Nolan Ryan, My Uncle Tom and the Fastest Pitch Ever Thrown

When I was eight or nine, my mother’s Uncle Tom sat me down at his dining room table during a family trip to his home in Connecticut and pulled out a small paperback book that had obviously been thumbed through more than once: Baseball’s Hall of Fame (Seventh Revised Edition). As we flipped from player to player, Tom talked about each one. It’s not so much what he said that I remember (my single strongest memory is his reminiscence of the time he saw Pie Traynor, the Pittsburgh Pirates great third baseman, make a number of unbelievable plays to rob batters of certain base hits), but the way he said it: to hear him speak, these players and this game were every bit as important to him as his regular job as an engineer. There was a passion in his voice as he told his stories, a tone that said it was all right to love baseball, even if it was “only a game.”

Tom passed away shortly before my tenth birthday, but our chat had helped plant the seed of baseball history in my young brain. Previously, my view of the game had been Kevin Romine coming off the end of the bench to hit game-winning homeruns, Wade Boggs tracing small circles with the barrel of his bat as the crowd anticipated another “Wall Ball” double and Jim Rice swinging his bat with what I recognized as an uncommon ferocity. But these observations were all present tense. After listening to Tom, I began to understand that there was a lot more baseball out there, a lot of history to learn and understand and enjoy.

Over the next few years, I became as voracious a reader of baseball-related information as one is ever likely to meet, never consciously trying to memorize various records and statistics but rather learning my way around through seeing them hundreds upon hundreds of times. By my teen years, I could have aced any test that included questions on Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average, Cy Young’s career wins, and Pete Rose’s career hits, just to name a few. One of my favorite “records”, however, was always the one for fastest pitch, which in those days belonged officially to Nolan Ryan and the 100.9 mile per hour fastball he unleashed on August 20, 1974.

All baseball records are subject to change – inaccuracies and minor errors from past generations are constantly being found and corrected (which has resulted in a drop in Cobb’s career batting average from .367 to .366, for example) – but none has undergone more of a makeover than Ryan’s fastest pitch mark.

The list of fastest pitches encompasses only the past thirty or so years, an era in which virtually every pitch has had a radar gun trained on it – prior to that time, it was difficult to test the actual speed of a pitched ball, which unfortunately leaves us wondering just how hard Walter Johnson, Satchel Paige, Bob Feller and Sandy Koufax were throwing in their respective heydays. This is one reason why, on Baseball Almanac’s list of the 27 pitchers who have reached triple digits on the radar gun, only two (Ryan and onetime Houston Astros teammate J.R. Richard) did so prior to 1992.

Reading through the list, one would assume that pitchers today are throwing harder than ever before, but that is probably not the case, for a couple of reasons:

1) Different radar guns: according to an article by Cooperstown researcher Eric Enders, the most popular radar gun in the 1980s was the Ra-Gun, which measured pitch speed as the ball neared the plate. Because a pitch loses about one MPH for every eight feet it travels, the Ra-Gun “never clocked a pitcher at over 100 mph, and gave readings that were consistently slower than today’s common Jugs brand guns.” The Jugs guns measure pitch speed differently, of course, taking a reading as the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. This means that such guns deliver the speed of a particular pitch before it has time to decelerate, resulting in a situation, Enders says, where “measuring the same pitcher at the same time, the newer gun will consistently show a speed 4 to 6 mph faster than the old one.”

2) It makes fans happy: baseball fans like power, whether in the form of a hitter or a pitcher. Just as people like to see a fly ball explode off the bat of David Ortiz and keep carrying and carrying and carrying until it lands nearly 500 feet away, they enjoy watching Joel Zumaya enter the game throwing lighting bolts that make the stadium’s digital readout register a three digit number. Seeing that screen showing “97 MPH” is exciting; seeing a display that reads “103”, as Zumaya’s did during a game in Oakland on July 4 this year, can turn a middle reliever into an instant star with unlimited potential.

Back to Nolan Ryan. My question, I suppose, is this: just how fast was that pitch that Nolan Ryan unleashed back in 1974, the one the Guinness Book of World Records still recognizes as the official record? Or perhaps more accurately, how fast would the measurement have been if it had been taken with a JUGS gun rather than a new creation of Rockwell International, which was supposedly accurate but took its reading at a point roughly ten feet in front of home plate?

Using the information from the Enders article, which he in turn took from Robert Adair, who covered the topic in his book The Physics of Baseball, we might be able to figure out a rough estimate. Based on the location of the Rockwell laser, Ryan’s pitch traveled no more than fifty feet before a measurement was taken; subtract the pitcher’s stride and release point and that number becomes roughly 45 feet. According to Adair’s calculations, that would mean the ball decelerated about 5 ½ miles per hour from the time it left Ryan’s hand until the time it registered on Rockwell’s gun, for a total initial speed somewhere in the 105 – 107 MPH range.

Are these measurements accurate? Probably not – I’m not a scientist, after all, and I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But if nothing else, it provides some more food for thought in the whole “fastest pitcher ever” debate.

Tom died before Nolan Ryan retired from the game, missing his final two no-hitters, 300th win and near-unanimous induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. But the important thing to me is that I was around for all of those things, and maybe someday Ill have the opportunity to extend a younger family member the same courtesy that Tom showed me: to teach them about the game I love and the people who have played it best.