Ryan’s Arm Still Amazing Teammates from ’69 Mets

Somewhere in the dark genetic recesses of Nolan Ryan’s development, a bolt of lightning crashed on a tree or a farmhouse or a wagon deep in the heart of Texas, and forged the unimaginable. And so we have Nolan Ryan’s arm.

It is the ultimate pitcher’s weapon. It’s the probability curves of the right parts intersecting at a point to produce the Mercedes of Mercedes. He’s a terrific man, who appears to have found the right kind of hard work and attitude, but it gets down to the bushings and gaskets everybody else doesn’t have.

And then you have to laugh at the absurdity of it all -- him pitching another no-hitter at the age of 44, his seventh. Come on. Experts in bio-mechanics want Ryan’s arm.

The word was getting around Wednesday night: Nolan is doing it again. Televisions snapped on in immediate response. Dr. Ron Taylor was getting home from work and Ryan was in the sixth inning against the Toronto Blue Jays. “And when he struck out Roberto Alomar on the last pitch, it was like Nolie was throwing the first pitch of the game,” Taylor said over the phone Thursday.

There was wonder in his voice, and that man is a doctor. Taylor pitched alongside Ryan on the 1969 New York Mets that shocked baseball. Ryan was a baby; Taylor was an honors graduate in engineering. He has gone on to medical school, to become an expert in biomechanics and team physician of the Blue Jays, and Ryan is still doing it. Taylor is trying to steal what he can.

It’s one thing to throw 100.9 mph at some point in a career; Ryan got his best fastball up to 96 against Toronto and was still burning at 93 on that last pitch -- but he’s been doing this for so long. Consider that in 1972 -- the year for which I have a count -- Ryan threw 4,608 pitches. Multiply that by 24 seasons and 60 feet, six inches, and it comes out 1,267 miles. That’s from New York to St. Petersburg at better than 93 miles an hour.

The tall tales are the most fun, and they’re all true. Ryan, throwing for the Mets in a tryout at the Astrodome as a hollow-chested high school senior, threw a fastball when catcher John Stephenson was expecting a curve and the bruise on his chest sidelined him two weeks.

“If he had drilled John in the middle of his chest it would have stopped his heart,” Ron Swoboda recalled.

Swoboda was at work at WVUE in New Orleans Wednesday night when he picked up the last outs of this no-hitter. He was a young outfielder on that 1969 team with Ryan. “I’m watching and he’s still gassing guys,” Swoboda said. “It flabbergasts me: ‘Nolan, you’re 44; start acting your age.’ You can take him only so seriously and then you have to laugh.” Swoboda laughed.

It’s a thrill in the era of the great comeback, the season of George Foreman, Bjorn Borg, Mark Spitz, Jim Palmer, that Ryan is older than any of them and he’s never been away. Taylor’s first evaluation is that it shows what athletes can do with “proper training and discipline.” And Swoboda, who was a thinking man when dummies were laughing at his efforts, says what Ryan is doing illustrates the claim of physiologists that we should be doing at 45 what we did at 25 if we worked at it.

Wise men have studied Ryan, measured the angle and mass, the relative length of the bones in his arm and the leverage, the strength of the muscles that propel the ball and his body mechanics, from pushoff to follow through. They’ve speculated on the advanced ratio of fast-twitch muscle fibers to slow-twitch. They’ve worked with him on advanced training routines and studied his mental approach, and his mechanics.

“It’s exactly like cracking a whip,” said Gene Coleman, executive director of the fitness center at the University of Houston who has poked, probed and scanned Ryan’s body. He says pitching the ball is a three-link chain, starting with the heaviest segments in the legs, transferring force through the trunk to the arm and shoulder to the hands and fingers, which are the lightest. Pitchers have thrown dazzling stuff early in their careers and then broke down because they threw across the body or took too long a stride -- or didn’t keep themselves in Ryan’s shape.

“That means,” Taylor said, “that Nolan hasn’t had to pitch when he’s tired and his body is vulnerable.”

With high-speed technology, Ryan’s motion was superimposed onto 30 other pitchers and Ryan’s was found to be “close to mechanically perfect,” Coleman said. Ryan knows when fatigue has changed his motion and secure enough to get himself out of the game.

Coleman’s study shows Ryan is: 1) mechanically sound; 2) in superb condition; 3) mentally prepared to do his job, “and No. 4, which should be No. 1, he’s genetically blessed.”

A man could be as right a person and work just as hard and never have the parts that make Ryan’s arm work. Back in little Alvin, Texas, where Nolan and Ruth Ryan still live, they give this youth fitness test. The softball throw this year was won at 169 feet. “The longest softball throw I heard of was 300 feet by a 19-year-old,” Coleman said. “They have records of Ryan throwing 330 feet as an eighth-grader.”

Back in a high school tournament, Ryan asked a red-haired kid from another school if he was trying to date Ruth. The redhead said yes. Ryan’s first pitch was over his head and the next was in the middle of his back.

And in the 1969 playoffs, Gil Hodges brought Ryan in to face Rico Carty, a deadly fastball hitter, with two on and a 1-and-2 count in the third inning. Ryan’s fastball froze Carty, turned the game, and Braves’ Manager Paul Richards said Ryan was the only pitcher in the world who could have done it.

That was 22 years ago. “Heh-heh-heh,” Swoboda said.

And Bob Feller, once the standard for fastball pitchers, says, “Nolan Ryan’s arm must have been built on a Wednesday.”

And with a lightning bolt.