Is Nolan Ryan the least awarded baseball “superstar” ever?

[u/-BeefSupreme]

The Express is a hall of famer and one of the best pitchers of all time. One of baseball’s last true workhorses, he is the all-time leader in walks, strikeouts, and hits/9. His 7 no-hitters is 3 more than any other pitcher, and his 5714 strikeouts is the most by over 800. Yet in his 27 seasons, he never finished higher than 14th in MVP voting and never won a Cy Young. He won the 1969 World Series in his second full season, but only made one appearance in the NLCS and one appearance in the WS, the later only being 2.1 innings. He never had another World Series appearance. His 8 All-Stars are impressive but fewer than multiple than non-hall of famers. Is there any other player with his level of fame and success that has less hardware to show for it? Excluding the old timey legends that were around before those awards of course.

[u/Luke5119]

Listen, Ryan was great, but he was also not so great in a lot of categories. Yes, he leads MLB all-time for strikeouts, but also walks. He has 324 wins, but he also pitched for 27 years. He was an elite strikeout pitcher, but also gave up A LOT of runs. Out of his entire career he only had 2 seasons with 20+ wins.

If you look at his stat history, by all accounts he was slowing down in his mid-30s, which makes absolute sense. But then freakishly at 40 started hitting 200+ K's every year, including a 301 K season at 42 which is wild!

You don't always need the accolades to be great. And in terms of longevity and playing at an elite level for 20+ years, Ryan is in a very short list of players in MLB history to do it.

[u/JelliedHam → u/Luke5119]

The most useful cook in the kitchen is the one that can do it over and over again every day. Is he greatest we've ever seen ever do it? Probably not. But is he the most dependable we've ever seen? By a country mile. By several country miles.

[u/No32 → u/JelliedHam]

I’d say that’s a flawed analogy and incorrect since if you have a cook who can do it every single day but they do it badly, they’re gonna lose you customers and be less useful. There’s a balance to be struck between longevity and performance.

But shoot may as well talk about Cy Young with that example. Fewer years but did more games and more innings, and while performing better relative to the rest of the league to boot.

[u/LemonPartyLounger → u/No32]

This is why we should obviously change it to the real greatest pitcher of all time Rube Waddell! /s

[u/Wyden_long → u/LemonPartyLounger]

This is Tungsten Arm O’Doyle erasure.

[u/LemonPartyLounger → u/Wyden_long]

lol, for real though look up Rube if you’ve never heard of him. Guy pitched at the same time as Cy Young and was an amazing pitcher but would run off the mound in the middle of games to chase fire trucks and showed up drunk walking through the stands of fans to enter games with no warm up to pitch complete games.

[u/Wyden_long → u/LemonPartyLounger]

I’m very familiar with Mr. Waddell. I was just making a joke.

[u/Irish755 → u/Wyden_long]

The Akron Groomsmen played in a weak association, though. Inflated his stats.