Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
His offense was strong. It just played in a park that held its numbers down.
For at least 10 seasons it was decidedly below average. Are we calling "below average" offense "strong" now?
For ten seasons he happened to pitch in the Astrodome. Why is it so difficult to understand that the same thing that helped his pitching hurt his team's offense?
Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
He was so great, yet somehow 2/3 of the time average bums pitched better than he did.
As evidenced by his winning win percentage?
This is JORR arguing that Nolan Ryan was actually kind of average, ladies and gentlemen.
Nolan Ryan was far from a great pitcher. He was also far from ordinary. He was a freakish guy, the hardest ever to hit. But at the end of it all the amount of baserunners he allowed was unimpressive. More baserunners per inning than such luminaries as Jeff Samardzija and Atlee Hammaker. Those baserunners showed up in his W/L record. Not that .526 is terrible, but it is certainly disappointing for a man who missed more bats than anyone in baseball history.
Those Astros teams were pretty f-ing solid offensive teams, loads of talent. Their numbers were heavily impacted by the done.
Early in his tenure there JR Richard was as good as Nolan if not better and later Mike Scott was the bell cow on those teams.