by Tim Wendel
Unlike most pitching prospects, Price could already throw a two-seam and a four-seam fastball. The two-seamer will tail or run away from right-handed hitters, while the four-seamer will bear in upon a batter’s hands. Not only had Price mastered both variations of the fastball; he had a good idea of when to throw them, too.
But what really got Bosman’s attention was Price’s delivery. In baseball terms, it was “clean,” meaning it had few cricks or contortions as he threw the ball to the plate. Bosman, who often watches the Golf Channel in his hotel room after another long day at the diamond, compares the motion with Tiger Woods’s golf swing. Both are efficient and able to be easily fine-tuned because they’re “relatively simple in nature.”
That said, Price had plenty of obstacles to overcome. Not only was there plenty of competition to make the Rays’ staff coming out of spring training, but there was concern about how many innings Price could realistically pitch this season at the big-league level. The previous two years he had thrown about 120 innings. A regular spot in Tampa Bay’s starting rotation would see that workload approach 200 innings. “That increase for anybody,” Bosman says, pausing for the right words, “is something you’d rather not do.”
Although Bosman says Price “went through the [Rays’] minor league like Sherman through Atlanta,” a list of things to work on awaited the young phenom as the new season began. They ranged from gaining better control of his slider to knowing the correct situation to throw his changeup. Despite Price having one of the best fastballs to come along in some time, Bosman wasn’t interested in working on an increase in Price’s velocity. In fact, the more he saw the young phenom pitch, the more he became convinced that Price’s stuff moved best in the mid-90s, not when he approached 100 miles per hour on the radar gun.
“There’s something to learn and something to accomplish at every level, especially spring training,” Bosman says. “David did a great job in the big leagues last year, but we all know that the pitcher has the advantage the first time around. When you’re honking it up there at 96, 97 miles per hour and doing it from the left side, that’s a pretty good advantage the first time around.
“But if you’re going to go out there and face a lineup three or four times a game, you’re going to need more than a fastball to do that. I don’t care how hard you throw. Hitters can tune it up a little bit and they’re going to get to you. You need other weapons. You need to know exactly what you’re doing out there. That’s something that hasn’t changed since forever in this game.”
One of the things I love about baseball is that so many great players come from such mythical-sounding small towns straight out of Americana. Bob Feller was from Van Meter, Iowa; Lefty Grove from Lonaconing, Maryland; and Walter Johnson from Humboldt, Kansas. It reminds me of the scene from The Natural where the train stops in the middle of nowhere and a young buck, somehow played by Robert Redford, steps out of the shadows and shuts down the big-time slugger. It seems as if the next great arm is out there amid the rows of corn, as elusive as the ghosts in Field of Dreams, ready to stride to the mound, if only we can find him . . . and sign him to a long-term deal.
Nolan Ryan was another fireballer who seemingly came out of nowhere. He was born in Refugio, Texas, and his family moved to nearby Alvin, Texas, when he was six weeks old. Located almost midway between Houston and Galveston, Alvin has become more suburban outpost than small town since Ryan’s upbringing in the years after World War II. Even Ryan, its most famous favorite son, admits that the weather in Alvin can often be lousy and the place can be thick with mosquitoes and humidity during the summer. Rain and hurricanes can plague it during the winter months. But for Ryan no place was better suited for his development as a person as well as a big-league pitcher.
“I never found a place where I wanted to live more than Alvin,” Ryan wrote in his autobiography, Throwing Heat. “I guess if I were a member of the Chamber of Commerce, I’d have trouble selling the place.... [But] for me it’s where my roots are, where I’ve always been. It’s home.”
Alvin had a population of about 5,000 when Ryan was growing up there. The town would close up tight by 10:00 p.m., and Ryan later compared it to the backdrop of The Last Picture Show—the kind of place where it’s early to bed, early to rise, and everybody knows everybody else’s business.
Ryan’s father, Lynn Nolan Ryan, worked in the oil industry. Other dads grew rice or raised cattle, and pretty much all the moms stayed at home. The Ryan homestead was a four-bedroom on Dezo Drive, where Ryan was the youngest of six children. When it was time for his two older sisters to head off to college, the family was in need of extra cash, so Ryan’s father got a second job delivering the morning paper, the Houston Post. Much more is made now of how to raise a bona fide sports superstar. Of course, Woods was swinging a golf club right out of diapers. Up in Canada, kids begin to skate as soon as they can walk, with their parents daydreaming about their offspring being the next Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretzky. But Ryan’s father never pushed sports. Sure, he and the other dads in town helped lay out the first ball fields in Alvin, one of which now sports Nolan’s name. But things had a more serious purpose back then. When that second job, folding and delivering the Houston Post papers at 2:00 a.m., needed to be done, it was decided that young Nolan should tag along. At an abandoned Sinclair service station in town, Ryan folded papers from two to three in the morning and then headed back home to grab a few more hours of sleep before school.
“I got quite an education,” he said in his autobiography. “Oh, there’d be an occasional drunk staggering by from out of the pool hall down the street. . . . And I’d see skunks crawl out of the drainage system to eat the popcorn that people dropped coming out of the movie.”
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 w
atching.
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 fami
ly 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.
Steve 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.”
