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Show by Jim Murray What does Nolan Ryan have to do? j Charlie Chaplin never won an Academy Award. Think of it Neither did Humphrey pogart, John Banymore, Cary Grant nor Greta Garbo. F. Scott Fitzgerald never even got a Pulitzer. Elvis never got a Grammy. Erich Maria Remarque never got a NobeL The list of injustices is long. Jim Brown never won a Heisman. Babe Ruth never won an MVP. Neither has Bill Terry. No .400 hitter ever did. ; But nowhere in the worlds of art and entertainment can you find a bigger oversight than the fact that L. Nolan Ryan, the legend, has never won a Cy Young Award. This defies rational explanation. This is a young man they'll sing songs about in the long winter nights around the potbellied stoves wherever old-timers gather. ; This is a man whose shadow over the game will lengthen with the ages. This is a man of mythic proportions whose stories will grow and reputation soar and will take his place with the half-myth, half-real giants of the game like Satchel Paige, Feller, Cobb, Hornsby and Dizzy Dean. ; He is a sure Hall of Famer. He is one of the authentic marvels of athletics. He creates the kind of instant awe in retelling that you usually have to have been dead for SO years to inspire. Batters speak of him the way minstrels spoke of ancient kings, with wonder and fear. One no-hit game can be an accident Two can be a coincidence. But five no-hit games is wine into water. It's changing pumpkins into coaches, fairy-tale stuff. Someday-my-prince-will-come action. So, what are the writers waiting for? You'll have to tell me. Let's take 1973, for example. AQ Nolan Ryan did that year was (1 ) pitch two no-hit games, (2) win 21 games and (3 ) strike out more batters (383 ) than any pitcher before or since. Jim Palmer got the Cy Young Award. He had a nice year, he won 22 games. He struck out 158 people. There was no reason to sue anybody. But Nolan Ryan had 26 complete games (out of 39 started). Jim Palmer had 19 (out of 38). Ryan had pitched 30 more innings. You have to wonder how Jim Palmer got 14 first-place votes to Ryan's 9, and 6 second-place ballots to Ryan's 6. It's even harder to figure out why Palmer got 172 votes in the MVP balloting that year (Reggie Jackson won) to Ryan's 20. The rap against Nolan Ryan is, he's a .500 pitcher. Well, who do you think lost the most games in major-league history? Cy Young, that's who. And who is next? Walter Johnson, no less. Young lost 313. Walter Johnson lost 279. Nolan Ryan hasn't even lost 200. And he's won 220. But what you have to search for in Nolan Ryan's record is not the games he has won or lost but the number he's appeared in that his teams have won. The facts are that no batter in either league gives Nolan Ryan the trouble Nolan Ryan gives Nolan Ryan. He shaves his worst enemy every morning. One result is, no team ever really sheHacks Nolan Ryan. Even on his worst nights, when he is busy walking the universe, Ryan usually manages to keep the game in sight, particularly because nobody can hit the ball on the occasions when it is in the strike zone. Ryan's 2,035 walks easily lead every pitcher in history. His 3,700 strikeouts lock him in a duel of the ages with Philadelphia's Steve Carlton. Ryan's marks were achieved in fewer innings. Nolan's arm may be the best in major-league history. It is a rule of thumb that fastball pitchers (1 ) burn out by the late innings and (2) bum out in late career. Nolan Ryan threw his first no-hitter when he was 26. He threw his last when he was 34. When he set the record for the fastest ball ever pitched, the timing device caught the 100.9 mp.h. fastball in the late innings. Ryan threw 40 pitches over 95 mp.h. that night and 7 were over 100. The machine was the only thing in the ballpark that could see the pitches. "You needed an instrument just to hear it," Bin Rigney remarked later. Now 37, Ryan still has a fastball that tends to glow on its way to the plate, like the capsule reentering the earth's atmosphere. "I may throw three or four over 98 mp.h. and 15 to 20 over 95," he says. "The ratio of fastballs to breaking pitches may be 70-30 but the curveball is still the 'out' pitch. You know, when people talk of Sandy Koufax or Bob Feller, they never mention the curve balL But the curveball was their 'no-hit' pitch, I too." Nolan Ryan's 5 no-hitters are suplemented i by 9 one-hitters, 18 two-hitters and 26 1 three-hitters. It is the most awesome display i of virtuosity in the game's annals. i None of mis has ever impressed baseball's I historians. The night in 1974 that Ryan was clocked at 100.9 (he threw two of these), he struck out 19 Detroit Tigers. That season he won 22 games, struck out 367. He got only one vote for the Cy Young Award. Jim Hunter won it with 12 (9 for second and 3 for third). Ferguson Jenkins was second with 10 first-place votes, 7 seconds and 4 thirds. Of course, Nolan Ryan only pitched one . no-hit game that year. You've got to be consistent: If you're not going to give a guy a Cy Young for winning 21 games and pitching two no-hitters, you can't give it to him for winning 22 games and only one no-hitter now, can you? (c) 1984, Los Angeles Times Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate |