For a couple of years a long, long time ago, I wrote a weekly column for a newspaper called The Comics Buyer's Guide. Quite a few of those columns appear elsewhere (like, here) on this site but a lot don't. This is part of a column that doesn't. It appeared in that paper on 3/23/01…
When I was going to University High, an annual event was a morning of sexually-segregated assemblies. All the girls would file into the school auditorium while all the boys went out and filled the bleachers of the football field. In each locale, there would be a guest speaker holding forth on a topic that was notionally of interest only to that gender.
I'm not certain what transpired in the girls' assemblies. We heard they were all about cooking and sewing, but we guys had our suspicions. There was one year there, I was sure they were all voting to not go out with me —
"Okay, Becky, you'll lead him on…make him think there's a chance. Then, just when his hopes are up, you dump him and take up with the dorkiest guy you can find…
"Sandra, you sit in front of him in Algebra, right? Okay, so you wear that real tight little skirt — the blue one — and when he asks you for a date, you don't say anything. Just giggle a lot, whisper to your friends and point at him…"
My first year at Uni — 1967 — the Boys League assembly featured a talk by one of the gents who had designed the Ford Mustang. For about an hour, he told us that the only car in the world worth owning was the Ford Mustang. Not only that but the only job in the world worth holding was designing and/or selling Ford Mustangs. His message to the Youth of America was that if we wanted to amount to anything in our lives, we should all buy Ford Mustangs and then work for the Ford company for whatever wages they deigned to pay us.
My last year there, the guest speaker was professional wrestler Freddie Blassie — and in calling him a speaker, I'm being a little loose with the language. So was Mr. Blassie, who spent the hour trying, without a whole lot of success, to formulate complete sentences. Still, he made a lot more sense than the guy from Ford.
For the assembly in-between, we had an actual professional baseball player…though not a particularly exciting one. He was a pitcher who had only been in the majors for a year or two, and I believe he'd sat out most of the previous season with an injury. He was with the New York Mets and he was in-town to throw against the Dodgers. Given his then-current earned run average, the odds favored him losing.
I recall that the crowd liked him a lot. He was charming and funny and obviously quite serious about The Game. But he wasn't Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale, the recent superstars of Dodger pitching. He wasn't even Ron Perranoski, who was the guy they usually sent in for the ninth inning to save Sandy and Don when they got weary. Our guest speaker was just an undistinguished Met. That made it somewhat absurd when, during the Q-and-A segment, a member of the audience asked him: "Who's the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game today?"
And the undistinguished Met didn't ponder his choices for even a moment. He said, "I am."
Everyone laughed at the sheer audacity of the statement. Had a Sandy Koufax said it, we might have cheered in agreement but for this unknown…this Nolan Ryan kid to claim to be the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game? Ha! What an ego! What a pretentious, outlandish claim!
Flash-forward just five years: The Guinness Book of World Records certifies Nolan Ryan — now a California Angel — as the hardest-throwing pitcher in recorded Major League Baseball history. On August 20, 1974, he is pitching against the Chicago White Sox. There's a three-and-two count against the batter in the ninth inning and Ryan fires one across the plate at 100.9 miles an hour.
Hmm…that claim of his don't seem so outrageous now, does it?
And just so we all have some idea of how fast that is: 100.9 miles per hour is the wind velocity of a moderate-level tornado. It's also about the speed Californians slow to in a School Zone, especially when driving Ford Mustangs. Then let's flash-forward to the end of his twenty-seventh season…
That's right: 27. A seven with a two in front of it.
Nolan Ryan is now the holder of 53 Major League Baseball records. He has thrown 5,714 strikeouts and won 324 games, including 7 no-hitters. Most pitchers go their whole careers and don't come within a spitball of a no-hitter. Ryan threw seven. (Actually, just lasting 27 seasons in professional baseball is a stunning accomplishment, in and of itself.)
Mr. Ryan, if you're reading this — and I know you aren't — I'd like to apologize on behalf of all the male students who attended University High in 1968. We all thought you were…well, let's be polite and say "exaggerating."
Oh, hell, let's be accurate and say "full of crap." In hindsight, it doesn't seem like such an outrageous claim to make. If he wasn't the hardest-throwing pitcher in all of baseball when he said it, he was darned close.