Nolan Ryan Pitching Quotes

So consciousness is best left uninvited from most of the parties. When it does get included, it’s usually the last one to hear the information. Take hitting a baseball. On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, the Guinness Book of World Records clocked Nolan Ryan’s fastball at 100.9 miles per hour (44.7 meters per second). If you work the numbers, you’ll see that Ryan’s pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate, sixty-feet, six inches away, in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to hit the batter’s eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual system at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and modify the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But the surprising part is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second, as we will see in Chapter 2. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it. One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.

Wheels within wheels was another of Minna's phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he'd dated behind each other's backs, he'd bug his eyes and intone, wheels within wheels. No met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away---wheels within wheels.

1991 season. But he wouldn’t forget about missing out on a major contract, and some of his teammates believed that became a defining moment for him. Starting, finishing, and winning the game were the only things Morris believed in. In essence, they became his personal bottom line and perhaps the only thing he could control in the game after the collusion cases of the mid-1980s. “I’ve been in many games with him where he’d give up a four-or five-or six-spot in the first two innings and refuse to come out of the game,” said Kirk Gibson, who was Morris’s teammate in Detroit and another victim of collusion. “He’d walk in the dugout and say, ‘I’ve never lost with ten.’ We’d win, 9–8. “Or if he’s out there and it’s the eleventh inning and we’re up by six runs and he has to give up four to win, he’s certainly not coming out of the game.” Such an approach didn’t lead to the best of numbers at times. Morris finished his career with 254 victories but a 3.90 ERA, leading to debate whether he deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. Still, within the game Morris was regarded as one of the best of his era. “The pitcher who best fits the description of a workhorse today is Jack Morris, Detroit’s ace for so long,” Nolan Ryan wrote in his book Kings of the Hill, which came out shortly after the 1991 World Series. “The standard is going to be 250 innings, and Morris has been good for that nearly every season. He got to finish a lot of games with the Tigers because Sparky Anderson trusted him even more than he did his bullpen. That’s remarkable when you consider that Willie Hernandez, the Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player in 1984, was their stopper.” Twins bullpen coach Rick Stelmaszek remembered when Morris was going through that bitter divorce in 1991, “and by August, I was siding with his wife. But he was a competitor to the max. He was the pitcher of the eighties. If he had good stuff, he’d just laugh at you, and if he didn’t, he’d battle you and figure out a way to beat you.” Ron Gardenhire’s locker was located near Morris’s for the worst-to-first season in the Metrodome. “So I got a first-hand look, day after day, about how he went about his business,” the third-base coach remembered. “Nobody loved the big game, with it all on the line, more than Jack.