In 1974, Sandy Koufax, the most private man in baseball, a legend who had been retired for eight years and almost never spoke to the press, broke his silence to defend a pitcher the entire world had given up on. The pitcher’s own team had traded him away for almost nothing. His critics called him a thrower, not a pitcher.
His walks were embarrassing. His wins were mediocre. Koufax saw something different. Nobody listened. They should have. To understand why Sandy Koufax saw what others missed, you have to start with a teenager in Alvin, Texas. Nolan Ryan grew up 30 miles south of Houston.
When the Astros came to town in the early 1960s, Ryan started buying tickets to watch his idol pitch. One night, sitting beside his girlfriend Ruth, Ryan became so locked in watching Sandy Koufax work through a lineup that he stopped talking entirely. Ruth sat next to him the whole game. He never said a word. That was the man Ryan wanted to become.
The irony is that Koufax would later become the one man who truly understood what Ryan could be before Ryan himself proved it. The first person outside Ryan’s family to see it clearly was a Mets scout named Red Murph. In 1963, Murph watched a high school game on a Saturday afternoon in the Houston area. The night before, he had seen two of the hardest throwers in the National League, Jim Maloney and Turk Farrell, pitch against each other in Houston.
Then he watched a skinny 16-year-old right-hander throw in the midday heat. Murph wrote in his scouting report that night, “This skinny, right-handed high school kid has the best arm I have ever seen in my life. I saw him pitch on a Saturday at high noon, and I saw Jim Maloney of the Cincinnati Reds and Turk Farrell pitch against each other in Houston on the Friday night before.
And here it is, high noon, and the life on this young man’s fastball is faster than any one of those two great major leaguers. The Mets front office rolled their eyes. Every memo Murph sent about any pitching prospect ended the same way with a note that the prospect does not have the velocity of Nolan Ryan. The phrase became a joke at Mets headquarters.
When the draft came in 1965, Murph pushed hard for Ryan in the first round. The Mets took other pitchers instead. Ryan fell to the 12th round, the 295th pick overall. The catcher who received Ryan’s fastball in high school, Jerry Spinks, described what it was like behind the plate. As each game wore on, I had fewer fingers on my left hand capable of gripping a bat.
Ryan’s early years with the Mets were a study in raw talent trapped by the wrong circumstances. Chronic blisters on his pitching hand, Army Reserve obligations pulling him away every summer, and a rotation already anchored by Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman left Ryan pitching in short bursts, inconsistent and frustrated.
His ERA swung wildly, his walks piled up. In 1971, his ERA in the first half of the season was 2.24 and 7.74 in the second half. To this day, that remains the steepest single-season ERA increase for a starting pitcher in baseball history. His own teammate, Ron Swoboda, watched all of it and still believed.
Swoboda later recalled, “Someday when he puts it all together, they’re going to talk about Nolan Ryan the way they talk about Sandy Koufax.” The front office did not share that view. In December of 1971, Mets general manager Bob Scheffing traded Ryan to the California Angels for shortstop Jim Fregosi, a six-time All-Star who seemed like fair value at the time.
Scheffing explained the decision plainly. “We have had him three full years, and although he is a hell of a prospect, he has not done it for us. How long can you wait?” That question would haunt the Mets for the next two decades. Cardwell hit 233 with five home runs in New York and was gone within 2 years.
Ryan, given a permanent spot in the starting rotation for the first time in his career, immediately became the most dominant strikeout pitcher in the American League. The man the Mets could not wait for had been waiting for them all along. By 1973, Nolan Ryan had done something that seemed impossible. He had broken Sandy Koufax’s single-season strikeout record, 382, set in 1965 by one 383 strikeouts in a single season, a mark that still stands today.
The baseball world did not know how to react. On one side, the numbers were undeniable. On the other side, the critics had ammunition. Ryan had also walked more batters than almost any pitcher alive. His win-loss record was unspectacular. He had never won a Cy Young Award. And now the most decorated active pitcher of that era stepped forward to put Ryan in his place.
Jim Palmer had three Cy Young Awards. When he spoke, the sport listened. In a profile published in Inside Sports heading into the 1974 season, Palmer was direct. “Nolan’s got so much more natural ability than the rest of us. He’s like a child prodigy. You can’t even comprehend what it’s like to be that talented.
But he tries to intimidate people. I try to get him out. If you’re going to lose, it’s sure great to strike out 380 guys. Maybe his niche is 383 strikeouts. Mine is winning 2/3 of my games.” It was a precise and devastating argument. Palmer was not wrong about the walks. He was not wrong about the wins.
And in 1973, most of the sport agreed with him. Then Sandy Koufax spoke. When Ryan broke his strikeout record, reporters went to Koufax for a reaction. The response was vintage Koufax, dry, understated, and far more layered than it appeared on the surface. “Yeah, and he also surpassed my total for bases on balls in a single season by 91.
I suspect half of those guys he struck out swung rather than get hit.” Read it quickly and it sounds like a dismissal. Read it slowly and it is something else entirely. Koufax was not mocking Ryan. He was explaining Ryan. The walks were not a flaw to be corrected, they were part of the weapon. Batters stepped into the box against Ryan knowing the ball could arrive at over 100 miles per hour and could arrive anywhere.
That uncertainty, Koufax understood, was its own form of dominance. He made this explicit in the Washington Post in September of 1974. Koufax laid out his philosophy of pitching and placed Ryan at the center of it. “Pitching is the art of instilling fear, making the man flinch by making him look for the wrong pitch.
You are trying to control his instincts. But if your control is suspect like Ryan’s is, and the thought of being hit is in the batter’s mind, you will go a long way.” This was not a casual compliment. This was Sandy Koufax, a man who almost never spoke publicly, who had been retired for 8 years, who was famous for his precision and his perfect mechanics telling the baseball world that Nolan Ryan’s wildness was not a weakness, it was a different kind of control, control over the hitter’s mind.
To understand why Koufax had the authority to say this, you have to look at his own career before 1961. From 1955 to 1960, Koufax compiled a record of 36 wins and 40 losses. He was wild. He was inconsistent. He could not crack the Dodgers rotation. Then something clicked. From 1961 to 1966, he became arguably the most dominant pitcher in the history of the sport.
Koufax had lived Ryan’s exact story raw, overwhelming talent dismissed because of control before anyone else had. He was not guessing about Ryan’s ceiling, he was remembering his own. There was one man who had stood directly behind both of them. Jeff Torborg caught Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. He also caught Nolan Ryan’s first no-hitter in 1973.
Nobody in baseball history has occupied that position literally and figuratively with both men. Torborg described the experience of receiving Ryan’s fastball in those early Angels years. Nolan just muscled the ball in his early years. You could hear him grunt all over the ballpark. The grunt, the force, the sound of something that did not belong in a normal baseball game.
Koufax had heard that sound in himself decades earlier. He recognized it in Ryan when almost no one else did. And in 1974, he said so. Palmer went on to win two more Cy Young Awards after 1973. The world kept listening to him. The California Angels gave Nolan Ryan something the Mets never had, a permanent place in the starting rotation.
The results were immediate and for anyone who had doubted him, deeply uncomfortable. Ryan posted 329 strikeouts, a 2.28 earned run average, and set a still-standing major league record by allowing only 5.26 hits per nine innings in his first season with the Angels. The Angels were not a good team. They finished near the bottom of the league in runs scored for most of Ryan’s years there.
His win-loss record reflected that. Critics held onto this fact like a life raft. But the numbers that could not be explained away kept arriving season after season. In September of 1974, Ryan became the first pitcher in major league history to have his velocity officially measured during a game. A radar gun at Anaheim Stadium clocked a ninth-inning fastball at 100.8 mph.
The number that hitters had been describing for years, the ball that arrived before they were ready, the pitch that made grown men flinch before it left his hand, finally had a measurement attached to it. Sandy Koufax had called it fear. Science now called it 100.8 mph. That same season, Ryan threw his third no-hitter and twice struck out 19 batters in a single nine-inning game.
He was 27 years old. The no-hitters kept coming. A fourth in 1975, tying Koufax’s record. Then, on September 26th of 1981, Ryan threw his fifth no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Koufax’s own team, and broke the record that many had considered unbreakable. That same season, Ryan posted a 1.
69 earned run average, the best in the National League. He was 34 years old. Two-time National League Most Valuable Player Dale Murphy watched Ryan work through lineups during those Houston Astros years and said what every hitter in both leagues already knew. He is the only pitcher you start thinking about two days before you face him.
Not the day before, not the morning of, two days before. That is what Sandy Koufax had described in 1974, fear instilled not by a single pitch, but by the accumulation of what a pitcher makes a batter imagine before the game even begins. In April of 1983, Ryan passed Walter Johnson’s all-time strikeout record.
He was 36 years old and still accelerating. At 40, he led the National League with a 2.76 earned run average and 270 strikeouts. At 43, he threw his sixth no-hitter and won his 300th career game. Then came May 1st of 1991. Ryan arrived at the ballpark that evening in physical pain.
He told his pitching coach Tom House before the game, “My back hurts, my heel hurts, and I have been pounding Advil all day. I do not feel good. I feel old today. Watch me.” He was 44 years old. He was facing the Toronto Blue Jays, the best hitting team in baseball that season. He struck out 16 batters. His fastball sat at 94 and 95 mph.
He struck out every starting Blue Jays position player at least once. The final out was recorded when Roberto Alomar swung through a fastball to end the game. It was Ryan’s seventh career no-hitter, three more than any other pitcher in baseball history, three more than the man who had defended him when no one else would.
After the game, Ryan spoke to reporters, “It was the most rewarding no-hitter of them all because it came in front of my fans on Arlington Appreciation Night. My career is complete now. I got one for the fans in Arlington.” Back in 1973, after Ryan’s first no-hitter, Kansas City Royals first baseman John Mayberry had walked off the field and told anyone who would listen, “He is throwing the ball harder than any man I ever saw in my life.
” Royals outfielder Hal McRae added, “If they had a higher league, he could be in it.” There was no higher league. Ryan simply kept pitching in this one long after every reasonable expectation had been exhausted, long after every record worth breaking had been broken, long after the men who doubted him had gone quiet.
The walk totals were real, the skepticism was understandable, and none of it mattered in the end. Sandy Koufax retired at 30 years old because his arm was destroying itself. Doctors told him that if he kept pitching, he might lose the use of it entirely. He walked away from the game at his absolute peak. 27 wins, a 1.
73 earned run average, 317 strikeouts in his final season, and almost never looked back. He did not do television. He did not do radio. He gave almost no interviews. For decades, Koufax existed in baseball mostly as a memory, the standard against which every dominant left-hander was measured, the name attached to records that seemed permanent.
Richie Ashburn, a Hall of Famer who faced Koufax during his peak years, described the experience in terms that stayed with people. “Either he throws the fastest ball I have ever seen, or I am going blind.” Yogi Berra, after watching Koufax go 25 and five in 1963, offered the line that became one of the most repeated in baseball history.
“I can see how he won 25 games. What I do not understand is how he lost five.” This is the man who, in 1974, chose to spend his limited public words defending Nolan Ryan, not praising him in a ceremonial way, defending him making a specific, technical argument that Ryan’s control problems did not undermine his greatness, but were in fact inseparable from it.
There is a number that explains why Koufax could see this when others could not. Career hits allowed per nine innings pitched, the most direct measure of how difficult a pitcher is to hit. Ryan’s career mark is 6.55, the lowest in major league history. The pitcher directly behind him, in second place, is Sandy Koufax at 6.79. No other pitcher is close.
These two men, one wild, one precise, one right-handed and one left-handed, one who pitched 27 seasons and one who pitched 12, occupy the top two positions in the same category by a margin that no one else has approached. Koufax did not see a flawed pitcher when he looked at Ryan.
He saw a version of himself filtered through a different arm, a different body, and a different set of circumstances. He had been the raw, overwhelming talent that people gave up on before 1961. He knew exactly what that felt like from the inside. And he knew what it looked like from the outside when no one believed yet.
Ryan broke every record Koufax ever set. The strikeouts, the no-hitters, the longevity. The teenager who had stood speechless watching his idol pitch had, by the end of his career, made every number Koufax left behind look like a starting point. But Koufax had seen it first. In 1974, when the argument against Ryan was loudest and most reasonable, the quietest man in baseball said the thing that turned out to be true.
Not every warning gets heard, but time has a way of proving who was right.
