A road map for building a modern Nolan Ryan
Leigh Montville was one of the few writers to get an up-close look at Nolan Ryan’s offseason routine.
Prior to spring training in 1991, the Sports Illustrated writer traveled to Ryan’s Texas ranch and observed him for a day, curious to see what a legendary capacity for work entailed.
Ryan holds the all-time strikeout record, 5,714 of them, nearly 900 more Ks than second-ranking Randy Johnson. The mark is a testament to his rare stuff, and prodigious volume.
Ryan ranks fifth all-time in total innings, trailing three pitchers with black-and-white photos at Baseball-Reference.com, and another that threw a knuckleball (Phil Niekro) as a primary pitch. Ryan’s volume is even more impressive as he accomplished it as a high-velocity arm. He was not tossing the mid-80s fastballs of the 1920s.
Ryan’s workout began on his driveway on a gray, late winter afternoon. Ryan stretched out by tossing a heavier training implement – a football – to Harry Spilman, a neighbor and former teammate with the Astros, who caught his offseason throws.
Ryan learned the football routine from his pitching coach with the Texas Rangers, Tom House, an iconoclastic pioneer in biomechanics. Ryan was reluctant to adopt the practice at first as he watched the other Rangers throw the heavier ball during pre-game works beginning in 1989. But after studying it and talking to House about the concept, he began throwing a football , too. It turns out working with heavier training implements promotes health through building stronger shoulder- and arm-stabilizing muscles, particularly important in deceleration.
Following the football tosses, Ryan and Stinson began throwing a baseball in his driveway. Easy tosses.
“So, Roger Clemens is getting five million dollars,” Nolan said to Montville, shaking his head. “If Roger’s worth five million, what’s Wade Boggs going to be worth?”
Perhaps he arrived too early. But had he arrived later, he might not have been permitted to log the work, the innings, and accumulate the numbers he did.
After those light tosses, they moved to Ryan’s makeshift field in a plot of open pasture.
Wrote Montville: “Nolan put on his blue Rangers cleats to throw …. Hard tosses. The workout began a little before five o’clock, and now the time is a little after six. The light is almost gone. The dogs have lost interest, running into the woods in what would be a dead center field. Nolan says, ‘They’re probably looking for yesterday’s game ball.’ A pitcher’s grim joke. …Nolan says this is the kind of light he wouldn’t mind having for all baseball games all of the time. He asks Harry if there is enough light for one more pitch. Harry says that there is.”
Ryan began engaging in these workouts with Harry beginning in the middle of January. He continued them until he reported for spring training. He had a throwing plan.
This was in addition to the running- and weight-lifting routines he was known for at a time when such strength work was not common among pitchers. Three times in the week he did three sets of 12 bench presses with a 150-pound barbell, ran wind sprints for 15 minutes and a stationary bike for a half hour.
The routine perhaps explained how on the day Montville observed Ryan, the Hall of Famer was entering his 26th year in professional baseball, selected as a 12th-round pick by the Mets in the first amateur draft in 1965.
Let’s return now to the present day. I begin with that color of Ryan preparing for a season some 35 years ago because a few of us at Driveline were interested in recreating Ryan’s workload. What would building a throwing program for such volume look like? Is it even possible to build up an arm like that today?
Disclaimer: We are not suggesting every pitcher should work toward creating an extreme workload, rather, this an exercise to see what is possible within our data-based constraints.
Ryan was no doubt a freak athlete, a physical marvel. Legend has it that he once hit 108 mph. While he was 6-2, modest by today’s height, he could easily dunk a basketball in high school. He had God-given gifts but his capacity for work was learned. He built himself into a remarkable workhorse.
What can we learn from a player who not that long ago, in 1991, was a volume machine who could still reach 96 mph and toss no-hitters at age 44?
What would it look like to build a greater capacity for volume in today’s game? What would a Ryan-like throwing plan entail? And could it be done within the constraints of workload monitoring?
We were curious to experiment, so pro pitcher and Driveline researcher Josh Hejka, Driveline’s Max Engelbrekt, and myself went to work doing just that in this, the first of an occasional series at Driveline on pitching workloads.