Mark Whicker: Netflix doc shines spotlight on MLB's strikeout king

A recently released Netflix documentary about Nolan Ryan called “Facing Ryan” shines the spotlight on the iron tough Texan who became Major League Baseball’s all-time strikeout king.

January 18, 2023

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

There was once a thing called ABC’s Monday Night Baseball, and in the 70s, its bosses loved nothing more than the Killer Sun in Anaheim.

They really loved it when Nolan Ryan was pitching for the Angels, with the call for “Play Ball” at 5 p.m. Those were all potential no-hit nights.

Ralph Garr was leading off for the White Sox one night and stood there for three pitches, all strikes. He saw none of them. He returned to the dugout, racked his bat and announced, “Gentlemen, this bleeper-bleeping game is over.”

But even in good conditions Ryan’s fastball was often just a rumor. Rod Carew, George Brett, Roger Clemens and Bobby Grich all identified it by the sound it made, a combination of a wind gust and a tree frog. All of them seemed relieved in retirement, thankful that nobody would ask them to hit blindly again.

Ryan’s uniqueness grows with each season, as does his incongruity. There was nobody like him then and there’s nobody who even tries to be now. All of it comes into focus in “Facing Nolan,” the documentary on Netflix, a love letter from the days before radar guns and matchup relief pitchers, and those laminated cards that remind pitchers what weaknesses to find. Nobody ever carried a position of strength against Ryan.

“There are some lions in this game and there are a lot of lambs,” Pete Rose says. “Nolan was a lion.”

But, as in a nature documentary, we get to see the lion grow.

When Ryan was 24, he appeared to be a failed experiment. He walked 6.9 batters per nine innings in 1971. Two years earlier, he had been a World Series bullpen hero for the Mets, but now he couldn’t keep up with Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, and his career record was 29-34.

Then Bob Scheffing, the Mets’ general manager, called.

“He told me I was going to sunny California,” Ryan said. “I thought, great. I’m going to be a Dodger.’

Not quite. Ryan, Leroy Stanton and two others went to the California Angels for Jim Fregosi, who had been the Angels’ first true star. The unpopularity of the trade dissolved quickly.

Ryan, with some counsel from pitching coach Tom Morgan, went 19-16 and led the league in strikeouts for the first of 11 times. In the coming years, he would give the Angels unprecedented credibility. Orange County fans no longer had to fight L.A. traffic to watch baseball. Ryan was pitching in their neighborhood.

Plus, Ryan said, he got to meet Gene Autry, the Angels owner, since he’d never missed one of his cowboy movies.

He only won 20 games twice and he never won a Cy Young Award, but he wound up winning 324 games and pitching past his 46th birthday, until his elbow finally sounded the alarm on a poignant night in Seattle’s Kingdome. He has the record for no-hitters with seven, yes, but he also set the record for one-hitters, two-hitters and three-hitters, along with the single season mark of 383 strikeouts and the career record of 5,714. Another record, among his 51, is 6.6 hits per nine innings, and another one is an opponents’ batting average of .204. He also struck out at least 10 per nine innings at ages 42, 43 and 44, pitching half the time in the heat of Arlington, Tex.

He revived the Astros, who made the playoffs twice when he was there, and he put people in the seats in Texas. Much of his charisma came from the promise of no-hitters. Today, managers routinely hook pitchers after six innings and a prescribed number of pitches, no-hitter or not, and it’s accepted, even endorsed. For Ryan the ninth inning was a destination, and he always said his job was to out-perform the other starting pitcher. Considering the feeble offenses he had to bear, that was difficult, which is why he was 8-16 with Houston in 1987 and still led the National League with a 2.76 ERA.

The film is more interested in Ryan’s back pages, and what made him perhaps the most prototypical Texan of all our great athletes through the years. He was stoic, quiet, habitual, hard-working, logical, and level-headed, Also, just a little bit mean.

He grew up in Alvin, Tex. and, for years, grew up throwing copies of the Houston Post into front yards. Did he get his arm strength that way? No, he explained: “We delivered the papers from the car, so I was always using his left arm.”

He married Ruth, his grade school companion, and in many ways his only confidant. She talked him out of giving up the game and going to college, and eventually to veterinary school, during the tough times in New York. She was an accomplished tennis player, and the rest of the family says she’s the most competitive Ryan of the bunch, which is quite a claim when pitted against Nolan’s unbending workout plan.

Ryan was a rancher, a real one, when he wasn’t pitching, and he picked Houston because he was tired of working outside Texas (and when Angel boss Buzzie Bavasi said he’d have no trouble finding a couple of 8-7 pitchers to replace him). His son Reid was hit and almost killed by a motorist in front of the Ryan home in Alvin, with Nolan in Anaheim and helpless, and he kept thinking about that.

The same thing happened when Houston owner John McMullen tried to slice his salary, figuring Ryan’s years were gone. So Astros fans missed Ryan’s 300th win and his sixth and seventh no-hitters, along with his best years in preventing hits and baserunners.

They also missed the sight of Ryan drilling Robin Ventura of the White Sox in 1993 and then greeting his invasion of the mound area with the type of rodeo headlock you’d put on a misbehaving calf. Ryan added several hard right hands to the head. As a concession to his age and stature, he was not thrown out of the game, as Ventura was.

“Did you mean to hit that guy?” former Rangers’ owner George W. Bush asked (he also filled another high office later on).

“George,” Ryan replied, “sometimes you just have to take control of the situation.”

His daughter Wendy cheered every punch, then later wondered if this meant she’d never get a date. Brett, one of the most ebullient and confident players the game has known, watched from the on-deck circle as Ryan spun Jim Wohlford. He immediately thought that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to get into the box. After all these years, Brett said, he still gets the shivers around Ryan.

At home, it’s different. The grandchildren tweak him, imitate the way he talked on Advil commercials, needle him when he doesn’t catch fish.

“We got a family full of comedians,” Ryan said.

One day the Rangers had a silent auction for charity, and one of the prizes was a dinner with catcher Mike Stanley, one of Ryan’s close friends. Reid Ryan wound up spending $200 to win it. Of course he could have had dinner with Stanley any time, so Nolan, whose grip on a dollar bill was hard to shake, started chirping.

“Dinner with Mike Stanley — the thrill of a lifetime,” he called out.