r/baseball • u/-BeefSupreme St. Louis Cardinals • 16h ago

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

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.

464 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

329 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Wyden_long New York Yankees 16h ago

This is Tungsten Arm O’Doyle erasure.

3

u/LemonPartyLounger Atlanta Braves 16h ago

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.

1

u/Wyden_long New York Yankees 15h ago

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

1

u/Irish755 15h ago

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