The 10,000 Careers of Nolan Ryan: A Computer Simulation Clarifies His Long Career

The fans, by virtue of the all-century team, and sportswriters, by virtue of Hall of Fame voting, have spoken. Overall, the greatest pitcher in baseball history is Nolan Ryan. Experts might have chosen Cy Young or Walter Johnson, pointing to their 511 and 417 respective victories while Ryan won only 324, but, hey, what’s a hundred or two victories between immortals? Lefty Grove? Forget it. He won only 300 games and was a grouch to boot. Christy Mathewson? Come on. The guy’s been dead for seventy-five years.

It’s true that Ryan possesses a remarkable baseball career. Foremost is his signature: strikeouts. His total of 5,714 exceeds Steve Carlton’s runner-up 4,136 by an unprecedented percentage margin. Ryan had as many no-hitters-seven-as Sandy Koufax and Bob Feller combined. And Ryan’s stingy 6.56 hits allowed per nine innings gives him top honors in that category, too.

The career totals are no less extraordinary: 324 victories (tied for twelfth with Don Sutton), 773 games started (second to Cy Young), 5,386 innings pitched (fifth), 61 shutouts (tied with Tom Seaver for seventh), a solid 3.19 ERA, and his twenty-seven seasons pitched (best) prove his durability. It’s easy to see why he coasted into the Hall of Fame.

Side B

But just like that hit 45 RPM record, Ryan’s career has a “B” side. If Ryan is the Mount Everest of strikeouts, then he’s rusting with the Titanic when it comes to bases on balls. Again, Carlton is his closest pursuer, and again, Ryan obliterates him with more than 1-1/2 times as many walks: 2,795 to 1,833. His 292 losses puts him in third place behind Cy Young and Jim Galvin, but to match Young’s wins and losses, Ryan would have to average 27-3 for seven seasons. He has thirteen more losses than Johnson while posting ninety-three fewer victories. For Grove to match Ryan, he would have needed to average 4-25 for six seasons. Tom Seaver would need to go 13-87. If Carlton lost fifty consecutive decisions, he would still have a better W-L record than Ryan. Table 1 shows the records of twentieth century 300-game winners normalized to a 162-game season for comparison.

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Despite having the worst winning percentage of the group, Ryan finished second to Koufax (37,200 votes) in the All-Century Team voting. Ryan’s 15,347 votes exceeded the combined totals of Young (7,748) and Bob Gibson (6,542), and failed by 136 votes of exceeding the combined totals of Spahn (5,922), Johnson (4,883) and Grove (4,668). With a puny 1,348 votes, Mathewson would have been the mop-up man in the bullpen. Ryan’s 491 Hall of Fame votes were the highest in history and his sizzling 98.79 percent voting percentage was virtually identical to Tom Seaver’s record percentage (98.84) and higher than Steve Carlton’s 95.8. Among contemporaries, Ryan is more in the Gaylord Perry-Phil Niekro-Don Sutton class than the Seaver-Carlton class. Perry would need a 10-27 record to catch Ryan, Niekro 6-18, and Sutton 0-36. When Perry, the first pitcher to win 300 games in nineteen years, struggled to reach the Hall of Fame after three years, his unsanitary mound habits were listed as the reason. Niekro, a fine baseball citizen, had an even more difficult time, entering in his fifth year of eligibility. Sutton, an alleged greaseballer (Perry admitted oiling up) also needed five tries to make the Hall.

The most remarkable part of Ryan’s W-L record isn’t just that it’s mediocre, but that his mediocrity is mediocre. Not once in twenty-seven seasons did Ryan post a record at least seven games over .500. Perry, Niekro, and Sutton had some terrific seasons-21-8, 23-13, 24-16, 21-13, 21-6 for Perry (the third and fifth seasons earning him Cy Young awards), 23-13, 20-13, 17-4, 16-8 for Niekro, and 19-9, 18-10, 19-9, 21-10,13-5, 17-9 for Sutton. Ryan never had one season like that. And Ryan wasn’t posting just twenty or twenty-five decisions every season like most starting pitchers today. From 1972-1979, Ryan averaged 32 decisions per year, and had 35 or more in 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976 and 1977.

The Purpose

I set out to discover three things: First, the pitchers in baseball history with the most lifetime victories who failed to match Ryan’s season high of six games over .500; second, the pitchers in baseball history with the fewest lifetime victories who exceeded Ryan’s +6; third, how unlikely it is for a pitcher of Ryan’s career W-L record and longevity to fail to exceed a +6 season.

Scanning Total Baseball answered the first two questions. Table 2 shows the top ten pitchers with the most career victories without having a season six games over .500.

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These pitchers totaled 1,316 victories in 149 seasons without a +6 season. Table 3 lists ten pitchers with just 152 victories in 41 seasons each had a +7 season or better. Pitchers active in 1999 and 2000 are not included.

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10,000 Nolans

My final question — what were the odds of a pitcher hurling for twenty-seven seasons with a won-lost record of 324-292, failing to have one season where wins – losses >= 7? — required a computer. The computer model placed Ryan’s 324 victories and 292 losses in a pool. Each season would draw from that pool the same number of decisions Ryan actually had during that season. Thus, every 1966 season of a simulated Nolan Ryan career had one decision. Each 1974 season had 3-8 decisions, and so on. Using the computer, I simulated 10,000 Nolan Ryan careers this way. The bottom line was that a 324-292 pitcher who played during twenty-seven seasons has a 99.19 percent chance of being seven or more games over .500 at least once. The average simulated career had 3.35 seasons of at least +7. Ryan had five simulated careers that failed to match his +6 — he was +5 in each of them. Of the 10,000 career simulations, 288 showed a +7; 925, +8; 1,326, +9; 1,767, +10; 1,588, +11; 1,330, + 12; 1,039, + 13; 581, +14; 483, +15; 219, +16; 207, +17; 63, +18; 56, +19; 15, +20; 22, +21; one, +22, +24, +25 and +26; and 6, +23. The rough bell curve, left, illustrates these numbers.

Table 4 shows Ryan’s actual career on the left and ten simulated careers, each divisible by 1,000, on the right.

 

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Excuses, Excuses

One excuse given for Ryan’s unimpressive winning percentage is that he pitched for poor teams. This argument must be rejected. It is true that Ryan outpitched the teams on which he played, but it wasn’t by much. His 12-13 composite from 1966-1969 (he didn’t pitch in the majors in 1967) gave him a .480 winning percentage, while the Mets in those three years went 239-246 for .493. In 1970-1991, he won at a .526 rate, compared to his teams’.504. On average, Ryan was roughly 13-12 for a team that was 81-80. Even when he pitched for good teams, Ryan had records just a few games over .500.

The Wins Above Team (WAT) statistic, which compares a pitcher’s W-L mark to that of his team also fails to support the Ryan-was-a-hard-luck-pitcher claim. Total Baseball lists the top 100 pitchers in WAT, and Ryan (along with Wynn and Sutton) doesn’t make the top 100. Through 1996, Young was first, with a career WAT of 99.7. Babe Adams (194-140) and Allie Reynolds (182-107) tie for ninety-eighth place with 20.2. Russ Ford, with his short career (99-71), makes the list with 24.3. With a WAT of less than 20.2, Ryan is less than one win above his team per year. In contrast, Seaver and Koufax with respective WATs of 58.9 (sixth place) and 30.6 (fortieth place) respectively, average three wins above their teams per season.

Nolanmania

So why does Ryan get so much more adulation than Niekro, Perry, and Sutton, in whose class he belongs (I would rank him behind Perry, but ahead of Niekro and Sutton), and even more than Seaver, Carlton, and Jim Palmer, direct and far superior contemporaries? I think it may be that every time he pitched, fans and sportwriters anticipated something special. Even on a bad night, the fastball was explosive. On a good night, he could strike out double figures. On a great night, he might pitch a no-hitter. With Ryan, total domination was always a possibility. Total domination always excites us.

Still, it is strange that the public — and especially the writers — substituted the glitter of strikeouts and no-hitters for the gold of victories. When you get right down to it, Ryan’s mediocre record is inexplicable: he was difficult to hit, had good ERAs, and didn’t allow many homers (his top home runs allowed in a season was 20 in 1982). If you refer back to Table 1, you will see that with the exception of Ed Plank, every pitcher from Grove down to Carlton was considered, in his prime, the best pitcher in his league, if not in all of baseball. Ryan can’t come close to making that claim. And just because he should have been the equal of Grove, Mathewson, Johnson, Seaver, et al. doesn’t mean he was.

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Sample computer-generated Nolan Ryan facts

1. In 1974 of career 3,676, Ryan had his best year of 270,000 seasons going 32-6. In total Ryan had six 30-victory seasons in his 10,000 careers. When I simulated Koufax’s brief career 10,000 times, he had 240 thirty-victory seasons.

2. In 1973 of careers 982 and 6,836 Ryan had his worst seasons, going 8-29.

3. Ryan had four careers with six twenty-victory seasons. In real life, Ryan won twenty twice, slightly less than what the model predicted: 2.25 per career.

4. Ryan had 346 careers (including career 10,000) in which he failed to achieve a twenty-victory season.

5. Ryan’s best undefeated season was 18-0 in 1970 of career 1,799.

6. Nine times, Ryan had seasons in which he went 0-10 in 1993, his biggest skunk.

7. Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal each had three twenty-five-victory seasons in their (real) careers. Ryan matched their individual totals twice in his 10,000 computerized careers (7,340 and 8,823).

8. In career 119 he had consecutive twenty-seven-victory seasons, going 27-10 in 1973 and 27-11 in 1974. This was the only time he had a career with two seasons of twenty-seven or more victories. (To make up for those marks he went 12-23 in 1977, 6-14 in 1986, and 6-16 in 1991).

9. On average, Ryan had a +20 W-L season every 200 careers.