Did you guys know....

[Steff]

That 30 years ago Nolan Ryan tossed 235 pitches in a game against the Red Sox...??

 

 

And went on to pitch for 19 more years after that.

 

 

Friggin' babies out there these days

[Goldmember]

That 30 years ago Nolan Ryan tossed 235 pitches in a game against the Red Sox...??

 

 

And went on to pitch for 19 more years after that.

 

 

Friggin' babies out there these days 

they should be doing that and going on 3 days rest too...

[southsider2k5]

This is the whole article from the Trib

 

Thirty years ago Monday night, in a cavernous, nearly empty Anaheim Stadium, Denny Doyle doubled home Mickey Rivers in the bottom of the 15th inning to lift the California Angels to a 4-3 victory over the Boston Red Sox.

 

Barry Raziano pitched two innings of relief to earn his only major-league victory. Raziano, who runs a construction company in Louisiana, said recently he has no recollection of the game, which puts him in the overwhelming majority.

 

But you could argue that someone will eclipse Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak before another game is played like the one on June 14, 1974.

 

Standing at his clubhouse cubicle before a recent game, Angels pitcher Jarrod Washburn eyeballed a copy of the disco-era game log and shook his head.

 

"No," Washburn said. "It won't happen again."

 

What happened was this: Boston starter Luis Tiant pitched 14 1/3 innings and took the loss. Nolan Ryan of the Angels lasted 13 innings, struck out 19, walked 10 and--hold on to your helmets--threw 235 pitches.

 

Ryan said two memories stood out: striking out Cecil Cooper six times and "not wanting to come out" after heaving his final pitch, which yielded a groundout to second by Carl Yastrzemski.

 

By today's standards, Tiant and Ryan each pitched more than two "quality starts"--six innings, three earned runs or fewer allowed--on the same night.

 

"Quality start?" Ryan chuckled over the phone. "In those days, if I had pitched only six innings and gave up three runs, I had a bad outing and I was hacked off. And I can tell you what: My manager and general manager weren't happy either."

 

No big deal

 

What makes the 1974 game seem remarkable now is how unremarkable it seemed then.

 

The Los Angeles Times' account acknowledged "Tiant and Ryan dueled tenaciously," yet no mention was made of Ryan's pitch count. Ryan knows he threw 235 only because Tom Morgan, the Angels' pitching coach, kept track on a hand-held clicker.

 

"I think he did it out of, I don't know if it was curiosity or what," Ryan said.

 

No pitch totals are available on Tiant, but how could he not have thrown at least 180?

 

Yet there were no grievances filed to the players union, no complaints by either pitcher about inhumane treatment, no newspaper writer's rebuke of the managers who allowed it and, in the case of Ryan, no rest for the weary.

 

"It obviously ruined his arm, because he had to retire 19 years later," said Bill James, a renowned chronicler of baseball facts and figures.

 

Ryan took his regularly scheduled start four days later and won, pitched again five days later and won again, started five days after that and tossed a one-hit shutout against Texas.

 

"Guys like Nolan Ryan, they only come around once every 100 years or so," Washburn said.

 

Ryan may have been blessed with a bionic arm, but he did not corner the market on durability. He finished with 26 complete games in 1973 and again in 1974--and did not lead the American League either year. Cleveland's Gaylord Perry had 29 in 1973, and ex-Cub and then-Ranger Fergie Jenkins had 29 in 1974.

 

Ryan, who won 324 games and pitched until he was 46, led the league in innings pitched only once, in 1974, with 332 2/3, four ahead of Jenkins.

 

Since then, baseball has gone from seat-of-the-pants, gut-check performances to Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky. Whether baseball is better now is questionable.

 

Whole new ballgame

 

Modern pitchers rarely are allowed to throw more than 110 pitches, after which chess-master managers consult their flow charts and start a parade of percentage maneuvers involving multitudes of relief pitchers.

 

"You know, in those days," Ryan mused, "I was my own closer."

 

Outrage followed San Francisco manager Felipe Alou's decision to allow Jason Schmidt to throw 144 pitches in a 1-0 shutout of the Cubs on May 18. Ryan says he averaged between 160 and 180 pitches per outing in 1974.

 

For 100 years or so, starting pitchers were warriors and relief pitchers were, Ryan said, guys who never got to pitch "unless your starter was just horrible and got knocked out early."

 

At some point in the 1970s, baseball was transformed, irrevocably, right in the middle of Ryan's career.

 

"I can remember the first couple of starters I knew that didn't go out with the intent of finishing the ballgame," the Hall of Fame pitcher said. "I couldn't fathom that.

 

"I came from the mind-set that it was your game, you were the starter and you had every intention of finishing it. . . . You weren't remotely interested in turning it over to somebody. That's just the way it was. You thought nothing of it."

 

Fred Claire, the Dodgers' former general manager, tried to imagine Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale getting yanked from the mound after topping the 100-pitch count.

 

"Those guys would have looked at [manager] Walter Alston like he was somebody that had come down from Mars," Claire said.

 

In 1933, Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants pitched 18 shutout innings in a 1-0 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. No, his arm didn't fall off.

 

In the seventh game of the 1962 World Series, New York Yankees manager Ralph Houk allowed starter Ralph Terry, a right-hander, to face San Francisco Giants left-handed slugger Willie McCovey in the bottom of the ninth of a 1-0 game with runners at second and third.

 

McCovey lined out to second baseman Bobby Richardson in a classic World Series ending.

 

On July 2, 1963, Juan Marichal of the Giants and Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves matched pitches in a game the Giants won 1-0 on Willie Mays' solo home run in the bottom of the 16th.

 

Think this is the same sport?

 

In 1974 there were 1,089 complete games thrown in the major leagues by 24 teams. Last year there were 209 by 30 teams.

 

In 1974 the Boston Red Sox's pitching staff had 71 complete games. In 2003 the Houston Astros had one.

 

In 1968 Detroit's Denny McLain led the majors with 30 complete games. Last year three players led the majors with nine, including the White Sox's Bartolo Colon.

 

Some say baseball isn't better or worse now; it's just back-loaded. Whereas Koufax, Drysdale and Don Sutton were the Dodgers' heroes decades ago, Claire noted that "the most exciting player the Dodgers have today is Eric Gagne"--a closer.

 

Broadcaster and baseball historian Bob Costas understands there is no going back from the strategic turn baseball took while acknowledging the game has suffered somewhat.

 

"There's tremendous drama in a guy walking off the mound after completing a tough, complete-game victory or trying to make his way through it," Costas said. "You don't have those moments anymore."

 

Tracking the evolution

 

Why did baseball change and, more important, why did it have to? Even statistician James, the man who turned baseball thinking inside out, can't quite put his finger on the answer.

 

"Without anyone deciding we were going to dramatically change the game, it wandered very, very quickly in a certain direction," James said.

 

Baseball experts cite several factors that coalesced in the 1970s leading to radical departures in baseball thinking:

 

Free agency: It did to the complete game what MTV did to the radio star. When players were finally granted free agency in the 1970s and salaries started to escalate, owners became more interested in protecting their investments.

 

"When we were on one-year contracts and you went down, I can remember they tried to cut people 20 percent or they wouldn't sign you," said Ryan, whose career spanned 1966-93. "All they did was lose a starting pitcher. They didn't lose a starting pitcher and still have to pay him $8 [million] to $10 million over a three- or four-year period."

 

Ryan said front-office men seeking to protect the bottom line began to think that pitchers would last longer if they pitched fewer innings per start.

 

This put more emphasis on relief pitchers, whose increasing roles led to rising salaries that also needed to be justified.

 

Ryan says this begat the modern-day "setup man" and "closer."

 

"Now if you sign a guy for an exorbitant amount of money and you guarantee his contract, you have locked yourself in to that person," Ryan said. "You have committed to that person that he is going to play."

 

Eventually, the "pitch count" worked its way into the manager's decision-making process and is now as much a part of the baseball box score as at-bats.

 

Ryan's opinion of the pitch count: "Absurd."

 

James says the pitch count redefined the way the game was managed and reported.

 

"It was unfair, inaccurate and shouldn't have happened," James said. "But pitch counts became a weapon with which to attack any manager who let a starter throw 130 pitches."

 

Sports medicine: In 1974, Dodgers orthopedic surgeon Frank Jobe performed a historic ligament-transplant surgery on pitcher Tommy John, extending a career that otherwise would have been finished.

 

In the years since, the surgery has prolonged the careers of hundreds of pitchers.

 

Claire said Jobe and other sports doctors made huge strides in understanding the mechanics of the pitching motion and, more important, how unnatural an act it is.

 

As pitchers rehabilitated from injuries, it was understandable their arms were treated with more care.

 

Whereas, Claire said, "When guys in the 1950s hurt their arms, they were done."

 

Inside baseball: James, who once worked at a pork-and-beans plant in Lawrence, Kan., published his first "Baseball Abstract" in 1977 ("Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can't Find Anywhere Else").

 

James was different. For example, he once wrote, "The way that managers have tested the limits of starting pitchers for the last century is quite a bit like the way they used to test for witches, by pond dunking."

 

James' quirky insights were initially shunned by the baseball establishment, but they slowly took root.

 

Expansion: Scioscia says the complete game went on life support because there are more teams.

 

"I think the pitching has become so diluted to where when you have a good one, I think you want to make sure he's handled in a manner that's going to keep him good for a long time," Scioscia said.

 

No turning back

 

Yankee Stadium may still be the House That Ruth Built, but baseball in general today is moored to "specialization" and "economics."

 

No more gladiator Bob Gibsons, no more Nolan Ryans, no more 200-pitch outings.

 

"I don't think so," Claire said. "The course has been set. This is what we have."

 

Major League Baseball's new motto: It is what it is.

 

"I don't like the game as much," Ryan said. "I'm . . . a purist. If a guy is throwing a shutout or a guy pitched a really good game and he's still dominating, you don't take him out. . . . It's hard to accept the changes when, in your mind, it's not for the better."

[dasox24]

That's incredible! 235 pitches in a game... Wow!

[RibbieRubarb]

And the bad side only 35 were strikes...

 

[Texsox]

That 30 years ago Nolan Ryan tossed 235 pitches in a game against the Red Sox...??

 

 

And went on to pitch for 19 more years after that.

 

 

Friggin' babies out there these days 

Ryan is a Texan

[southsider2k5]

Alvin Texas to be exact.

[Wedge]

26 complete games AND HE DIDN'T EVEN LEAD HIS TEAM IN THAT CATEGORY!

[Texsox]

Alvin Texas to be exact.

He has a nice little restaurant and motel on Choke Canyon about 2 hours from my house. I stop in for lunch every once in a while. There is also a nice tribute to him in Victoria, on my drive to Houston.

[whitesoxin']

That is amazing. Pitch counts suck. If you have the right mechanics, the pitchers arm should never be sore.