High Heat (11 page)

Beginning in second grade, Ryan rolled papers until he was 14 and was old enough to drive and have a route of his own. The family distributed the paper until Ryan was out of high school. Later on, some would claim that Ryan's longevity and strength throwing a baseball came from flipping those papers out the window of his 1952 Chevy in the early-morning hours. Unfortunately, that myth was disproved when Ryan later revealed that he used his left hand, not his pitching arm, to peg those papers. That said, Ryan did reveal in his autobiography that he was able to roll and tie 50 newspapers in five minutes. That kind of exercise had to result in strong wrists and fingers.

“When I was in ninth grade, they had the President's Physical Fitness tests. It was really a joke because it had little to do with physical fitness,” Ryan recalls. “You ran 40 yards, did X number of push-ups, sit-ups, and one of the deals was softball toss. So we go out to the football field, with no warm-up, no nothing. It was here it is, just throw it. I threw it 309 feet. I'll never forget that number.”

He adds, “As a kid, I could always throw the ball farther than anybody else. But my velocity was no different than the top four or five kids in Little League. I was not a standout in Little League.

“Then I hit my last growth spurt as a sophomore in high school. That was the first year in high school back then. I went to baseball practice right after the basketball season ended. All of a sudden, it was like I had a different arm.”

Growing up Ryan played baseball and basketball, but in talking with him, you almost get the sense that sports in his family were a definite afterthought. They certainly weren't regarded as a ticket to stardom, even when he began to throw with much greater velocity. Ryan, like Steve Dalkowski and others, began turning heads by his sophomore year in high school. Perhaps that's one factor that remains the same through the years—if you aren't making waves by early high school, a college scholarship or a big-league contract probably isn't in the offing. Certainly there are exceptions. Billy Wagner
and Kevin Brown are two pitchers who gained speed in their fastball later on. But such cases are unusual. By the time Ryan was 16, it was acknowledged that he was the fastest pitcher in and around Alvin. He couldn't get the ball over the plate half the time, but the speed was apparent to anybody who was really watching.

Incredibly, not many were. Unlike Dalkowski, whose high school games had dozens of big-league scouts in attendance, Ryan had basically one guy in his corner back then—John “Red” Murff. In March of 1963, Murff was working for the lowly New York Mets. He had left the Houston Colt 45s and was pretty far down the baseball totem pole. After pitching in 26 games in the mid-'50s for the Milwaukee Braves, he had become a bird dog: a guy who beat the bushes for talent and tried to convince the higher-ups that what he found had some merit.

Murff's Saturday morning had begun in Galveston and he had about an hour to kill before another game that evening in the Houston area. There was a high school tournament going on in Alvin and Murff decided to stop by. There was only one other scout in attendance, Mickey Sullivan from the Philadelphia Phillies. Murff can't remember the name of the team Alvin High was playing—it was either Clear Lake or Clear Creek—but he'll never forget the tall, lanky right-hander he saw on the mound that day for Alvin.

“You almost hear that ball explode,” Murff later recalled.

Other than the fastball, the kid didn't have much. The first batter he faced hit a double to right-center field off an awful hanging curve. Still, that fastball was something. In it, Murff saw glimmers of the gift, something that cannot be taught.

He asked Sullivan who the kid was.

“Nolan Ryan,” Sullivan replied. “He doesn't have too much, does he?”

Murff bit his tongue and agreed with Sullivan. Yes, indeed, the kid had a lousy breaking ball.

A few weeks later, Murff found himself at Colt Stadium in Houston for several major-league games between the home team and the visiting Cincinnati Reds. The 45s' Turk Farrell and the Reds' Jim
Maloney were both hard throwers, with fastballs supposedly in the mid-90s. But as Murff watched them work, he realized the skinny kid he'd seen back in Alvin may have been even faster. From then on there was no arguing the scout off this point, and certainly there were many in the Mets' organization who tried to do just that. For Red Murff, Nolan Ryan had the goods, and he was going to do his best not only to sign the kid, but also to protect him.

As Ryan's sophomore year came to an end, Murff paid a visit to Alvin High School. He told Jim Watson, the baseball coach, that he had 1 of the 10 best arms in the country on his team. On his third guess, Watson finally realized that Murff was talking about Ryan.

Murff convinced Watson to keep the kid away from the weight room in the off-season. He was afraid that if Ryan bulked up, the velocity on his fastball would suffer. In addition, Murff asked Watson not to send in the school's scores to the Houston papers.

“What's the point of that?” Watson asked.

That kind of attention would hurt Ryan's concentration, Murff told him. Of course, keeping the scores from being called in to the big city newspaper was also a ploy that would help Murff keep the young prospect under wraps. While Watson agreed to keep Ryan away from the weight room and the scores strictly hush-hush, he couldn't quite fathom what Murff saw in the lanky young pitcher.

“Nolan didn't have any idea where the ball was going, but he didn't exactly have to thread the needle back then,” Watson said years later. “Those kids were so scared, they'd swing at anything just to get out of there. Once he broke a player's wrist, and once a kid just refused to come up and hit against him. He'd average fifteen, sixteen strikeouts sometimes in those seven-inning games.

“In Texas, back in the '60s, football was king. We only played baseball because the state made us. The major leagues to us in Alvin were a million miles away.”

Ryan saw how wide that chasm was when he went to a game in Houston and saw Sandy Koufax pitch. He came away amazed by how fast the Dodgers left-hander was. How sharp that curveball was. The idea that he could do the same thing someday seemed downright
ridiculous. But through it all, Red Murff believed. He assigned Robert “Red” Gaskell, who lived in Texas City and had some extra time on his hands, to attend every one of Ryan's games. He was to report back to Murff about the games Murff couldn't see in person. And more importantly, he needed to alert Murff if any other scouts came around. Scouts for other organizations did occasionally pass through town, but none showed any genuine interest in Ryan.

“Back then, I was 6-2 and weighed 150,” Ryan says. “But Red Murff did his homework. He talked to my dad, who was a big man, and learned about my family history. He knew I'd fill out, but the rest of them didn't think so. Red thought outside the box and stuck up for me.”

As for that promising speed? Why didn't that make for more believers?

“There were no radar guns—I didn't know how fast I was. I was so wild,” Ryan says. “I was just a kid with a great arm. I didn't know what I had. No one did—only Red Murff.”

Ryan remained below the radar well into his senior year at Alvin. That's when Bing Devine, the Mets' assistant to the team president, made a special trip to south Texas to see him pitch. The timing couldn't have been worse for an audition. Watson's club had lost back-to-back 1–0 games, and as a consequence the coach first had his ballplayers run wind sprints and then forced them to face Ryan, wild as ever, in a team batting practice. It wasn't until this day of penance and contrition was winding to a close that Murff got in touch with Watson. Devine would be in town tomorrow, he told the coach, and Ryan had to pitch.

At first, Watson told Murff there was no way. Between the wind sprints and the extra pitching session, Ryan was spent. Couldn't they do it another time? But Devine was only going to be in town one day. Ryan just had to go, Watson said. And the high school coach reluctantly agreed.

Ryan's outing the next day was one of the worst of his high school career.

“Well, Ryan pitched and he was bad,” Devine later told Harvey Frommer. “He just had a miserable day. We didn't have radar guns
in those days, so we relied on the scout's eye and his personal analysis of how hard a pitcher threw. The way I checked to see if a pitcher threw hard was to see if the opposing hitters made contact at all, if they even hit foul balls.

“If the hitters at that level of play made contact, then you realized that the pitcher wasn't as fast as he appeared. Not only was Ryan wild that day, but the other team hit the ball. The team made considerable contact.”

Afterward Ryan was disconsolate, thinking he had blown his big chance. He had only pitched into the third inning and left the game trailing 7–0.

Devine departed with Murff, heading back to Houston and the airport. Murff remembers the traffic was terrible and both men were in a foul mood. Finally, the scout asked Devine, “What do we do now? You gonna knock me out of the box?”

“You've been seeing this fellow for three years in high school. You know what he can do,” Devine replied. “Obviously I won't be able to corroborate your great report when we sit at a meeting up there in New York City and set up our list of draft choices. But I won't fight it. I'll just say that Red Murff says Ryan is better than I saw him, and he undoubtedly is.”

In the weeks that followed, the Mets went a step further. They sent Murff around the country to see five of the other top arms coming out of high school. Just to make sure that old Red wasn't sipping too much of the Kool-Aid. But even after his tour, Murff maintained that none of the other pitchers he had seen compared to one Nolan Ryan. The kid from Alvin, Texas, remained on the team draft board, and the Mets ended up taking him in the 12th round, the 295th player taken overall. That's a long way off from the maximum bonus money allowed, more illicit cash under the table, and perhaps a new Pontiac, blue with a racing stripe, thrown in to boot.

While Ryan was initially disappointed at how far he had fallen in the draft, Murff told him it was OK. At least the young phenom was in the game now.

If Steve Dalkowski's contract signing resembled an auction, Ryan's occurred with a curious tension. Despite his being a low draft pick,
the Mets put together a $30,000 package, with incentives. As part of the negotiations, the Ryan family had allowed a local sportswriter, Steve Vernon, to sit in. He was supposed to be a fly on the wall, staying silent on the big signing day. But when Ryan hesitated to sign the contract, it was Vernon who finally blurted out, “What's the matter with you, boy? You crazy? Sign!”

With that Ryan finally put pen to paper, and his professional career was under way.

 

 

S
teve Dalkowski was scared to death when he left his home in New Britain, Connecticut, at the age of 18. On the train trip down to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he had been assigned in the Orioles' minor-league system, he stared out the window, watching the landscape fade from small-town New England, roaring past the big cities of the Northeast Corridor—New York, Philadelphia, Washington. There were two things he couldn't get out of his mind. One was the color of the very land itself. As he went further south, it became reddish-brown, almost the color of dried blood. This red-dirt clay was so unlike where he had grown up. The other thing that rattled around in his head was that if he was so good, could throw so hard, why were the Orioles sending him so far away from Baltimore, where the big-league team played?

Of course, Dalkowski was a long way from being ready to play in the major leagues. But consider how much has changed since Dalkowski and so many other young prospects were signed a generation ago. Today the latest phenom is routinely coddled and pampered to the point that it riles the old-timers.

“It's a world apart from what we went through,” says Jerry Coleman, who was a second baseman in the majors from 1949 to 1957 and later became the radio voice of the San Diego Padres. “After a while, they finally figured out that the well of talent wasn't bottomless. That you better be careful with the arms you sign and develop what you have.”

Indeed, the concept now extends throughout most organizations in baseball. Visit the academies in Venezuela or the Dominican Republic,
and the players' dorms or barracks often resemble the chain hotels. The kind that a lucky prospect could call home in Great Falls, Montana, or Modesto, California. Lessons in English are often mandatory, and some recruits can even gain their high school diploma while training for baseball. In Dalkowski's era, it was much more sink or swim. A Darwinian situation where the players had a lot of down time and little guidance.

His rookie year, at Kingsport, Tennessee, Dalkowski learned how to chew tobacco, struck out 19 batters in a game he lost, and led the league with 39 wild pitches. Seeing that Kingsport was a dry town, he caught rides across the state line to get his beer. It was also in Kingsport that the legend of his wildness gained a new chapter.

One night an opposing hitter was crowding the plate and a Dalkowski fastball sailed up and in, striking him on the side of the head. Legend has it that the pitch tore off part of the batter's ear. Filmmaker Tom Chiappetta, who has spent a dozen years putting together a documentary about Dalkowski, doesn't believe that the story is true.

“The guy he hit was named Bob Beavers and he played for the Bluefield Dodgers,” Chiappetta says. “From what I understand Mr. Beavers's ear may have been nicked, but it was still pretty much intact.”

Beavers went to the hospital with a concussion, however, and soon retired from baseball. John-William Greenbaum, a student at Indiana University who has done extensive research on Dalkowski's career, says the errant pitch caught Beavers “just above the right ear,” splitting the cartilage. “There was a lot of blood,” Greenbaum says. “From what I'm told there was a pretty serious scar. But if it took anything off, it was a very small amount of flesh.”