The 25th anniversary of Nolan Ryan and Rickey Henderson confirming they were absolute freaks

The greatest day in baseball history is the day you fell in love with the sport. It’s the day you hit your first little league home run, the time you skipped work and ended up catching a foul ball, when you watched a no-hitter with a dozen friends, or the time your team won it all, and you didn’t care which random weirdo you were hugging. You get to choose the greatest day in baseball history.

This is about the second greatest day in baseball history.

Twenty-five years ago, on May 1, 1991, baseball was ready for a milestone. Stories were pre-written, features assigned. A ceremony was planned, and a Hall of Famer was present and ready to give his record away. Rickey Henderson’s stolen base record didn’t catch anyone by surprise. It built and built and built, and by the time he was, oh, 26, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that he would break the record, assuming he stayed healthy. Baseball loves its milestones. Nice, safe, predictable milestones. Get the cameras ready. Plan the speeches.

Twenty-five years ago, baseball wasn’t ready for anything. We were all getting ready for a nice picnic, and baseball jumped up on the table and rolled around in the potato salad. Baseball is appreciating exactly what you expect to happen, sure, but baseball is also adjusting to appreciate something glittery and beautiful that just fell from the moon.

On May 1, 1991, Rickey Henderson stole his 939th base in the major leagues, breaking a record he would spend the rest of his career grinding into dust. Hours later, a 44-year-old Nolan Ryan threw his seventh no-hitter. There is no such thing as an unbreakable record, not with baseball forever mutating into a future we can’t comprehend. However, these are two records that will be broken with sentient robots in attendance. “What a show!,” these conscious abominations will say when the records are broken, fully aware of their own fragile mechanical souls and how special those fallen records really were.

If a 23-year-old rookie burst into the major leagues and stole 100 bases every year until he was 38, he would enter his age-38 season six steals shy of Henderson’s record.

If a 23-year-old rookie threw a no-hitter every other year until he was as old as Cliff Lee was in Lee’s last full season, he would still be a no-hitter short of Nolan Ryan’s record.

These records are perfect to compare, perfect to contrast. Baseball is about the short bursts and the serial dramas. Henderson and Ryan were both.

Rickey Henderson on first base was a knife switch being flipped. When Henderson took one of his 2,190 walks, it made Henderson’s home crowd shriek. It made the away crowd convulse in disgust. Here was the one player who shouldn’t be walked. The pitcher knows he can’t, absolutely can’t, walk him. There were thousands and thousands of times, though, that Henderson took a walk with the bases empty, and the crowd went wild. They were watching a simple baseball game, and now everyone knew they were watching a half-baseball, half-Japanese game show.

Nolan Ryan taking the mound before the first inning was like a pitcher you’ve heard of taking the mound before the first inning. In 766 of his career starts over 27 years, Ryan didn’t throw a no-hitter. There were some amazing, transcendent games sprinkled in there, sure, but you didn’t really expect a no-hitter every time he pitched. You thought about it, perhaps, in the ha-ha-what-if kind of way, but you didn’t buy tickets because you were guaranteed a no-hitter.

Henderson on first was something you watched, something you elbowed your seatmate about. It was a cat-and-mouse game, and judging by how uncomfortable the pitcher looked, the cat and mouse were fighting in his pants.

Ryan pitching in a game was something you came to watch, but it wasn’t always remarkable. He threw hard, and his legend grew over the decades, but he was also capable of some extraordinarily lousy pitching. Twice in his career, Ryan walked 200 batters in a single season. It’s not like he was a teenager when he did it, like Bob Feller: The last time Ryan walked 200, he was 30 years old.

His no-hitters, then, were a slow build. Layers and layers of evidence that made you revise your expectations on the spot. Oh, he has his good stuff tonight. Oh, he has his command. Oh, the batters are in for a tough time tonight, ha ha. Oh, he still hasn’t given up a hit in the fourth inning, you don’t suppose ...

You can watch both records online. Here’s Henderson’s record, and note that it’s just an eight-minute snippet because you don’t need the context, the whole game. You don’t need to watch Lance Blankenship reach on an error in the eighth to understand why Henderson’s day was special.

Henderson’s chase was a little anticlimactic to that point. He was often picked off, caught stealing, and hurt in the first two weeks. But when he was on second, and he made his move, you can hear the collective hum of the crowd jump an octave. The announcer yells, “He’s going!”

Henderson, in that moment, was baseball as instant gratification. You expected something, and you didn’t have to wait too long for it to happen. It was dizzying and thrilling, just like you would have hoped.

Ryan’s record is presented in a two-hour video without the commercials.

It has to be the whole thing. Every out is a part of the story, part of the slow build. The announcers don’t mention the no-hitter until the end of the fourth inning.

Ryan in no-hit range once again, here in Texas tonight.

Just pointing it out, viewer. Just something we noticed. And in the fifth inning, it came up again.

It’s been a long time for Nolan Ryan between no-hitters. June 11 of last year was number six. (Laughter in booth.)

Working on one here tonight.

You can see the stuff. You can see the hitters struggling. And each out is more pressure on the tectonic plates that are about to slip, something geological and deliberate.

When Henderson was on first, or even second, it was like the ninth inning of a Ryan no-hitter, if a little less so. It was knowing exactly what could happen.

When Ryan got into the ninth without allowing a hit, it was like Henderson on first with a record about to be set. Everything in his career built to this.

Rickey was flash. He was neon-green fluorescent gloves and snatch-catches. He was a snap of the jersey and a deliberate stare at a long home run. He was a regular spring training holdout because he thought deserved more money. When he took the stage after setting the record, his beautiful obliviousness and absence of tact absolutely sparkled.

Now, I am the greatest of all-time.

It was true, completely and unambiguously accurate, and people still had problems with it.

Well, not this guy:

That was exactly the kind of guy who could really appreciate Rickey Henderson in 1991. Bless him.

Henderson got under people’s skin because he knew he was an 80-foot-tall peacock whipping a lightsaber around and overturning cars, and everyone else knew it, too, but he actually said it, and you’re not supposed to say it.

Nolan was the Simpsons’ caricature of Johnny Unitas. A haircut you could set your watch to.

His stodginess was a feature, not a bug, and there’s something about the holster-adjusting, spitoon-clanging mythos that will always appeal to the old, white baseball demographic.

Nolan Ryan for Advil, here.

/throws bale of hay onto truck

If you’re sore from throwing bales of hay onto a truck, like me, you need Advil.

It was at least a little disingenuous. Ryan had a weaponized arm, a combination of ligaments and bone and muscle that made it shoot fire like no one before him. There was flash in there. It was just deliberately obscured behind a veil of head-down, hat-adjusting, just-doin’-my-job-ma’am-isms.

Henderson was a millionaire, and it was the idea of being a millionaire that meant more than the actual money. That’s why he kept the million-dollar check on his wall until the A’s called to ask him what gives.

Ryan was the game’s first millionaire, but it’s not something you hear about that much.

/throws bale of hay onto truck

He’s just like you, Bob Six-Pack, workin’ hard and seein’ results.

And just like in everything else with these two, there is comparison within the contrast. Do you think that Ryan wasn’t flashy? Good gravy, he was intimidation personified. Take a two-pitch sequence to Kelly Gruber in that seventh no-hitter, which led to one of the only runners of the game.

Colo(u)r commentator Tommy Hutton kept calling that pitch a fastball throughout the game, and who knows, maybe there’s no point in calling it a change? Hutton’s the one who had to face it, and it probably came in pretty damned fast.

That was that pitch that, every once in awhile, people question about Nolan Ryan. That wasn’t a straight fastball, that was the fastball that gets some sink to it. You can see the bottom fall out of it. And what I mean by “question” is there were some hitters at times who thought that maybe that Nolan Ryan was cutting the baseball.

And as if Ryan felt a disturbance in the force, as if he heard someone besmirch his good name, here’s what his next pitch looked like:

Ryan took pride in those pitches, in scaring the hell out of the other guy. And that counts. That’s flash. Standing atop a hill and declaring yourself Lord Fastball of Pain Mountain is flash, even if you don’t say the actual words. And if you ran out to challenge Ryan’s authority, he would put you in a headlock and punch the top of your skull.

You’re a fool if you think Henderson was nothing but flash, though. That would diminish the years of careful practice and study it took for Henderson to become a baseball deity, the years at the summit of a mountain, legs crossed, studying the mysteries of base stealing under a tree with Davey Lopes. It ignores the years it took for Henderson to become such a power threat that sometimes pitchers were okay with a slightly less harmful walk.

There was hay-bale-tossing dedication with Henderson, too. Don’t get distracted by the misdirection. Don’t get distracted by the flash and miss the craftsmanship with Henderson. And don’t get distracted by the stoicism and miss the flash with Ryan.

Henderson’s record was about longevity. It was about doing the same spectacular achievement over and over again. It’s technical perfection and remarkable acumen that accumulates over games, weeks, months, years, seasons, decades. Remember that part about Henderson being instant gratification? The record was several sentences about instant gratification that formed an engrossing, deliberate novel.

Ryan’s record is the best night of a star athlete’s life, just played out seven different times, which is about six more than anyone should rightfully expect. It’s about arm wrestling an entire roster into submission. It’s about “midnight came and midnight went/I thought I was the Pres-o-dent” and feeling invincible.

They were both players who were feared like no other. Henderson kept catchers awake at night, and he screwed pitchers up just by reaching base. Ryan kept hitters awake at night, with Reggie Jackson saying that Ryan was the only pitcher who made him consider wearing an earflap on his helmet.

They were both freaks. Ryan was 44 when he threw his seventh no-hitter, and the closest comparison for his arsenal was probably Kerry Wood in his 20-strikeout game. If you think that’s hyperbole, watch the fastball/curve combination again. Watch how uncomfortable the hitters looked, and watch how much the catcher’s mitt moved because he still wasn’t quite sure where it was going.

Henderson posted a .456 on-base percentage when he was 46 with the San Diego Surf Dawgs, and all he wanted to do was get another chance in the majors. He probably still thinks he can put up a .400 on-base percentage with 30 steals in the majors, and I’m not sure that he’s wrong.

At 6:00 in the Ryan video, the announcers inform us that the lineups were brought to us by Game Genie, which was a device that rewrote the code of video games. It was perfect, because every Ryan and Henderson game was brought to us by Game Genie. They rewrote the code over 52 combined seasons, and broke our brains.

It was perfect, absolutely perfect, that they would set their records on the same day. It might have looked like Ryan was upstaging the king of upstaging at the time, but it’s perfect in retrospect. Here was longevity, here was short bursts of instant excitement. Here was flash, here was dedication. Here was instant gratification, here was delayed gratification.

Here were two entirely dissimilar players who had far more in common than you think. They were both baseball freaks. They were both players so unique, baseball fans will be talking about them in great detail over a century from now.

It’s 25 years later, and we’re still honoring the Day of the Baseball Freak. It was, at the very least, the second-greatest day in baseball history. I wouldn’t blame you if you put it right at the top.