My Father the Pitcher
Nolan Ryan
Nolan Ryan was born in 1947 in Refugio, Texas. A fastball pitcher with a deadly curve, Ryan played for a number of Major League Baseball teams but is most identified with the Houston Astros and the Texas Rangers. He holds the all-time record for no-hitters, at seven, and was named an All-Star player eight times. He married Ruth Holdorff in 1967, and they have three children, Reid, Reese, and Wendy.
Reid and Nolan posing before a Houston Astros game in the 1980s
my dad grew up wanting to be a rancher, not a Ranger. He bought a calf before he was ten, rented a small plot of land for it to live on, and bottle-fed it. You could do things like that in Refugio, Texas, in the 1950s. It was an idyllic town with big oak trees and an incredible Little League field, where my father learned to throw.
My dad went pro with the Mets in 1966 (and won the World Series with them in 1969), then got traded to the California Angels just after I was born in 1971, but Alvin, Texas, was always home—at least in the off-season. He wanted to be near the horses and cows and bird dogs. In the 1970s, West Coast games weren’t televised in Texas, and there was no interleague play to bring the Angels closer to home. So, for a while, my dad was just another guy in town. One off-season, he pumped gas. Another, he attended community college.
In 1980, the Houston Astros signed my father to the first million-dollar MLB contract, and we began living in Texas full-time. My father’s nickname up north had been Big Tex because he was sort of a hometown-boy cliché: He liked being outside and led a simple family life. He had started dating my mother when he was fifteen. When he moved home, he was still Big Tex, but as a local icon, not a curiosity.
In Alvin, we lived on one hundred acres outside of town in an old remodeled farmhouse. We had a backstop and an infield, and when I was in Little League—and even high school—my team would come over to practice. My dad would try to throw batting practice sometimes, but he was bad at it. He was a 100-percent-effort guy. He couldn’t throw slow. He’d hit you or bounce it. But when the kids on the team asked to see a Major League pitch, he’d show them what the real deal looked like. Maybe not the 108.5 mph fastball he threw in 1974, but something close.
Naturally, I wanted to be a pitcher. But my father was so advanced, it was hard for him to give me guidance—at least at first. I worked on mechanics with Astros pitching coach Tom House when I was getting started on the mound in my teens. My dad cut in only after I understood the basics. He taught me about the mental side of the game when I was considering playing college ball. He taught me how to be the 100-percent-effort guy.
Because he was big and threw hard, people didn’t always understand that he made subtle adjustments and decisions to confuse batters. He prepped, and he had amazing mental discipline. My dad used to say, “Don’t let the failure of your last pitch ruin the success of your next one.” It was kind of a mantra. He always knew who swung at the first pitch and who couldn’t hit a curve. He’d make undisciplined batters chase the ball out of the zone, and he’d stare down the batters he thought he could scare. He understood what he couldn’t control and moved forward.
During the years we lived in Alvin, my dad played for some bad teams. In 1987, he went 8–16 and led the league in ERA. He was the most dominant pitcher in baseball, but his team didn’t win because they didn’t score. He would have had a remarkable record if he’d been back in New York, but he never complained—not in public and not in private. He just thought about the next pitch.
My dad came to watch me play when he could, though he was on the road a lot. It got harder as I got older. He was too famous to sit in the stands. By the time I was pitching for Texas Christian University, he couldn’t come to a game without spending the whole thing signing autographs. So one time, he slipped into our dugout, just to watch the game in peace. We were playing the University of Texas, and their legendary coach Cliff Gustafson complained. It was against the rules for someone unaffiliated with the team to be in the dugout. We didn’t have an assistant pitching coach at the time and my dad had just retired, so he signed up and wore the uniform. The pitcher with the most strikeouts in the history of Major League Baseball had become our assistant coach.
I remember a game we played against Texas A&M. They had these boisterous fans who were ragging us the whole time. One kid spent the entire game yelling at me and my dad. He said some pretty un-savory stuff. My dad didn’t react. He had a tough exterior, but he was mostly a fun guy to be around—lots of horseplay and jokes. He kept it pretty light. Still, he was annoyed.
That night, we went out to dinner, and the kid who had been heckling us was there. My dad walked over to his table, put his hands on the kid’s shoulders, and said, “You have fun at the game today?” The kid completely froze. My dad could have confronted him and made an ugly scene, but he’s not like that. He congratulated him on the win while letting him know who was the bigger man. By the end of the meal, the kid was asking for his autograph.
In 1996, I got released from the New York–Penn League. I’d had a strong season in Class A, going .500 with a low ERA. But I hadn’t crossed the picket line during the strike in 1994, which brought baseball and my career to a halt, and I’d gotten off to a slow start when games resumed. I went 0–10 between two leagues. When I found out about my release, I started blaming the strike and other people. I wasn’t being honest and admitting that I wasn’t very good. So my dad talked to me. “How many of the people you first played with got to play high school ball?” he asked. “How many got to play college ball? How many got to play professionally? You had an unbelievable career.” He told me to keep trying to play if I wanted, but that he was going to be proud even if I decided to move on. So I took a different route. I got involved in the minors as an executive and an owner. In 1993, I became president of the Houston Astros.
Watching the Astros win the World Series in 2017 was as close as I ever got to the intensity of watching my father pitch. I had an emotional connection with the guys, and we were trying to achieve something together. But still, it wasn’t the same as watching my dad out there, stalking around the mound, thinking about his next pitch, whipping his big body toward the batter.
It’s different watching someone you love. It’s different when it’s your dad.