Game Over 
Savoring the Private Ryan
Baseball. Values. Family. An afternoon on the ranch with Texas icon Nolan Ryan.
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“I thought I’d retire as an Astro,” Ryan said. He turned 33 in 1980, an age by which power pitchers usually have begun to fade. Who could have foreseen that his career, then totaling thirteen years, was less than half over? Over the next nine seasons with the Astros, he broke Sandy Koufax’s record of four no-hitters, led the league in earned run average twice, and at the age of 40, initiated a run of four consecutive years in which he topped his league in strikeouts. But the last two years of the streak would take place in Arlington, not Houston. Ryan’s contract expired in 1988, and the new contract the Astros offered him called for a 20 percent salary reduction. Both California and Texas sought to sign him, and Ryan chose the Rangers because they were closer to home, even though Angels owner Gene Autry offered more money than the Rangers’ $1.6 million.
“I was going to play one more year,” he said, “and I realized, ‘Hey, I’m enjoying this so much, I’m going to play as long as I can.’” Who wasn’t enjoying it was American League hitters. Ryan struck out 301 of them in 1989 at the age of 42. No pitcher older than 31 had ever accumulated 300 strikeouts in a season. Two years later, he gave up only 102 hits in 173 innings, the third-stingiest ratio of all time, just over 5 hits per game. Who holds the record? Nolan Ryan in 1972.
By this time, all doubts about Ryan’s greatness as a pitcher had been extinguished. He had outlasted the skeptics; there was nothing to compare him with. When he pitched his seventh no-hitter in 1991 at age 44, the New York Times called him “John Wayne with a baseball cap.” Kelly Gruber of the Toronto Blue Jays, the team victimized by Ryan’s no-hitter, told the Boston Globe, “I hate to lose, but my respect and feelings for Nolan Ryan are so great that I’m actually happy to have been there. That may be the wrong feeling, I don’t know, but he’s more than a marvel. He’s the model for what we all should be. When I’m not facing him, I’m always rooting for him. It’s the same with a lot of players. [I]f we had to lose this game, I’m glad he got the no-hitter, and I’m glad I got to see it. He’s a great man.”
OUTSIDE THE RYAN LIVING ROOM, A dark sky was closing in. A photographer showed up early for a shoot and said that he wanted to get started in case it rained. “It never rains here,” Ryan replied, pursing his lips to effect an air of resignation with a dash of rancher’s cynicism. This was one of the few times his expression changed during our visit; Ryan is a man who has spent a lifetime controlling his body, and his face has not been allowed to go undisciplined. He got up to change his shirt, and I went into the kitchen to talk to Ruth. From the size of the refrigerator, it was apparent that the Ryans did a lot of entertaining here. The front had the square-footage of a king-size mattress.
A former cheerleader and state champion tennis player in high school who wears her streaked hair in a ponytail, Ruth Ryan is as perky and outgoing as Nolan is restrained. (When he’s angry, she wrote in her memoir, “He clams up and won’t talk.”) She led me into the dining room, where a round table made of pine with a built-in lazy Susan was surrounded by eight chairs covered in cowhide, and talked about the house. “Nolan designed it,” she said. “He said that his dream house had the bedrooms inaccessible from the rest of the house. You have to go outside to get to them.” We walked out of the kitchen onto a spacious stone patio and saw the bedroom wing, with three doors in a row, each of which led to a room containing multiple queen-size beds. It sounds like a motel, but in fact it’s more like a bunkhouse with a little privacy, which was no doubt what Ryan had intended.
I wondered what it’s like to watch your husband play baseball for a living. It is such a cruel game. The best hitters make outs 70 percent of the time, and the best pitchers are lucky to win half of their starts. Along with the record for the most strikeouts, Nolan Ryan also holds the record for giving up the most walks. Ruth attended most of the home games her husband pitched while he was in Texas, driving to the Astrodome when he was with the Astros and flying up to Arlington for the night when he was with the Rangers. “Some of the wives could enjoy the game,” she said, “but being a pitcher’s wife is different. I died with every pitch. One day after Nolan had retired we went to a game, and I thought, ‘Hey, this is really fun. Relaxing, eating hot dogs, talking to everybody—no wonder people watch baseball games.’ There are things about being a pitcher’s wife I don’t miss at all.”
We caught up with Nolan at the sheds, a group of metal buildings that includes a stable and a shelter for tractors and other ranching machinery and climbed into his pickup for a drive to a setting requested by the photographer: a rocky outcropping called Half Moon Ridge that is close to the Nueces. He stopped the truck on the primitive road, and we had to pick our way through heavy brush for about a hundred yards to reach the outcropping. The first bluebonnets of the season had come out, and Nolan stopped to admire them. “If we could get a good two-inch rain, this country would explode,” he said. Ruth looked at the sky and said something hopeful. Nolan shook his head: “It never rains here.” (He was right; the storm passed to the north.) “The drought of ’96 almost did us in,” he said. “It was a triple whammy: no rain, low cattle prices, high feed prices. At least feed isn’t so bad now.” Close to the outcropping, the brush thickened, and we had to improvise a circuitous route. “Watch out for this one,” Ryan said, indicating a thorny bush that looked like a relative of a pencil cactus. “We call it a jump cactus, because it’ll jump right out and gitcha.”
The photographer began setting up his equipment, and I knew that the conversation was coming to an end. “Are you enjoying retirement?” I asked. Oops, wrong question. For a moment Ryan fixed me with a pitcher’s stare, a look so deep that it seemed to originate from behind his eyeballs, and I noticed that where most people have horizontal lines across their forehead, he has two deep vertical lines above his nose, sculpted by 27 years of scowling at batters and focusing on hitting a tiny target from sixty feet away. Then the stare was gone. “I didn’t retire,” he said. “I just don’t play baseball. One thing I’m short of is time.” Aside from his ranches and the Round Rock Express, he owns a bank in Alvin; he set up the Nolan Ryan Foundation, which will open an exhibit at Alvin Community College this spring; and he serves on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, to which he was appointed by his old friend Governor George W. Bush.
He still does some work for the Rangers too. “They bring their top rookie prospects to Arlington in February,” he said, “and I’ve spoken to them the last few years. Everybody has a weakness, I tell them. Every level you go up in baseball, it magnifies your weakness. I always went to spring training in the best shape I could be, so I could work on my weakness. I’ll never forget what a scout told me one time: ‘You watch kids playing ball, and they’ll tell you what they do best. If they’re fast, they’ll run wind sprints. If they’re fastball hitters, they’ll hit fastballs in the batting cage. You never see ’em working on their weaknesses.’ I wish everybody could play sports. It teaches you discipline, how to deal with people, how to deal with adversity, how to deal with success. You learn the rewards of preparation and the value of dedication and sacrifice.”
And then he tugged his white Resistol lower on his forehead and climbed up on the rock to be photographed, silhouetted against the capricious clouds and the sunlight that was trying to break through.
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