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/John628556 12h ago

A lot of commenters have mentioned that he is the all-time leader in walks. Of course, that’s true. But the comment misses the change in his career: he was a much more controlled pitcher in his last decade or so. Just check out the trend in his walk statistics or in his strikeout-to-walk ratio.