Johnson, and—with his relentless workout regimen—the 38-year-old southpaw seemed like a good bet to stick around for awhile. Only the year before he’d won 23 games, and in 1983 he would notch another 275 strikeouts.
But Carlton’s time was drawing to a close. After the 1983 season, he would never surpass 200 strikeouts again, and his attempt to rekindle his magic with four different teams finally ended, after a stubborn, embarrassing run, in 1988.
And the Ryan Express, remarkably, just kept going, throwing his seventh and last no-hitter at age 44 in 1991. By the time he was done after the 1993 season, Johnson and Carlton were both in his rear-view mirror.
I doubt that Ryan’s career strikeout record of 5,714 will be surpassed anytime soon. Roger Clemens, now in second, has called it a day (and this time undoubtedly for good—he looked out of gas in his last half-season with the Yankees, and, of course, steroid accusations are dogging him now). Randy Johnson, in third place, has experienced health problems over the last few years that have limited his effectiveness. Just as important, with five-man rotations and middle relievers and closers being used far more extensively, there simply isn’t the opportunity for a pitcher to accumulate the innings necessary to gain strikeouts.
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