19 in ’19 — #9: Nolan Ryan, the symbol

19 in ’19 highlights the 19 most impactful Cowboys, Rangers, Mavericks and Stars throughout the history of each franchise. Our staff voted on the top 19 from all four combined lists to create these overall rankings. You can find all of our team lists and profiles here.

Strictly speaking, Nolan Ryan’s impact on the Metroplex has little to do with whipping Robin Ventura’s ass. A headlock is not a legacy, and a punch is not an epitaph – not for Rougned Odor and certainly not for the most accomplished pitcher to ever wear a Ranger uniform, who doubles as one of the greatest arms in baseball history.

It does, however, help explain Ryan’s significance.

You’re likely familiar with the broad strokes. In 1993, at the age of 46, Ryan squared up and pummeled a man 20 years years his junior for having the nerve to charge his mound. It’s a seminal baseball brawl as well as a hit on the memorabilia circuit. Ryan has signed countless photos of the event through the years, often with the same inscription – Don’t mess with Texas.

The sentiment is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also telling. Ryan’s go-to line isn’t about his fastball or his records, but the place where he’s from. The place he embodies. To him, defeating Robin Ventura wasn’t about keeping a punk in line. It was about administering justice on behalf of an entire damn state.

It’s an outsized idea, of course, but it still took. When it comes to Ryan, the bigger picture always did.

As a Ranger, Nolan Ryan was successful. But as a symbol, he’s incomparable.

He was the least hittable Ranger pitcher ever, threw his record sixth and seventh no-hitters in a Ranger uniform and his 31.1 fWAR after the age of 40 ranks first all time, with 21.3 of that value being produced in Texas. But Ryan would have faced an uphill climb to make this list on resume alone.

He only pitched five seasons in Arlington – too few to dent any of the club’s all-time counting numbers charts. Ryan never got a crack at an indelible postseason moment, either; the Rangers were a pedestrian 414-396 with zero playoff appearances over his tenure.

Texas has been a historically pitching-barren franchise, yet Ryan ranks just seventh in career bWAR among Rangers pitchers, while his ERA sits fifth. He represented the club in as many All-Star games as Alexi Ogando. Ryan can’t even stake claim to being the best short-timer to don the uniform – that honor, for better or worse, belongs to Alex Rodriguez. Nor, if we’re being honest, do the Rangers really have that much of a claim to him: The cap on Ryan’s Hall of Fame plaque may be embossed with a T, but he was an Angel and Astro far more than a Ranger.

Nevertheless, he endures as one of DFW’s iconic athletes more than a quarter-century after throwing his final pitch. That owes itself less to what Ryan did than what he represents – a confluence of ideas greater than himself.

In Texas, that meant credibility, first and foremost. Ryan’s arrival in 1989 came on the heels of a 70-91 record the year prior, an entirely forgettable campaign that somehow was only the team’s fifth-worst that decade. Buddy Bell was long gone and Rafael Palmeiro had only just been acquired, while Ivan Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez were mere dots on the horizon. Ryan, whom club intel suggested was still a top-five starter in the National League for Houston, represented a stab at legitimacy, a beacon illuminating an otherwise bleak landscape. The Rangers might still be bad, but at least they’d have Nolan Ryan.

He was never supposed to provide what he did, not when he turned 42 the month after signing his contract. And so every over-deliverance – the 300^th win and 5,000^th strikeout and the final two no-hitters and the back-to-back years he paced the league in strikeouts and the five years in Arlington, three more than he initially signed on for – wasn’t so much a victory lap as a block party for a franchise that never had much of anything to celebrate. Which is why nobody batted an eyelash when, upon Ryan’s return to Arlington in 2008 as team president and CEO, then-owner Tom Hicks introduced him as “the biggest hero we’ve ever had as an organization.” Heroes are saviors, and while Ryan couldn’t rescue the Rangers from mediocrity, he certainly did from irrelevance.

And, by their very nature, heroes are larger than life. So it only followed that the legacy of Ryan’s ouster in 2013 would be something as grandiose as the “Curse of Nolan Ryan.” Which, just so we’re clear: The idea that Nolan Ryan A) possesses supernatural powers and B) deployed them to hex his former employer is preposterous. Then again, the magic he conjured up for them on the mound was, too.

It makes a certain amount of sense, then, to cast his absence as an explainer for every organizational failure, big or small, over the past six years. Nothing Ryan did for the Rangers ever seemed proportionate to reality. Why would his divorce from them be treated any differently?

Perhaps it would be easier to turn down the volume if Ryan’s symbolism pertained only to what he did. But the true power of Nolan Ryan – established well before his arrival in Arlington – concerns who he is.

For starters, the consummate power pitcher. You can measure that colloquially; Google the term and see whose name pops up first on Wikipedia. Or you could do it the old-fashioned way, through the radar gun, which Ryan burned up with the unofficial fastest pitch of all time – 108.5 miles per hour in 1974 – and which clocked him at 98 miles per hour on his very last pitch, on a busted elbow, when he was far closer to his 50^th birthday than his 40^th.

But it’s done best through superlatives. No pitcher in history struck out more batters – only Randy Johnson is even within 1,000 of him. For that matter, no one ever allowed fewer hits per nine innings. Of course, nobody walked more players, either, or threw more wild pitches in the modern era. Ryan was a cyclone, ripping through any and everywhere a hitter stood except, seemingly, the end of his bat.

It’s the archetypal ace profile, sought-after in every generation but perhaps most of all in this one, at a time when pitchers are throwing harder and harder across the board. Consequently, now more than ever, Major League organizations bet on young arms with velocity. Every time they do, they’re chasing Ryan’s ghost.

That’s even more true of his durability. There’s an entire cottage industry devoted to solving baseball’s current broken-arm pandemic, with most sensible prescriptions calling for fewer pitches over shorter starts at, ideally, slower speeds. Except how do you explain Ryan, a Ducati in the age of tricycles, throwing demonstrably harder than his competition for demonstrably longer, in an era when sports science was downright prehistoric, and only breaking down at age 46? From 1971 through 1992 – spanning ages 24 through 45 – Ryan averaged 32 starts and 226 innings per season, a criterion no pitcher in baseball met in 2018. His start count dipped below 26 only once in that span. It topped out at 41.

Inevitably, he is held up as a counterpoint by pitching contrarians, ones who argue that arms are now babied to the point of becoming brittle. Ryan, it should be noted, is one of them: He’s bellyached about diminished workloads off and on for more than 20 years and is never afraid to volunteer a “back in my day” despite, as The Athletic’s Jonah Keri once wrote, “Ryan also acknowledg(ing) that he was the biggest of outliers … (who) won a genetic lottery that helped make him one of the most successful and most durable pitchers of all-time.” That’s the thing about ideas: They’re powerless if anyone can realize them.

Most of all, though, Ryan epitomized Texas – in his upbringing (born in Refugio, raised in Alvin), his professional career (with the Astros and Rangers), his post-playing interests (ranching, Nolan Ryan Meats, ownership of two minor-league teams and supporting political candidates in various state races) and, of course, his unwavering devotion to it. That is why he gambled on the Rangers in the first place: “(I’m) a die-hard Texan,” he said by way of explanation upon signing his contract.

To date, only Roger Clemens compares as the state’s most culturally significant baseball export, and Ryan is undoubtedly the more beloved of the two, the white knight to the Rocket’s black hat. Ryan put the “Texas” in Texas Ranger unlike anyone before or since, the sort of man who pores over state history and who has lived on a ranch and whose living room in his former home in Alvin was once described by Texas Monthly – a publication whose very mission is to chronicle and appreciate stories within the Lone Star State  –  as “aggressively Texan.” Maybe he wasn’t kidding about channeling the entire state in the Ventura brawl.

Belief. Paradise lost. Power. Longevity. Texas itself.

Even one of those ideas could carry an athlete to a deeper plane of meaning. Taken in concert, they elevate Ryan into mythology. His accomplishments here shouldn’t endure the way they have, and perhaps they wouldn’t for an organization with a stronger tradition of success or high-level pitching or both. Still, they have, and they will.

One more thing about that brawl: Run the tape back, and there’s reason to suspect that Ventura, not Ryan, emerged with the upper hand when it was broken up. Nobody tells that story, though. Symbols are what we want them to be. And no matter what his record was, on the mound or in a fight, Nolan Ryan, the symbol, is undefeated.

(Photo: Getty Images)

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