re: 100 mph fastball is the same as old school 93 mph.

I deal with it every day on Facebook baseball groups I belong to. There is literally not a day … a single day … that someone isn’t posting a meme of Ryan giving Robin Ventura noogies (I’d like to see what he’d have done if Frank Thomas or Bo had charged the mound, he’d have checked out like he did when Dave Winfield came after him once) or crowing about him throwing 250 pitches in a game, like that should be the standard or something, not understanding that Ryan was a freak of nature and not the norm.

For the record, I accept the OP’s contention that prime Ryan would’ve probably gotten a higher mph with today’s measuring system. And I think folks who claim that the true greats of the past, like Walter Johnson or Bob Feller, threw 75 mph are silly.

I also think so many people gripe about Ryan’s faults and claim that he’s overrated to the point where he’s become underrated, he was a legitimate no-brainer first-ballot Hall of Famer.

But Ryan is not the GOAT, or anywhere close to it, as so many of his most ardent devotees try to claim. On my own particular list of ATG pitchers, I have him 30th. I don’t think it’s an insult to call someone the 30th greatest pitcher out of every pitcher who’s taken the mound in 150 years.

But I think people like Phil Niekro and Bert Blyleven had better careers, and Ryan would be at the absolute bottom, under the bottom really, of the list of pitchers I’d start in the seventh game of a World Series.

I tell people he’s the most entertaining and unique pitcher ever, but IMO a lot of what makes fans love him so much actually contributed to him having a mediocre W/L record. (His devotees will try to tell you it’s because he pitched for sorry teams. Run the numbers, the teams he pitched for were over .500 for his career and significantly over .500 after the Angels got good in 1978. The only sustained run of bad teams he pitched for in 25 years were the 1972-77 Angels and Frank Tanana was the Angels’ best pitcher for a lot of those years.)

Basically Ryan started every game trying to strike out 27 batters. If he didn’t strike out the first guy, he tried to strike out the next 26, etc. He didn’t care about holding base runners on, he didn’t care about defending his position, he didn’t care about getting his defense involved in the game and by God he was never going to give in to a batter even if it was in his team’s strategic best interest to do so.

Fans get off on that tough guy mano y mano merde, but baseball is a team game.

Location and movement are always more important than velocity

Maddux is on the short list for GOAT, on my own list I have him sixth behind W. Johnson, Grove, C. Young and Seaver.

And not replying directly to anything you said, just taking the opportunity to toss this out. People claim the great players of the past couldn’t compete today. Grover Cleveland Alexander, who won 373 games and is in my personal top 10, was known for throwing perfectly placed pitches down and away. They can quantify anything today, and according to the writer Joe Posnaski, MLB batters in 2019 hit a rousing .130 against perfectly placed pitches down and away.

Is OP correct or mostly correct? I have no idea but it would make sense to me

So the guys throwing 103 today really aren't throwing harder / faster than Nolan Ryan in his prime?

How did the radar guns in the past that measured near the plate know the distance when pitchers at different levels threw from different distances?