How Many Strikes Must He Throw?

The best pitcher never to have won a Cy Young Award shifted in his seat and looked around the Houston Astros’ locker room.

“I think I finished second in the voting once. I’m not sure,” drawled Lynn Nolan Ryan.

Let’s see. Could that have been the year he pitched two no-hitters, won 21 games, had an earned-run average of 2.87, struck out 383 batters--the most anybody ever has--and pitched 326 innings?

Naw. Jim Palmer won it that year. He won 22 games, struck out 158 and pitched 296 innings. Nolan might not have been close.

Maybe it was the next year, 1974? Nolan pitched another no-hitter, won 22 games, struck out 367, had an ERA of 2.89, pitched 333 innings and allowed 221 hits.

Not very likely. Catfish Hunter won it that year with 25 victories. He struck out 143, pitched 318 innings and only allowed 268 hits.

What about 1972, when Ryan first struck out 300 batters--329 to be precise--fourth all-time behind Sandy Koufax, Rube Waddell and Bob Feller; won 19 games, had an ERA of 2.28 and pitched 284 innings?

Forget it. Gaylord Perry won that year. Perry had 24 wins, 343 innings and 234 strikeouts.

How about the strike-shortened year when Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter, had an ERA of 1.69, struck out, like, his 3,300th batter and pitched one of his two-hitters in the playoffs?

No, Fernando Valenzuela won that year. He had an ERA of 2.48, struck out 180 and won 13.

Why would they ever give Nolan Ryan the Cy Young Award? He has only struck out 1,000 more batters than Walter Johnson did. He has struck out 400 more than anyone else ever did. He has struck out 10 or more batters a game 174 times. He averages 9.4 strikeouts a game. The only other pitcher who averaged more than nine was Koufax.

Besides his 5 no-hitters, Ryan has had 9 one-hitters, 18 two-hitters and 26 three-hitters.

Give him the Cy Young Award? Don’t be absurd! Not when you have pitchers like Pete Vuckovich, Steve Stone, LaMarr Hoyt and Steve Bedrosian to give it to. You don’t give the Cy Young Award to a guy just because he has set or broken 38 major league records. After all, did Chaplin ever win the Academy Award?

The best 41-year-old sore-armed pitcher in the big leagues last year shifted in his locker-room seat.

“Do I think about it? Oh, not really. What I do think about is, I’d really like to get in one more World Series. I’d like to start a World Series game.”

Nolan Ryan is more than an athletic marvel. He’s a medical marvel. His glove should go to Cooperstown, but his arm should go to the Smithsonian.

It is a fact of baseball life that the fastball is the most perishable commodity in the game. It’s not only supposed to go late in life, it’s supposed to go late in a game.

Nolan Ryan’s never has. You had to get Nolan in the early innings or not at all. The velocity increased as the game wore on. Your only hope against Ryan was that the ball moved at such speed that it tended to want to orbit like something filled with liquefied oxygen and a booster.

The first guy Nolan Ryan ever pitched to, he hit on top of the head. The second guy, he broke his arm. The third guy went down to his coach before going to bat and said, “Do I have to?”

Last year, at 40 and with a throbbing elbow, and a limit on the number of pitches he was allowed in a game, Nolan Ryan led the major leagues in strikeouts for the sixth time in his career. He led it in ERA for the second time in his career. He became the first player in history not to win the Cy Young Award after leading the league in strikeouts and ERA.

So, what else is new?

On Sept. 9 last year, against San Francisco, Nolan Ryan, for the 22nd time in his career, struck out more than 15 batters in a game when he struck out 16 Giants--including Mike Aldrete for the 4,500th strikeout of his career.

Nobody else his age had ever struck out as many batters in a year, 270.

What made this more remarkable was that the Houston general manager, Dick Wagner, deferring to Nolan’s sore elbow the year before, had decreed a 110-pitch limit on Ryan’s turns on the mound.

For the first time in his career, Ryan had no complete games, but it didn’t stop him from leading the world in strikeouts again. He was fifth in the Cy Young balloting.

Fastball pitchers are supposed to go to the artifices of pitching as they get into their late 30s and 40s. Nolan Ryan still muscles up a ball in the 97- to 98-m.p.h. hour range. He averages over 90. It has been said his changeup is 89.

He is the only guy in history whose fastball, certifiably, on sophisticated aeronautical equipment, exceeded 100 m.p.h.--and it did it seven times.

Baseball historians of the future are probably going to wonder what Nolan Ryan did in his off-hours that ruled him out of baseball’s pitching award after hanging up those kinds of numbers. Did he rob banks, kill kittens, sell government secrets, set fires?

Nolan doesn’t drink, smoke, chew or swear. He raises cattle, not hell, in the off-season. He’s polite, approachable. He takes the position that God gave him that arm, he didn’t have to work down a mine shaft for it. He’s the most unimpressed guy in the world with the fact that he’s Nolan Ryan.

Well, almost the most unimpressed. The Cy Young voters have managed to stay pretty blase about it, too. Maybe they’re waiting for him to cure cancer.