Better 7 punches to the head rather than a 100 mph fastball.
Lol. Love this video, haven’t seen it for a couple years. Thanks.
Not really punched with the kind of authority that Ryan was known to throw balls. Like many great pitchers he was a head hunter. He let the batter know whose plate it was.
He’s up there. One of the best.
Pitchers aren’t know for being great hitters. Don Drusdale, Rick Rhoden, Babe Ruth and Nolan Ryan are exceptions.
Nolan raises cattle, not owns cattle, he raises cattle. And at that time he was into bulldogging for fun.
Nolan Ryan-Robin Ventura: The Inside Story Of Baseball’s Most Famous Fight
Much has been made about the “Ventura Fight” but most don’t realize its roots started three years earlier in Florida.
In the 1990s, Chicago’s Craig Grebeck was one of baseball’s smallest everyday players. Just 5’7”, he compensated for his lack of stature with the attitude of Goliath.
During a spring training game against the Rangers in 1990, Grebeck hit a home run on the first pitch and pumped his fists triumphantly as he jogged around the bases. Sitting on the Rangers bench, Ryan stared at the Lilliputian and made a mental note.
A few months later the Rangers were at Comiskey Park. Ryan was on the mound, and Grebeck hit a home run off him. As he had in Florida, Grebeck whooped it up rounding the bases. When Ryan got back to the bench, he asked pitching coach Tom House, “Who is that boy?”
House told him Grebeck’s name.
“How old is he?” asked Ryan next. “He looks like he’s about 12.”
“He’s pretty young,” said House.
“Well, I’m gonna put some age on the little squirt. He’s swinging like he isn’t afraid of me.”
“Sure enough,” recalls House, “next time up [in the teams’ next meeting], plunk! Nolan hits him right in the friggin’ back. Grebeck was 0-for the rest of the year off him.”
Thus began three seasons of constant strife between the Texas Rangers and Chicago White Sox.
“It didn’t help,” says House, “that Chicago hitting coach Walt Hriniak taught his hitters to cover the outside third of the plate. He even had his hitters dive toward the plate in order to cover the outside corner.
“That was encroaching on Ryan’s turf. His fastball spent so much time on the outside half it could have taken up residence there. ‘Half the plate’s yours, half is mine,’ was Ryan’s thinking. ‘you don’t know what half I want. But if you’re going to take away half of the plate that I want, you’re gonna pay.’
“He hit a bunch of White Sox. They had a philosophy that didn’t quite fit in with Nolan’s philosophy, and we had three or four fights with them, because Nolan would pitch into hitters that were diving.”
Robin Ventura disagrees. It wasn’t batting stances that caused the friction, he says, but a good old-fashioned bean-ball war.
“Hriniak didn’t have anything to do with it,” Ventura claims. “At the time in baseball the zone was low and away, and that was where pitchers were getting you out. We weren’t the only team doing it. It was the kind of pitch that was getting called, so you just had to be able to go out and get it.”
In any case, altercations between the two teams accelerated:
August 17, 1990: Ryan hit Grebeck again in his first at-bat on the first pitch. Three innings later the Sox retaliated by hitting Rangers third baseman Steve Buechele.
September 6, 1991: Ryan hit Ventura in the back at Arlington.
August 2, 1993: Two days before the Ventura fight, Roger Pavlik of the Rangers hit Ron Karkovice. Chicago retaliated by hitting Dean Palmer twice and Mario Diaz once.
“We had a lot of going back and forth that season,” says Ventura. “Guys were getting hit regularly, and it was just one of those things where something was going to eventually happen.”