NOLAN

Life of the legendary pitcher, a Texan par excellence.

Nolan Ryan, longtime baseball writer Brown tells us, was the archetypal small-town Texas boy, growing up in a little town not far from—but not part of—Houston, stepping straight out of the pages of a Larry McMurtry novel. By Brown’s account, another Texanism is “the baddest fastball in history,” which puts Ryan in the company of legendary Texans such as Davy Crockett and Sam Houston as a metonym for the Lone Star hero. Brown sometimes writes with the staccato breathlessness of your everyday sports commentator but with due attention to the importance of sports in the culture of Texas and, in the larger sphere, the U.S. There are some nicely deflating moments as well, as when two tourists from New York City approached Ryan at a diner and asked to take a picture—not of him but of the giant onion rings he was eating. As Brown also writes, Ryan’s baseball career can be tracked by the uniforms he wore: “the burnt orange of Alvin High School, then the blues and oranges borrowed by the Mets from the Dodgers and Giants, the golden halos of the Angels, the sunset smear of the Astros, and the red, white, and blue of the Rangers.” Over a long career—he was the oldest All-Star, the oldest pitcher to throw a no-hitter, the oldest pitcher to strike out 10 or more batters in a single game—Ryan amassed an astonishing 51 records in his 27 years in the majors. Perhaps only the disgraced Pete Rose ranks in the same stratosphere, and, Brown writes, Ryan “was everything in a pitcher Pete Rose was as a batter.” But the clean and straightforward Ryan, of course, is enshrined in Cooperstown, while the late Rose, if he gets there, will forever have an asterisk by his name.

A fittingly admiring look at the life of one of baseball’s greatest.