by Tim Wendel
“He was shy but he had this physical presence, and there was no doubting what a great arm he had. But Nolan hadn’t had much success with the Mets and you could tell that was bothering him. Thinking back on it, I suppose I was a bit spoiled after catching stars like Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Bill Singer earlier in my career. Right away, though, I saw that Nolan had as good an arm as any of them. The problem was his mechanics weren’t there. Not yet anyway.”
One of the first adjustments, and perhaps the pivotal one, that the Angels made with Ryan’s delivery had to do with his lead leg and foot. This was the left one he raised in the air as he went into his motion. Torborg noticed that as Ryan tried to throw harder, the left foot came up and then too far back in the windup phase. Instead of staying square to home plate, the left leg moved past the pitching rubber toward center field. That caused Ryan to lose balance and, as a result, control.
“Ideally, you like to see a pitcher bring that lead leg back no farther than the pitching rubber,” Torborg says. “Of course, every pitcher is different. But when Nolan brought that leg back past the rubber, it caused the top half of his body to open up. His control went downhill fast as he flew open in the rest of his delivery. So that’s the first thing we started to work on.
“After that we began to experiment. How best to stay balanced throughout the delivery, how high the leg kick should be. You’ll notice that later in his career Nolan had a higher leg kick. That’s how he was able to maintain that great velocity later in his career. But all of those adjustments started back in the spring of ’72.”
When the two-week strike ended, pitching coach Tom Morgan was back in the mix, and the Angels officially began spring training at Palm Springs. As the exhibition schedule got under way, though, Ryan continued to struggle in game situations. Off the field, Ryan was about broke, thanks to the work stoppage. He had to borrow from a bank back home in Alvin, using his 1971 tax returns as collateral. For a time, he and Ruth lived out of a camper-trailer at the local KOA campground. Through it all, Ryan couldn’t help thinking that perhaps he “wasn’t cut out for the baseball line of work.”
In the Angels’ camp, the coaching sessions picked up steam. Now when Ryan went into his motion, Morgan began to stand a few feet in front of him and slightly off to the pitcher’s left side.
“I’d never seen a coach do anything like that before,” Torborg says, “but it was a brilliant move. If Nolan swung too far to the left in his follow-through, he’d literally run into Tom. With Tom standing there, Nolan had to stay square to the plate and stride straight toward the plate with that left leg. This is all small stuff and it can be exhausting to work on day after day. But Nolan was up for it. He was hungry to do whatever it took to make him a better pitcher.”
Ryan adds, “That’s the moment when things began to really make sense to me. Tom slowed down my delivery and then he’d stand there, just off to my left side as I threw. It was a small thing maybe, but as a result it kept my elbow up. That maintained my velocity and also helped my control.
“What it allowed me to do was to get the feeling for finishing [the delivery] in the right way. Once that happened, it soon started to make sense. All that frustration I had began to disappear. For the first time I started to believe I could do this.”
As the regular season began, Ryan won his first outing, a 2–0 victory over Minnesota. By mid-May, however, his record had sunk to 2–4, and Ryan appeared to be headed back to the bullpen. That’s when Morgan told manager Del Rice that he believed Ryan was about to turn the corner and that it would be best to keep him in the rotation. While the coach was probably blowing smoke, the suggestion bought Ryan a bit more time. The pitching clinics went on, with Torborg, Morgan, Art Kusnyer (the Angels’ other catcher), and coach John Roseboro (a former big-league catcher) now involved.
“It was exhausting work, mechanical work, boring at times, but those days turned around my career,” Ryan later wrote in Throwing Heat. “To accomplish anything in life you need faith and you sometimes need help. I was getting the help from those guys on the Angels, and I will always be in debt to them for caring for a young, wild-armed pitcher. I got faith from the help they gave me, and then it all started to pay off.”
Ryan shut out the White Sox and a few games later three-hit the Tigers over seven innings in a close loss. He followed that up with a two-hitter against the Athletics, and by mid-season he had won 10 games. A regular man in California’s rotation, he was pitching every fourth day and seemed to feed off the routine. On July 9, Ryan enjoyed the best game of his career, striking out 16 against Boston. Eight of the strikeouts came in a row, which set an American League record.
Thanks to another movie, Von Ryan’s Express, Nolan Ryan gained a nickname—“the Express.” Old-timers began to compare his fastball with those of the legends. Oakland manager Dick Williams, who had faced Sandy Koufax in intrasquad games when both were with the Dodgers, claimed Ryan was faster. “[Ryan] threw a heavy ball,” Williams is quoted as saying in Ryan’s autobiography. “Even his change of pace, at 85 miles per hour, was faster than most other pitchers’ fastballs.”
Ryan was named to the All-Star Game in 1972 and ended up leading the American League with nine shutouts and 329 strikeouts, the fourth-best total ever in the modern era (post-1900). Despite his also leading the league in walks and wild pitches, the Angels nearly doubled his salary to $54,000 for the next season.
In 1973, his second season with the Angels, Ryan quickly served notice that those sideline sessions would lead to an even bigger payoff. On May 15, against the Royals in Kansas City, he took a no-hitter into the eighth inning. An over-the-shoulder grab by shortstop Rudi Meoli kept the Royals hitless. In the ninth, it came down to Ryan against Kansas City’s centerfielder, Amos Otis.
His last time up, Otis had sharply grounded out on a curveball. As a result, Ryan decided “all I’d give him this time was heat.”
Otis swung and missed at the first fastball. But the second time around, he tattooed a long fly to right field. Ryan remembers the drive being “catchable.” Torborg, who was back behind the plate, wasn’t so sure.
“After Amos hit it,” Torborg says, “I remember thinking to myself, ‘What a shame. We came within one pitch of a no-hitter.’”
Yet outfielder Ken Berry, a late-inning defensive replacement, ran down Otis’s ball at the warning track. Ryan had the first no-hitter of his career. As his teammates mobbed him on the mound, Torborg—who knew something about no-hit contests, having caught Sandy Koufax’s perfect game—kept repeating, “That was beautiful.”
A few months later, on July 15, Ryan took the mound in Detroit. Torborg was sidelined with a broken finger, and Ryan decided to call his own pitches. In fact, that would be standard operating procedure for much of the rest of the season, even when Torborg returned to the lineup.
“We devised signals in which he’d touch his cap certain ways and my signals were to help relay the signals to the infield,” Torborg says. “Of course, the danger of that is that if [the catcher] doesn’t pick up exactly what he’s going to throw, he could kill the guy behind the plate with that fastball of his.”
For this contest in Detroit, the only ones in danger were the Tigers’ hitters. On the way in from the bullpen, Ryan felt so good about his stuff that he told Morgan that if he ever was going to pitch another no-hitter it would be now.
Art Kusnyer, the Angels’ other catcher, mishandled Ryan’s first pitch—a sharp breaking curve. When umpire Ron Luciano called it a ball, Ryan made a mental note to go with his fastball, which had plenty of pop that day.
As Ryan began to set down the Tigers in order, Detroit manager Billy Martin started to needle him. But much as he had with Luciano behind the plate, Ryan shrugged off such distractions and “just zoned in on what I had to do.”
And did he ever. Ryan struck out 16 batters in the first seven innings. In the top of the eighth, the Angels batted around, breaking up a close game. Even though the big inning assured
Ryan of the victory, the long time on the bench seemed to take something off his fastball. Still, he held the Tigers hitless into the ninth inning.
With one out, Gates Brown scorched a line drive. But once again shortstop Meoli was there to snare it. Detroit’s hope of breaking up the no-no rested with Norm Cash. As he stepped into the batter’s box, Ryan noticed that Cash wasn’t exactly holding a bat in his hands. The Angels’ pitcher gestured to Luciano to check it out. Upon closer inspection, the bat was determined to be a leg ripped off the snack table in the Tigers’ clubhouse.
Cash, ever the wily veteran, argued with the umpire that he should be permitted to use it. The debate lasted several minutes and perhaps would have broken the concentration of another pitcher. But Ryan was sure of himself now. Several of the most flamboyant figures in the game were center stage on this day—Luciano, Martin, the showboating Tigers hitters—and none were able to get under his skin.
With the debate over, and Cash forced to swing a conventional bat, Ryan got him to pop out on a 1–2 fastball.
Some pitchers only dream of throwing a no-hitter, and Ryan had done it twice in the same season. If you believe Torborg, that amount could have been easily doubled.
“What people don’t remember is that Nolan could have had two more no-hitters that season,” Torborg says. “He came close against the Yankees, that’s for sure. In that game, Thurman Munson hit a pop-up in the first inning that fell between our infielders because nobody called for it. The scorer called it a hit. New York didn’t come close to getting another hit the rest of the day.
“The other near miss came against the Orioles. It was late in the game and Mark Belanger was up for Baltimore. Earl Weaver had him bunting on the first pitch and Belanger took it for a strike. Weaver took the bunt sign off and Belanger was lucky enough to tag the next pitch for a base hit.
“When you think about it somebody like Bob Feller had three no-hitters for a career. Nolan nearly surpassed that total in one season.”
Even though David Price isn’t pitching tonight in Durham, half a dozen scouts sit in the rows behind home plate, setting up their radar guns in empty cup holders. When neither of the starting pitchers, right-hander Jack Cassel for Columbus and left-hander James Houser for the hometown Bulls, register anything faster than 90 miles per hour on the gun, they begin to talk more among themselves. Still, every pitch is dutifully recorded and filed away for reports that are sent almost daily to the parent club.
Batters are timed running to first base. An outfielder is critiqued on how well he pegs the ball to the cutoff man. But as far as pitchers are concerned, any scout worth his salt has a sweet spot for sheer velocity. So often that’s the basis for quality pitching, either in the starting rotation or out of the bullpen.
In recent years, several big-league teams have turned around their fortunes by finding a pitcher or two who can throw really hard. The Detroit Tigers reached the Fall Classic in 2006 thanks in large part to Justin Verlander. Of course, the Red Sox repeated as champs in 2007—this time with Jonathan Papelbon as their closer.
“Overall, velocity among pitchers everywhere you look has been going down on average,” says Rob Ducey, a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays. “That’s why everybody’s got an eye out for a pitcher who can bring it. Find that guy and it can mean all the difference to a team’s season. A guy with a great fastball can flip things in your favor almost overnight.”
To hear scouts talk, there has never been enough high heat to go around. In the 1980s, for example, the quality fireballers could often be counted on one hand—Ryan, Mario Soto, and Rich “Goose” Gossage.
“There’s no question in my mind there are fewer hard throwers today than there used to be,” Pete Rose complained to Inside Sports’s David Whitford in 1983. “We used to go to Houston and face Jim Ray, Don Wilson, Larry Dierker and Turk Farrell. Los Angeles had [Sandy] Koufax and [Don] Drysdale. San Francisco had Bobby Bolin, Gaylord Perry and [Juan] Marichal.”
The list of fireballers for that era was made even shorter when J. R. Richard collapsed while playing catch before a game in the Astrodome on July 30, 1980. Richard, the first National League right-hander to strike out 300 batters in a season (303 in 1978), was rushed to the hospital. There doctors worked for 18 hours to finally remove a clot from the junction of two arteries in his neck.
“J.R. was the fastest pitcher I ever saw,” says Ralph Avila, a Cuban-born scout who helped establish the Los Angeles Dodgers’ baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. “He and Nolan Ryan were a step above the rest, in my opinion, and J.R. may have been a bit faster than Nolan.”
Such was the state of baseball—there was a definitive power shortage in the pitching department—until Mark Langston, John Wetteland, Robb Nen, and Mark Wohlers came along in the 1990s. In a sport that has become so scientific, the fastball remains mysterious, downright mystical. Even though professional franchises search the globe for talent, often spending millions in developing prospects, finding an authentic fireballer who can pitch at the major-league level remains elusive. “You can’t teach a good fastball,” says Troy Percival, who once averaged better than a strikeout an inning when he could really bring it. “You can teach a good curveball, you can teach a changeup, but you can’t teach arm speed. It’s a God-given ability.”
As a result, anybody who has a good fastball tends to become coveted, because even in flush times there are often few such hurlers around. So no matter who’s pitching, regardless of how long a track record he may have, the scouts invariably pause after almost every pitch and check the reading on their radar guns.
As a scientific concept, radar was discovered by German Heinrich Hertz in 1886. If his homeland had done a better job of developing “radio detection and ranging,” or radar for short, the course of World War II might have gone much differently. Decades later, it was left to British scientists Henry Boot and John Randall to develop the “resonant cavity magnetron.” This allowed radio waves to be sent out by a high-frequency transmitter. The waves would hit a distant object and bounce back to the transmitter. From there, such variables as the distance and speed of the object could be calculated.
On the eve of World War II, several countries had fledgling radar systems. In fact, there was a radar station near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, but the technology was so new that it was dismissed on the fateful day of December 7, 1941. But as the conflict escalated, the race was on to refine radar into a defensive network against approaching aircraft. Nobody did a faster, better job than Great Britain. Radar has been credited with helping to save England during the Battle of Britain. Newsweek magazine reported that in August 1940, the Nazis lost 15 percent of their planes over England. In the air battle of September 15, 1940—one of the turning points of World War II—185 planes of their original 500 were destroyed. The Germans changed tactics and began to attack at night. But thanks to radar-directed night fighters and antiaircraft batteries, the new ploy failed as well.
After the war, radar moved into everyday life, notably at airports and on the highways. Law enforcement employed it to corral speeders, and that was the link that brought radar to baseball. In 1974, Michigan State baseball coach Danny Litwhiler was reading the student newspaper. One of the local headlines reading “Be Careful! Don’t Speed on Campus!” was accompanied by a photo of a campus policeman pointing a modern radar gun at would-be speeders. Litwhiler immediately wondered: Could a radar gun clock a baseball thrown by one of his pitchers?
Before taking over the Spartans’ program, Litwhiler had played 11 years in the majors and had a .281 lifetime average. In 1942, he became the first major-league outfielder to play every inning of every game in a season without committing an error. His glove from that season found a home in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. Now another piece of equipment that Litwhiler would use would find its way there, too. He convinced the campus police to come down to the baseball stadium. Radar guns back then were far from portable. The device was powered by the au
tomobile cigarette lighter, so Litwhiler had the police car drive out onto the field, parking it near the pitcher’s mound. He had one of his young hurlers throw, and the radar gun began to pick up readings ranging from the mid-70s to the high-80s. Litwhiler contacted the company that made the radar gun, but it didn’t see much potential in marketing the device to baseball. So instead, Litwhiler called the inventor, John Paulson, directly and was able to convince him to make a handheld model with a battery.
That spring Litwhiler took the portable radar gun to spring training, and Baltimore Orioles’ Manager Earl Weaver “went crazy about it,” he remembers. Weaver had already coached several of the fastest of the fast, including the enigmatic Steve Dalkowski and future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer. After the ballclub wouldn’t authorize the $1,200 to buy one of the first radar guns, Weaver decided to take the amount out of his own pocket.
“I’d save that much in bonus money by not signing some guy who couldn’t throw hard,” Weaver explains. “This thing measures speed factually, without trusting to guesswork.”
But if the technology was perfect, much of the debate over who was the fastest of the fast would have ended with the rise of the radar gun. By the mid-1970s, three major-league clubs were using the gun, and today almost every scout has a portable device of his own. But there is a major difference between the various manufactures. Scouts say the JUGS gun, which Litwhiler helped popularize, measures the speed of the ball soon after it leaves the pitcher’s hand. The Decatur RAGUN, which soon followed in development, is said to measure the speed of the ball closer to the batter and home plate. So the JUGS gun was soon known as the “fast gun” and the RAGUN as the “slow gun.” Routinely, there was a four-mile-per-hour difference between the two.
These days, most scouts use the Stalker Sport. Even though the gun is a high-powered, more consistent version of those earlier models, many believe grading baseball talent will always be a crapshoot. “I’ll look around sometimes after a quality pitch and everybody will have slightly different readings,” Ducey says. “Part of this whole game is still about trusting your gut, too. Realizing what you’re really seeing.”