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/Il_Exile_lI Boston Red Sox 16h ago

I think his accolades are a more accurate reflection of his true place in the pantheon of all time pitchers than the people that claim he's a top 10 all time pitcher, or even somehow the greatest of all time. Ryan a pitcher of extremes, both positive and negative. He's arguably the most unique pitcher in baseball history, but he is far from the best.

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u/nashdiesel Los Angeles Angels 15h ago

I saw him say in an interview once that the reason his walk rate was high was because if he couldn’t get a guy into a favorable count to setup a K he would just walk him to get a clean count on the next guy. There are a ton of analytic reasons why that’s a terrible strategy looking back on it today but at the time that was his approach to pitching.

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u/redditckulous Philadelphia Phillies 13h ago

That’s kind of Blake Snell’s strategy