Surely some of it still exists, and if it were unreliable, it’d be easy to test it to determine that. Have any such tests been done?
I didn’t say Ryan was faster than Chapman, though, did I?
That only follows if all of his pitches were measured for speed.
In 2004, a top softball pitcher named Jennie Finch faced 3 MLB hitters on a softball field as part of an exhibition. Finch struck out all 3 of them. You may have heard of the 3 hitters: Albert Pujols, Mike Piazza, and Brian Giles.
Eddie “The King” Feigner once struck out Willie Mays, Brooks Robinson and Roberto Clemente in a celebrity showcase game. He was pitching from 2nd base (84’ 10" in softball)/
Radar wasn’t unreliable then. I certainly used old K-55 radar units back in the day that were calibrated and certified to be accurate. As I understand it at the time they were able to measure the speed near the plate. Now they measure speed as it leaves the hand. Another big difference is they did not measure every pitch of every game. Speed measurement didn’t become widespread until statcast was implemented in 2008. Now every fan can see live the speed of every pitch even in minor league ballparks.
It’s been awhile but I remember reading in Ron Luciano’s book about Ryan. I believe the quote was he went by if the pitch “sounded like a strike.” Players like Ryan and Feller certainly did have the reputation of being much faster than most pitchers.
Finch pitched in the mid 70s at her fastest. In softball they pitch from 43 feet away not 60’6” like baseball. The time to the glove at that distance is the equivalent of a pitch in the upper 90s and coming from a different angle. It’s not surprising she was able to strike them out. I think it was Pujols who said he would need time getting used to the different look and then he would be able to hit just as well as he normally would.
Yeah - but wouldn’t that suggest it would be about the same for an average non-pro?
Maybe, but look at the baselines. If you can’t hit major league pitching except for 1 out of 1,000 tries, then “getting used to the different look” of major league fastpitch softball pitching would still only get you back to 1/1000.
Or at least a large number of them. And Ryan pitched enough times in his career that you could get a large number of measured pitches from only a small percentage of them. He pitched nearly 100,000 times: If only 1% were measured, then we can still say that his 100.9 pitch was a one-in-a-thousand event.
Of course, part of that is going to be familiarity, not difficulty.
No. Absolutely not.
If it were a mechanical pitching machine firing 105-mph smokers into the strike zone repeatedly, then yes, a layman could hit some of those, and maybe even train to hit them effectively.
But to face a guy who has made a career out of building ways to read a batter and defeat him? No, absolutely not. First he’ll throw something fast and inside to move the batter away from the plate, then he’ll throw something too fast to read, and too outside to reach. The pitcher will change tactics depending on whether the batter seems more likely to avoid the plate, or reach for trash.
A layman is not going to hit a pro pitcher unless that’s what the pitcher wants.
Exactly. All I’m saying is - perhaps - hitting pro softball pitching is just about as difficult as hitting MLB pitching. Just to offset the “most difficult thing in sport” claims.
Probably pretty similar. The pitching motion makes it seem like it’s coming out of nowhere. The closer distance makes the reaction time needed about the same as a major league fastball.
It’s only a “logical conclusion” if your premise is that the person who has been famous for 60 years as the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball history somehow “can’t” actually be that, even when measured with objective devices, and even when your specific non-sequitur objections to the idea (e.g., “he gave up a lot of home runs so he couldn’t have thrown the ball really fast”) have been specifically addressed. I think your premise is faulty and, certainly, unsupported.
Jordan generally is held to have the highest vertical leap in NBA history among players with significant careers, at 48". Like Ryan’s speed, this is not at all surprising given his body type, the era in which he played, and the fact that he’s Michael Jordan. You seem to be ignoring the fact that the reason people get these repuations is because they have a lot of skills at the sports they play. There may be a lot of misplaced nostalgia about the capabilities of past generations of athletes, but sometimes the best player at some particular thing really was from before the present day - and we’re talking about Nolan Ryan who pitched into the Clinton administration and Michael Jordan whose last years in the NBA could be watched via streaming video on a computer. This isn’t fourth-hand tall tales about baseball players from the Civil War era.
Most lists claim Mac McClung can jump as high as Jordan did. He can’t really do anything at NBA level besides jump, though, so he just wins dunk contests and gets cut from NBA rosters. Not sure how this fits into the conspiracy.
Wait, is the measurement wrong, or is the measurement proof that he was juicing? Seems it can’t be both.
I would put more stock in the latter demonstration. You have an underhand pitch coming out of a different motion, a rising ball, a shorter distance, no mound, and different dynamics of getting solid contact (aluminum bat on larger ball). The skills to succeed at baseball probably translate to high-level competitive softball, with practice, about as well as they do to cricket - i.e., roughly, and not necessarily for everyone.
With Feigner, you’re talking something that really had a lot of elements of a carnie show - maybe not pro wrestling but definitely a Harlem Globetrotters type of situation. In a standard softball setup, he could have a fighting chance against a Major League hitter due to the differences, but the “throwing behind his back from second base” bullshit was just rigged balls and showmanship, and the MLB players who participated were well aware that they weren’t being brought in to time 5 pitches and then casually drop a single into left field.
Chapman gave up .6 HR per nine innings, Ryan was .5
When it comes toclaims about someone being the best at something, to my mind it’s not whether one person said it. What convinces me is whether
- EVERYONE said it, and
- It is supported by the results on the field/court.
I am very confident, for instance, that Negro League player Pop Lloyd, who played away from the attention of the major leagues, was a truly exceptional, inner-circle-Hall-of-Fame ballplayer, because everyone said so. Black observers said so. White observers said so. It was universally held that Lloyd was a sublime baseball player. Honus Wagner, the greatest shortstop in major league history, said he was flattered that people called Lloyd “the black Wagner.” John McGraw, who knew as much about baseball as anyone who has ever lived, asserted Lloyd was as great as Wagner or anyone else alive. So did countless others. If one or two people said Lloyd was great, that means very little, but everyone said it. And then when we finally have stats for him, in the Eastern Colored League, when Lloyd was already pushing 40, the man was STILL hitting the bejeezus out of the ball to the age of 45 and an excellent ballplayer, a sign of greatness.
EVERYONE who faced Ryan said he was the fastest they’d ever seen. There is near universal consensus on this point. Hundreds and hundreds of players, umpires, scouts, coaches, and announcers agree on this point.
And it is supported by all the statistical evidence related to pitching velocity.
They are very different pitchers asked to do very different roles. Chapman has been in the league 16 years and pitched 771 innings. Ryan pitched over 5,300 innings.
It is remarkable that at 37 Chapman is still one ofthe fastest pitchers in baseball. He’s hit 103mph this year twice. Of course that’s not the full story. As a Yankee fan I was happy to see him go. He’s a head case. Once he gave up a walk he couldn’t handle it and the inning unravelled. It’s not like Ryan was unhittable every time he went out. The man lost almost 300 games. He was also on really shitty teams for a lot of his career.
That’s not really the case. Ryan was on some bad Angels teams but he was on some awfully good teams in Houston. He wasn’t all that great there. He usually wasn’t even the best pitcher on his team. Sometimes he wasn’t the best pitcher on his team in Anaheim.
Ryan was unusual, not really like anyone else. He was a mix of amazing talent and odd ineptitude. He had as good a fastball AND curveball as anyone but couldn’t control them. He was an amazing athlete who never really learned how to field his position and might honestly has been the worst fielding pitcher in modern baseball history. He gave up fewer hits per inning than any starter ever, but get a few guys on base and hoo boy, the wheels could fall off in a hurry.
Advanced stats bear out that Ryan added enormous net value to his teams every year from 1971 to 1992. That’s a great, lengthy career, with a few more so-so seasons on either side of it.
In the big picture, while his inconsistency keeps him out of the conversation of the “best pitcher of all time” inner circle, he was tremendously valuable for what he was - the best available #2 pitcher in almost any rotation from the era he played in, and a huge fan favorite who drove ticket sales and other revenue, who gave your baseball-team business that for almost nothing (he didn’t make more than about a million a year until the final three years of his career).
Just to be clear on this…
Ryan famously signed a four-year, $4.5 million contract to join the Astros in 1980, which made him the first MLB player to make at least $1 million a year – in other words, no one was making $1 million playing baseball until then. Thus, he became the highest paid player in baseball, on a contract which was paying him more than four times what he had been making with the Angels.
So, he was definitely a highly-paid player during the second half of his career, and at least for a year or two, he was the highest-paid player in the game.