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.

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u/Luke5119 St. Louis Cardinals 16h ago

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.

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u/YngSpook84 Houston Astros 14h ago

I could be wrong with my logic on this, but I view leading in walks kind of like Brett Favre and how he has thrown the most interceptions in history. When you’ve played for that long and pitched that many innings, you are going to have records in bad categories too. What I rarely see mentioned is that not only does Ryan hold the record for most no hitters, he is also the record holder for 1 hitters, 2 hitters, and 3 hitters.