A Tale Of 2 Pitchers: Nolan Ryan’s 235-Pitch Game and The Unlikely Teammate Who Got The Win

By BILLY HELLER

When the Kansas City Royals traded former Mets farmhand Barry Raziano to the California Angels in 1974 during spring training, it was a bit of a headache for the right-handed pitcher, who had just made his MLB debut with the Royals the previous season.

He had already driven to Fort Myers, Fla., from his home in New Orleans. “So now I gotta drive back to Palm Springs, Calif.,” Raziano says. “And I get there a little late.”

Raziano, who struck out 27 batters in a 15-inning playoff game (and lost) as a high school senior, didn’t think he’d know anyone on the Angels.

But he was in for a great surprise. When he walked into camp, there was Nolan Ryan. The two had been teammates in 1966 for the Mets Class-A team in Greenville, S.C.

Raziano recalls Ryan greeting him with something like, “Hey Raz Man, what took you so long to get here?”

This is the story of the Hall of Fame strikeout artist and a ballplayer friend from the dawn of their careers — and the Angels-Red Sox game from 50 years ago that saw Ryan toss a now-unheard-of 235 pitches.

Both pitchers were drafted by the Mets in 1965. And neither of them had ever been to New York.

“I just knew the Mets had been an expansion ball club and really struggled,” Ryan said over the phone from his Round Rock, Texas, office.

“I knew that people went to the ballpark and cheered them whether they won or lost,” said Raziano in a phone interview from his home in the New Orleans suburbs.

At Greenville, the 19-year-olds shared a two-bedroom house with 3 other players that an old lady rented out. “Our rent was like $17 a month apiece,” Raziano says.
“She lived in a section of the house that was separate from the part that we lived in,” recalls Ryan. “And because she lived there, we were certainly respectful of the noise and the hours that we kept.”

“We were just a group of young guys that were thrilled to be there playing baseball.”

On the field with Ryan, at Greenville’s Meadowbrook Park, Raziano says, “I used warm him up in the bullpen, caught him until he started throwing over 95 [mph], then I gave it to the other catchers.”

When Ryan’s parents came from Texas to see him pitch for the first time, they brought Ryan’s high school girlfriend, Ruth, with them (Nolan and Ruth got married in 1967). Ryan struck out the first nine batters, Raziano says. He wound up with 272 strikeouts in 183 innings in Greenville.

Earlier, in Minor League training camp in Homestead, Fla., the Mets had to cut 50 out of the 160 players there. Raziano hadn’t been pitching very well and even asked if he could try out for the infield, which he’d also played in high school. Bob Scheffing, then the Mets director of player development, watched him hit and told him to stick to pitching.

With about a week left in camp, Scheffing, “matched me up against Ryan in a 7-inning ballgame. And I said, ‘Oh Lord, he really wants to get rid of me,’ ” Raziano says with a laugh. The results: Ryan threw a no-hitter. Raziano threw a one-hitter and beat him 1-0 on an error.

“And you know who got the hit off me? It was Nolan,” Raziano says.

Of his own at-bats against Ryan, Raziano says, “I heard three or four pitches go by.”

To this day, 77-year-old Raziano believes that the Mets kept him because he beat Ryan that day.

Raziano and Ryan, also 77, both started the 1966 season in Greenville pitching well. A June article in the local Greenville News about top players in the Western Carolinas League was headlined “Raziano And Ryan Pace WCL Hurlers.”

Before the end of that season, Ryan was promoted to Double-A Williamsport and then called up to New York, where he made his MLB debut on Sept. 11. It would be another eight years before they were teammates again.

Raziano remained in the minor leagues but, in 1969, made the Mets 40-man roster. In St. Petersburg, Fla., Raziano says, “I was having a really good Spring Training after winter ball in Venezuela. “My control was getting good. My slider was getting good. The fastball was down and in, sinking pretty good.”

Soon before breaking spring camp, Raziano got into a game against the Cardinals. “Three innings, no hits, no runs, no errors. Struck out three. And I’m on my way to New York, right?

“Next morning, my elbow was swollen like a grapefruit. Had a bone spur. And at that time, they didn’t cut on you when you were 22. They sent me home for the whole season.”

Ryan, of course, won the World Series with the Miracle Mets. But he says there would’ve been more of a “comfort level” for him in New York if Raziano had been with him on the ’69 Mets. “I came up through the organization pretty quick, so I played with very few of those guys in the minor leagues. So to have a teammate that you played with and roomed with and were familiar with would have been nice.”

Raziano was happy for his friend, but, he says, “It was depressing. I was getting paid, but I wasn’t pitching.”

Ryan pitched two more seasons for the Mets before asking for a trade. “I was frustrated with my development,” he says. “The Mets were trying to repeat ’69 and I just felt that I needed to go somewhere else where I could pitch a lot of innings and try to pitch to the point where I was more consistent.”

The general manager who made that notorious deal in exchange for Jim Fregosi was Bob Scheffing.

Ryan blossomed on the Angels — leading the Major Leagues in 1972 with 329 strikeouts in 284 innings. He was 19-16 in 39 starts, with 20 complete games and a 2.28 ERA.

After a couple of years in Triple-A ball, a frustrated Raziano also asked the Mets to trade him, going to Kansas City for the 1973 season. He finally made his MLB debut, but pitched in only two games, both in relief, for the Royals.

The next spring, Kansas City traded him to California.

It was early June 1974 when Raziano was called up to the Angels from their Salt Lake City Triple-A team. He took Bobby Valentine’s place on the roster — Valentine had dislocated his shoulder in a fight with Milwaukee pitcher Clyde Wright and was put on the DL.

That set the scene for the events of that historic June 14, 1974 pitching duel between Ryan and Luis Tiant.

It was a balmy Friday night at Anaheim Stadium, cloudy with a game-time temperature of 70 degrees. Attendance was 11,083 — or as Valentine put it: “That’s a good crowd for us in those days.” But there’s no record of how many stayed till the home team won it in the 15th inning just past midnight.

In the ninth inning, Ryan needs just two more outs to secure a 3-1 win over the Red Sox. But Carl Yastrzemski’s two-run homer tied it.

Ryan and Tiant each put up zeroes in the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th innings.

“In those days, you didn’t have pitch limits,” Ryan says. “Your mindset was: When you started a game your intention was to finish the game. And the fact that we were in extra innings, I wanted to pitch as long as I probably could and hoped to secure a win.”

As long as he could turned out to be 13 innings, after which manager Bobby Winkles pulled Ryan.

How did he convince his star pitcher to finally come out? “I don’t know if he really convinced me, or he just took me out,” Ryan says, laughing.

Valentine, who had just come off the DL, took the field at shortstop in the 11th. At bat in the 12th, he popped out with bases loaded.

After Ryan was lifted, Valentine, who later managed Ryan in Texas, told him how “spectacular” he had pitched. “He was mad, he was pissed off. And in this game he was really pitching. He was chucking it up there, he was grunting.”

So Raziano’s in the bullpen, “way out in left field,” he says, for the first 13 innings. “We were sitting there waiting and watching. Ryan never wanted to come out of a ballgame. He never got tired,” I watched him pitch in the 10th inning, he was still throwing over 102.

When Raziano finally gets the call to take the mound in the 14th that night in Anaheim, he says, “I just get up. I mean, it’s a job. You get up, you try to do your best.” That best was two perfect innings — for the win and it was in relief of his old buddy.

“It was my first win, so I was all excited about it. It was the only win I got.”

Plus, it wasn’t the first time he had faced — and bested Tiant, who lost in the 15th inning after a Mickey Rivers single and a run-scoring double by Denny Doyle. The other time was in winter ball in Venezuela — before 35,000 boisterous fans in Caracas. “All the betting went on Tiant, who was a heavy favorite,” says Raziano, who earned a 1-0 win. “The fans were not happy and guards with rifles come out at the end of the game, and Tiant was escorted into a cab.”

But this was Major League Baseball. Finally, after all the years in the minors, the injuries, the uncertainty.

After the game, Winkles, the manager, talked about his winning pitcher, telling the Anaheim Bulletin. “I’ve got to say that now — Raziano is my No. 1 reliever.”

Just 12 days later, Winkles was fired. A couple of weeks after that, new manager Dick Williams had Raziano sent back to Triple-A Salt Lake City, where he suffered a torn rotator cuff.

In Ryan’s next start, on three days rest, he pitched six shutout innings against the Yankees. On four days rest, Tiant won 2-1 in 10 over the A’s.

Ryan pitched 19 more years, retiring after the 1993 season. With 5,714 strikeouts, he was swept into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 1999. Of course, his 324 wins and seven no-hitters didn’t hurt.

Raziano would never play again in the big leagues. His career totals: 21 2/3 innings in 15 games, a 1-2 record, 9 strikeouts and a 6.23 ERA. He hung up his glove after the 1977 season with the Cardinals Triple-A team in New Orleans, his hometown.

There was a wide gulf between the careers of Nolan Ryan and Barry Raziano. But they still have that bond, beginning when they were fresh from high school at 19 and in a strange town.

To Ryan, Raziano was “a friend and a competitor.”

And even though Ryan didn’t finish that 235-pitch game, he was happy for his pal. “I just remember that when he got the win, it was his first Major League win, which I thought was cool.”
Here’s what Raziano also remembers: “We enjoyed life as 19-year-olds.”

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