Game Over 
Savoring the Private Ryan
Baseball. Values. Family. An afternoon on the ranch with Texas icon Nolan Ryan.
(Page 2 of 3)
Ryan loves Texas. For the first half-hour that I was at his ranch, we talked about nothing else. “I like to get out and drive,” he said. “This state is so diverse. We have four ecosystems here. You can’t find that in any other state.” He talked about hiking in Big Bend Ranch State Park and driving on dirt roads through the Chinati Mountains, south of Marfa, where, on one trip, a Border Patrol car suddenly materialized out of the vast emptiness and followed him all the way into town. He spoke fondly of Gonzales, where his other ranch is (“Did you know that the town was set up according to a Mexican land grant?”), and about why South Texas lacks the town squares with imposing courthouses that are common elsewhere in the state (“This part of Texas developed late. The towns grew up along the railroad tracks”).
He had fitted himself into a corner of a couch, looking solidly built and fit in his jeans, Western shirt, and boots. But his right leg stuck straight out across the cushions at an awkward angle. “The knee bothers me all the time,” he said. “I’m looking at a knee replacement. The cartilage is all gone.” It’s the price he has to pay for a hundred thousand or so pitches that began with all his weight on the leg.
I asked Ryan about the name on his ranch gate that surrounds the N-R brand: Ray Ranch. The N-R stood both for Nolan Ryan and Nolan and Ruth, but who was Ray? “The Ray family founded the ranch,” Ryan said. “It’s a well-known ranch in South Texas. J. Frank Dobie wrote about it in Tales of Old-Time Texas. You know, he grew up not far from here and spent a lot of time at his uncle’s place. He would come over here to see a friend named Rocky Reagan, who leased the ranch from an estate in St. Louis.”
Later, I looked up the story of the Ray Ranch, which Ryan bought in 1991. “Many an old ranch house by its very looks calls up human destinies,” Dobie’s tale begins. In 1868 Jim Ray and his brother headed west from Alabama to start a ranch in Texas. A business associate of their father’s named Hess, upon learning that the boys would be carrying $5,000 each, headed for Texas first, struck up a friendship with a band of Comanche, and lay in wait for the brothers. The Indians and Hess ambushed them in the back country and killed Jim’s brother, but he escaped across a creek. Later he discovered that Hess had drowned in the swift waters and recovered his brother’s money belt from the body. Still in peril in isolated country, he built a makeshift raft and floated down the Nueces toward civilization. At a sharp bend the raft hit the bank and broke apart; Ray had to cling to a root to keep from being swept away. Finally he swung free and made his way up the bank to get the lay of the land. “He thought he had never seen a more beautiful sweep of country,” recounted Dobie, “than the land in and beyond that bend of the Nueces.”
In a way, Ryan’s twentieth-century odyssey paralleled Jim Ray’s. Both were just eighteen years old when they left home to seek their destiny. Both faced long odds against making it. Both survived a lot longer than anyone else in their circumstances would have done.
OTHER GAMES HAD TO BE INVENTED, but baseball springs from the nature of man—the impulse, common to all infants, to hurl an object at a high velocity in a purposeful direction. Of all the people who have inhabited the earth, none has hurled a certain round object a little over two inches in diameter at a greater velocity than Nolan Ryan: The speed of his fastball was once timed by Rockwell International at 100.9 miles per hour.
For most of his career, however, there was considerable dispute about how good a pitcher he was. He never won a Cy Young Award, and he won as many as twenty games only twice, in 1973 and 1974, his second and third years with the Angels. The former season was his best. Among the standards by which a pitcher is judged are whether he gives up fewer hits than innings pitched and amasses more strikeouts than innings pitched; in 326 innings, Ryan gave up only 238 hits while striking out 383 batters (one of his records). On top of that, he threw two no-hitters before the All-Star break; nevertheless, the American League manager in the All-Star Game didn’t choose him for the team (Ryan was added by order of the commissioner of baseball), and Jim Palmer of the Baltimore Orioles edged him out for the Cy Young Award. Ryan remembers Palmer’s comment after the voting, and it still rankles: “He said, ‘Nolan Ryan went for strikeouts. I went for outs.’ But we were different kinds of pitchers. I couldn’t be the kind of pitcher Jim Palmer was. I was a strikeout-style pitcher.”
He was that kind of pitcher when the New York Mets signed him out of Alvin High School in 1965, a six-foot, two-inch, 140-pound string bean, for $20,000 and $500 per month. He was the youngest of six children, the son of an oil-production worker whose work ethic he inherited. Lynn Ryan had a second job, delivering the Houston Post on a 55-mile route, and night after night, Nolan got up at one in the morning to help roll and deliver newspapers before returning home at five to catch two more hours of sleep. He used his signing money to pay off his parents’ mortgage and buy himself a new Impala. He was already dating Ruth, who was just sixteen and two grades behind him in high school. In his second year in the minors he was overpowering—17 wins, just 2 losses, 272 strikeouts—and the Mets called him up late in the season. But his career almost ended before it got started.
The Mets had gotten him to join an Army reserve unit so that he wouldn’t be drafted, and when he finished six months of active duty in 1967, he injured his arm trying to get it in shape. “My arm popped like a rubber band,” he told me. “There was no sports medicine then. They just sent me home to rest it. I thought my career was over.” The Mets wanted him to have surgery, but he refused. Either his arm would heal or he would go to vet school at Texas A&M, as he had always planned to do. He and Ruth had gotten married in June, and he wasn’t going to struggle in the minor leagues with a bum arm; his pay had been so low that he had had to pump gas and do pickup jobs in the off-season.
Fortunately, the arm healed. Ryan made the team in 1968, but his frustrations continued. Because he had to leave every other weekend and for two weeks each summer to fulfill his military obligation, he couldn’t get into a regular pattern of pitching every four or five days. “I needed innings,” Ryan said. “Pitching is like golf; it’s all timing. The way you practice is repetition, repetition, repetition. You want to build up muscle memory. If your delivery isn’t the same, then your control is off. If you’re off an inch up here”—he raised his arm over his head—“then you’ll be off even more when the ball gets to the plate. The release point should always be the same. Once I found my release point, if I missed with a pitch, I knew why I had missed.” I asked him to show me his release point. He raised his arm, then dropped it back down. “I could not put my arm in the position it gets during delivery,” he said. “It only goes that way when I throw.”
His career with the Mets was mediocre, though he pitched in the 1969 World Series as a reliever and earned a save. (It was the only World Series he would ever play in.) After a lackluster 1971 season—10 wins, 14 losses, and almost as many walks as strikeouts—he was ready to hang ’em up. In her 1995 book, Covering Home: My Life With Nolan Ryan, Ruth relates that while they were driving back to Texas after the season, Nolan said to her, “Either they trade me or I’m quitting baseball.” They traded him to California. In the next three years he pitched more than 900 innings, struck out more than 1,000 batters, and won 62 games for a team with a puny offense. By 1976 he was making $125,000, enough to acquire the eighty acres outside of Alvin that is his main residence today. The next year his salary rose to $300,000. Still, he was regarded as a fearsome pitcher but not a great one. In her book Ruth mentions the two criticisms of her husband at the time: He lost about as many games as he won, and if you kept the score close, you’d beat him. After the 1979 season, he became a free agent, and the Astros brought him home as the first million-dollar ballplayer.
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