Nolan’s Numbers

Nolan’s Numbers

By Amanda Knopf Rauhauser

The circumstances of my birth were extraordinarily precarious: I was born two months premature, weighing only three and a half pounds. My parents lived in Boulder, but the hospital there didn’t have a NICU, so my mom and I were rushed by ambulance to St. Joe’s in Denver. I had open-heart surgery right after birth to close a valve that didn’t have time to develop in the womb. I lived in an incubator, stayed in the NICU for 60 days, and needed oxygen and feeding tubes to survive.

My dad, Val, says I came early because I wanted to make it in time for March Madness. But he also knew, as I soon would, that spring is the best time of year not because of basketball, but because it’s the start of baseball season.

A month after my birthday, on April 26, Nolan Ryan tied the record for one-hitters with his 12th. Ryan was born in 1947, the same year as my dad, and he pitched in the majors for 27 years. I was born on March 27th. True baseball fans know there’s magic in the game, in the numbers we obsess over. True baseball fans wouldn’t tell me that these numbers are just coincidence.

In 1990, the year I was born, Nolan Ryan had 232 strikeouts, which led the American League, and only 74 walks in 204 innings. His 5,714 career strikeouts are an all-time record, almost 1,000 more than the pitcher behind him: Randy Johnson, who also threw over 100mph. Ryan, an 8-time All-Star and Hall of Famer, holds the record for no-hitters with 7. These are the flashy stats, the ones most baseball fans know.

I became a pitcher too, playing college softball in Minnesota. My senior season, my dad basically moved from Colorado to Minnesota to be at all of my games. He charted pitches with unrivaled dedication and specificity: all the usual stats, but also total pitches, strike percentage, and first-pitch strikes per batters faced. All good pitchers know to get ahead in the count. Baseball Reference doesn’t have those stats for Nolan Ryan, but he must have thrown about a bazillion pitches, my dad says.

My dad taught me some other stats too: One year, Nolan Ryan led the league in ERA (2.76) but had a losing record (8-16). This backward stat is important to my senior year, when my ERA was 2.48, but we also lost seven games by one run. In one of those, perhaps the best pitching performance of my career, I struck out a game-high 12 batters and we still lost, 1-0.

Nolan Ryan was in the running for the Cy Young eight times and for MVP seven times, but he never won. Besides throwing so hard, his curveball was probably his best pitch. He didn’t just blow his fastball by hitters to get them out. These facts are the ones I admire, the ones that represent how hard and how long he worked at his craft. Somehow these stats also seemed to work their way into my story.

I never threw nearly as hard as Nolan, surely never scared opposing hitters the way he did. But I had a good curveball too. I learned to make my pitches move and change speeds to get batters out. And I knew, because of my dad’s scolding, never to walk as many batters as Nolan did. (His 2,795 career walks are also a record). His career strikeout-to-walk ratio was 2.04; mine was 3.64. His career ERA was 3.19; mine was 3.9. Whitey Herzog called Nolan the hardest-working pitcher he’d ever seen, and he pitched for over a quarter of a century.

Today, I coach pitchers for a college softball team in Oregon, and I count pitches obsessively, like my dad taught me. My biggest joy is not the team’s success; what I love most is what I love about the subtext of Nolan Ryan’s stats, the part I like to think seeped into my psyche through my dad’s love of good pitching, even when I was far too young to watch Nolan play. That subtext, the heart of this game, is the grind, the grueling work that great players put in, which is inconceivable to outsiders and impossible to convey in even the best box scores, lifetime stats, or awards.

The start of the baseball (or softball) season each spring is what I love most about my birthday. More years than not in the past 31, my dad and I have spent the day on a softball field somewhere. When my dad taught me to love this game, he taught me the deeper part of it too: the dauntless determination required to truly love and succeed at a sport so full of failure. This, too, is woven into my story: a story that could easily have ended at the moment of my premature birth, when I faced so many obstacles likely to make me fail.

Even more than a love of baseball, what my dad gave me that I cherish most is my middle name, after him: Valory, spelled with an O, as a testament to the way I fought to survive my first two tenuous months. Valor for the guts and courage I put into every single pitch playing softball. That doggedness, that drive, that’s baseball’s real lesson. That’s what Nolan Ryan means to me.

This was the fourth most-read piece of 2022.

Amanda Knopf Rauhauser played softball at Macalester College in Minnesota and now teaches writing at a community college in Oregon. She’s also the pitching coach for Linfield University’s softball program, where her team was ranked first in their division, made it to regionals, and had two all-conference pitchers in 2021.

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