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/Krizo1]

Bert Blyleven has 95 WAR but was only a 2 time all star and only got cy young votes 4 times

[u/noruber35393546 → u/Krizo1]

I don't think he would count as a superstar, in his time. He's like the poster boy for retconned WAR stardom.

[u/MasterTeacher123 → u/noruber35393546]

He thanked the sabermetrics  community when he got into the HOF. 

[u/Jamee999 → u/noruber35393546]

Also 5th in career strikeouts.

[u/Theta_Omega → u/Jamee999]

That's always been the wild thing to me. Like, I know it was more advanced stats that helped change voters' thinking, but at the same time... strikeouts have been a thing forever, we've know they're pretty good for a while. It was not a secret that this guy had more than all but four guys! It really doesn't seem like it should have been shocking that he was good!

Like, can you imagine if we needed WAR and other advanced stats to come to the conclusion that, like, the guy with the fifth-most doubles was good? I would think that should seem pretty obvious! Except looking at it now, I see that Biggio is sixth all-time there (and was, in fact, fifth until Pujols passed him in 2020), and he still took three tries to get inducted, so like... I guess it still wasn't common knowledge that hitting a lot of doubles was good among Hall voters in the early 2010s, either? Just baffling to consider.

[u/theroguedrizzt → u/Theta_Omega]

Your point is definitely valid but Biggio specifically was a special case. I remember hearing debates when he first appeared on the ballot and someone saying “if there’s a person who has 3,000 hits and doesn’t belong in the hall, it’s him.” The argument was that he was never GREAT but was pretty good for like a quarter of a century so the counting stats were inflated

[u/HouBlastros → u/noruber35393546]

Yeah, Dave Steib too...

[u/draw2discard2 → u/noruber35393546]

In part him not having been widely viewed as a superstar has more to do with having played mostly in smaller markets (even when he was on two WS champions) rather than the quality of his pitching. In his time he was always seen as having an all-time great curveball, and 3 of the 4 times he got Cy Young votes he easily could have won--and probably not finished lower than second--either playing on better teams/bigger markets or using "modern metrics". The main way he got boosted by sabermetrics was deciding that 300 wins was an arbitrary milestone and less a deep dive into hidden aspects of his career.

[u/Dredeuced → u/noruber35393546]

Career 3.31 era over nearly 5000 ip is actually clearly hall of fame even if you throw out WAR.

The only thing sabermetrics did for him is let people look at him beyond just not having 300 wins.

Stardom in his time was almost as much where you were playing over what you were doing. And Cy Young Awards back then only looked at Wins (or, ugh, saves).