A WELCOME CHANGE

The legacy of Nolan Ryan will not be that he pitched so long. The wonder was that he spent so much time on the upside of his career curve, particularly when he didn't have one.

Ryan went more than half his career with two pitches: a 95-plus mph fastball and a curve. Scouting reports were simple: a curve in the vicinity of the strike zone usually was unhittable, as he proved on five occasions.

He got his 4,000th strikeout on July 11, 1985, on a wicked 0-2 curveball against the New York Mets' Danny Heep.

"But if he didn't get his curve over," said Claude Osteen, the Rangers' pitching coach and a former opponent, "we had a hell of a chance of winning, because he was going to put men on base.

"We gave him enough time and waited on his fastball."

Teams waited and, generally, won. Even a 100-mph fastball is hittable, eventually. Hitting is timing. Forget the curve; wait on the fastball, and pull the trigger a little earlier than usual.

Ryan eventually came up with a remedy by the mid-1980s, of course.

He found another pitch.

"If a pitcher doesn't have three pitches," Osteen said, "he better have two damn good ones. And not the same speed, either."

Ryan's off-speed pitch hadn't been effective with the Mets or the California Angels because it wasn't far off-speed. Pitching coaches say a changeup must be 10 mph slower than the fastball to fool a batter. Ryan's wasn't. He couldn't slow it down enough or disguise it so that it looked like a fastball when it left his hand.

Then, in 1981, Joe Nuxhall, a Cincinnati Reds broadcaster and former pitcher, showed Ryan how the Reds' Mario Soto threw his changeup. The secret for Soto, who had the best changeup in the league, was his grip. Soto allowed the ball to slide to the outside of his hand, with the tips of his index finger and thumb touching, forming a circle.

Ryan worked on the "circle change" for at least four years before it began to feel comfortable. By the time he had command of it, he was a different pitcher.

"I thought it made him a much better pitcher," former Astros reliever Joe Sambito said. "I thought he was a better pitcher with that than he was with the Angels and Mets."

The possibility seemed ludicrous. Ryan was 38 by 1985. He had thrown five no-hitters, four of them a decade earlier, when his fastball still hung around the 100-mph barrier.

He certainly didn't look any better in 1985, at least from a statistical standpoint. He was 10-12, his first losing record since 1978. A 3.80 earned-run average was his highest since 1971, his last year with the Mets.

He started out well enough. He had an 8-3 record by June 17, a time frame that included his two season highlights. The first was his milestone strikeout of Heep. The other came at the All-Star game, when he threw an honorary first pitch.

Those moments made up for the second half, in which he won only two more games. He said he still did not have good rhythm after two long stints on the disabled list in the 1984 season.

The Astros were no better in 1985 than they were in 1984, either. They finished 12 games out again, tied for third place in the NL West.

The most Ryan could make of what he considered a "mediocre" season was to work on his changeup.

One of the reasons the circle change works so well for Ryan is that it does not require him to "choke" the ball back in his palm. Ryan has relatively small hands for a man his size. He has to hold the ball closer to his palm than most pitchers do, even on his fastball. Many pitchers choke the ball on their changeup, a technique that doesn' t work for Ryan.

He didn't take to the changeup quickly, though. His command of it coincided with better control overall. Former San Diego Padres manager Dick Williams, who had Ryan with the Angels, said in 1983 that Ryan's control was much better than it had been with the Angels.

Ryan's ratio of strikeouts to walks improved almost yearly with the Astros. He went from a 2-to-1 ratio, typical of his career, to 3-to-1 in the mid- to late-1980s.

He attributed the increased control to repetition. He never toyed much with other pitches. At times, he said, he has "turned over" his pitches to get a screwball effect, the ball breaking in on right-handed batters. He has thrown sinkers against left-handed batters on occasion if he needed a ground-ball out.

"Mostly, I just worked on the three pitches I had, though," he said. "If I could throw 'em for strikes, they were good enough to win with."

The results began to show after the long years of working on it, like 1985.

"It was becoming more of a factor all the time," former Astros catcher Alan Ashby said. "I thought it was the biggest factor in him becoming a truly great pitcher. I always felt that, for a guy with an exceptional fastball, a changeup was a great second pitch.

"Before he got that, Nolan would walk a lot of guys because he was always nibbling for the corners."

The changeup changed everything.