INSULT & INJURY

Ruth Ryan went to see her husband in the hospital a day after doctors cut on his career. She was five months pregnant with their second child. On the long, hot walk from the parking lot to Nolan' s hospital room, she stepped in a hole and turned her ankle.

They made a nice pair, Nolan and Ruth Ryan.

"He was miserable," she said. "I was miserable."

Reporters, eager to learn the results of surgery on Ryan's right elbow, apparently did not have a good grasp of the misery factor in the hospital room on Sept. 24, 1975.

"This could be the end of your career," someone said, first up. "If so, what are you going to do?"

The hobbled, pregnant woman thought about screaming.

"All I could think," said Ruth, nearly 20 years later, "was, 'C'mon, guys, have a heart.'"

Nolan Ryan has what most media consider a good relationship with them. "Good," meaning he generally is available, if not overly quotable, and never has he emptied a garbage can of ice on any of them. Had his fastball been as easy to see coming as his answers, he wouldn' t have struck out 50 batters, much less 5,000. But he is a marvel of consistency, on the field and off. Reporters have found him over his 27 seasons to be as monotonous as Kansas wheat.

He had one bad stretch with the media, though, an aberration that was the result of his most unpleasant memories in baseball. He became angry at reporters in 1975 after they speculated on arm problems that had ruined his fastball, threatened his career and exposed the biggest flaw in his personality -- his secrecy.

They speculated because he wouldn't tell them the nature of his injury. He wouldn't tell anyone. He didn't apprise Ruth of the severity until it became apparent he needed surgery, a procedure far from routine in the 1970s.

Ryan once said his reluctance to talk about the injury, or himself in general, is "a weakness.' Ruth has learned to live with it. But the reticence was a particular problem in 1975, a season he covered in his first autobiography under a chapter titled Crisis and Ordeal.

He was coming off his best seasons in baseball, the only two years in which he won 20 games. He bragged about his health. The only real arm problem he had was a popped tendon in 1967, the year before his rookie season. By 1975, however, the wear of three years of 300-plus innings was apparent.

He started the season well, better than any of his career. He won eight of his first nine games, 10 of 13 and had a 2.24 earned run average in those games. Five of them were shutouts; seven were complete games.

One was a no-hitter, on June 1 against Baltimore.

The difference in his fourth no-hitter, tying Sandy Koufax's major league career record, and the rest was style. He had no fastball, really. He believes now he got by mostly on his reputation. Batters still believed he had his fearsome fastball and flinched at the ghost of it.

His most effective pitches against Baltimore were change-ups. He struck out the game's last batter, Bobby Grich, on one.

He couldn't overpower the Orioles because of the pain in his elbow. The game was particularly poignant for Ryan, who called it "a pure pitching performance" rather than outright dominance.

He couldn't throw a fastball past anyone, though few knew it. He realized something was wrong with his arm when he woke up April 16, the morning after pitching, and his elbow was so swollen he couldn' t straighten his arm.

He told no one. He tried to pitch through it, pitched poorly in a loss to Texas and admitted his arm hurt. The team doctor diagnosed it as another tendon injury and recommended rest. Ryan sat out one game, returned and pitched well, for a while.

But his elbow ached all the time. It hurt so much he had to bend his neck forward to brush his teeth or comb his hair.

Ruth knew there was a problem because he would awake at night in agony. She never asked him about it, though. He eventually told her his elbow hurt but did not reveal the extent of his concerns until much later in the season, when surgery was inevitable.

"I'm pretty private about things," Ryan said, guarded even about his style. "I don't like to alarm people if it's not necessary."

The sentiment was chivalrous and distant. Ruth understood why her husband, whom she had known since they were teen-agers, would not tell her his problems. He knew she would worry, as is her nature, and he wanted to spare her the anxiety.

But, as his wife, she believed she needed to know.

They had been a couple, either as boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife, for a dozen years. They had left Alvin together, lived the claustrophobia of New York together, moved across country and started a new life in California together.

But, even after all they had been through by the mid-'70s, she still was not used to his habit of holding back.

"You go through the ups and downs together," she said, her tone as even as her husband's, "and sometimes you feel a little shut off when you don't hear the bad with the good."

He has become more open as the years pass, she said. Through Nolan' s two stays on the disabled list this season, Ruth said they have been "much more communicative than 10 years ago."

"A lot has to do with what else is going on in our lives," she said. "If one of the kids is sick or something, he won't talk about what's bothering him. He doesn't have to say a lot anymore, though. When he does, it's usually to the point where it's already obvious to me."

Members of the media can't guess, though. They have to ask. A figure of Ryan's stature takes frequent questions, which would irritate most people of Ryan's stoic nature.

"If it were me," Ruth said, "I'd be insane or want to run away. I think he's handled it great. He may sound put out sometimes, but he always knows that someone has a job to do."

He just didn't like the job the media did in 1975.

He had no problems with reporters when he was going good. The game after his no-hitter, he went into the sixth inning with a no- hitter against Milwaukee before Hank Aaron broke it up with a single.

"Well, now, Henry Aaron will have something to talk about when he looks back on his career," Ryan told reporters after the game. "He can say, 'I was the man who broke up Nolan Ryan's record no-hitter.'"

He called it, facetiously, the funniest thing he has said in baseball, perhaps the only funny thing. But the rest of the season was far from lighthearted. He lost with increasing frequency. He favored his elbow, which affected his shoulder. He took a cortisone shot in his shoulder and swore the Angels to secrecy, reasoning that, if the news got out, opposing batters would know he was not himself and wait on his not-so-fastball.

Reporters found out about the cortisone shot, though. Dick Miller of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner speculated that Ryan had a rotator-cuff injury. This was not so. His shoulder problem was irritating, not serious. The elbow injury, however, could have been termed serious had anyone known about it but Ryan.

Ryan was infuriated by the speculation. He later said he may have overreacted, a result of frustrations over his elbow injury and a withering record. After winning 10 of his first 13 games, he lost nine of his last 13. He lost eight consecutive decisions at one point. On the last, an 8-3 loss to Baltimore on July 22, he didn't make it out of the second inning.

As reporters approached Ryan after the Baltimore loss, Ryan overheard one ask another if he thought Ryan would speak to them. Ryan, turning on them, said he never would talk to them again and "a lot of things I remember now and would like to forget," according to the autobiography.

Miller, now a car salesman in Oxnard, Calif., previously had a good relationship with Ryan. Ryan always has socialized with the media, as long as it is limited to dinner or, perhaps, a movie. Miller, who named one of his sons after Ryan, thought the relationship was closer than most, one former colleague said.

"That was the only problem I ever had with Ryan," Miller said.

Ryan withdrew from the media and, to a lesser extent, his teammates. He already considered himself a loner. He never mixed much, then or now. His close friends are few but loyal.

"Nolan's not the type to go out and be flamboyant," said Dave Chalk, a third baseman on the Angels in the mid-'70s and one of Ryan' s closest friends on the team. "He didn't like to go out and carouse. We did some hunting during the off-season, and that was about it.

"Everything you hear and read about him is true. He's a gentleman."

Ryan apparently was too much of a gentleman to pile troubles on a friend, even Chalk, who drove in the only run of his no-hitter. Chalk, later a Ranger and now a Dallas resident, did not recall Nolan having any problem in '75.

The record proves he did. Ryan had a 4.82 ERA in his last 13 games, more than twice that of his first 13. Without telling anyone, Ryan visited Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles surgeon and athletic specialist, who recommended ice and whirlpool treatments. They helped, but only briefly.

Ryan finally told the Angels in late August that the problem diagnosed as a sore tendon in May was really in his elbow. The Angels yanked him from the starting rotation immediately and scheduled the surgery.

"I knew I had to have something done," Ryan said. "If I didn't, my career was over with. I'd dealt with it all summer, and it wasn' t going to get better. I was prepared that the surgery wouldn't fix it, either.

"If my arm wasn't better the next spring, I was going to retire."

At 28.

The surgery was routine by '90s standards. Surgeons removed calcium deposits that had accumulated in the joint through years of abuse, by way of pitching. They did not cut muscle or bone, which might have ended his career, as it had most pitchers.

The prospect of surgery had frightened both Nolan and Ruth, who was pregnant and had a 4-year-old, Reid. But, having confided in her, Nolan found his wife comforting, not anxious. She told him the operation likely would turn out well. If it didn't, that was all right, too.

Their life had been good in baseball, she said, but their future, regardless, was their family. They would be fine.

"I was proud of her point of view, and I felt better about the situation after that," Nolan wrote in his autobiography. "I felt better after I had shared my problem with her."

So did she.