To: Phantom Lord
Ryan had the best right arm in baseball history.
To: KSCITYBOY
Ryan had the best right arm in baseball history.
He may have had the hardest throwing right arm in baseball history (and even that may be a question of debate - especially among old-time Baltimore Oriole hands who remember a minor league pitcher named Steve Dalkowski, who blew his arm out practically the minute he finally made the Orioles), but Nolan Ryan was very far from being the best righthanded pitcher in baseball history. From where I sit, the best righthanded pitcher in baseball history would be Walter Johnson as the head of a class including second place being shared extremely tightly by Christy Mathewson, Bob Gibson, and Tom Seaver.
It's easy enough to overrate Nolan Ryan because of the five thousand strikeouts and the seven no-hitters, but the plain truth is that he was a very overrated pitcher (aside from his overall winning percentage, his earned run averages are serviceable but not singular) who was actually very vulnerable, overall, when his teams were anywhere close to a pennant race. (He was, in fact, passing his prime when he turned in his single best pennant race or postseason performance, in the 1986 League Championship Series; Bob Gibson he wasn't in the heat of a pennant race or in the post-season, overall.) And he wasn't even close to Walter Johnson or Tom Seaver for pitching top-of-the-line baseball for comparatively bad teams.
This is not to say he didn't earn his place in the Hall of Fame, by any means. He did earn it. But he was not the greatest righthanded pitcher of them all regardless of the raw quality of his pitching arm, and he was certainly not one of the top ten pitchers in baseball history.
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