Rangers Risin'

At 4:03 p.m. on sunday, In the lengthening shadows of Toronto's Exhibition Stadium, a sudden stillness fell upon the crowd as it awaited Nolan Ryan's emergence from the Texas Rangers' dugout. It was the bottom of the ninth inning, with the Blue Jays losing to the Rangers 4-0. And the man for whom ordinary clocks will never do—he measures the passing of time with radar guns—had spent the afternoon on the mound floating weightlessly, defying the gravity of his years. Just 11 days earlier in Milwaukee the 42-year-old Ryan, who's in his first season with the Rangers, had thrown a no-hitter for seven innings while fanning 15 batters, a franchise record for a nine-inning game, in an 8-1 win. Now here he was, in another cold-water port, mowing them down again. He had held Toronto hitless through eight innings; he had struck out 12, walked 3 and allowed only 4 Jays to hit the ball out of the infield.

His performance was wondrous to behold. In his earlier effort against the Brewers, Ryan had been unable to get his curveball over. On Sunday he was in the zone with all three of his pitches: the heater, the hook and the change. Mixing things up, changing speeds, hitting spots, he made his pitching seem like art.

Toronto catcher Bob Brenly had seen a lot of Ryan over the years—for the last eight seasons Brenly was a San Francisco Giant and Ryan a Houston Astro—but he had never witnessed a Ryan quite like this. "I've seen him with a better breaking ball," said Brenly. "I've seen him with a better fastball. I've seen him with a better change. But in all the times I've seen him pitch. I've never seen him have all the pitches. Usually you can eliminate one pitch. To me, it's the best game I've ever seen him pitch."

At 4:04. Ryan popped up the steps of the dugout and broke into a trot toward the mound. Before the eighth, he had heard a man taunting him. "No-hitter! No-hitter!" There was none of that now. Instead, the crowd rose as one to its feet and rendered a sustained ovation to the old man who was three outs from his sixth big league no-hitter.

Ryan got Lloyd Moseby, the leadoff hitter, to hit a foul pop to third baseman Steve Buechele. Nelson Liriano came to the plate. Ryan got him to swing at a curve and then fed him an inside fastball for ball one. Now was the time to go outside. "I don't know him, but the way he approaches the ball, I've got to believe he likes the ball down." Ryan would say of Liriano, who was 15 years old when Ryan, then a California Angel, last worked against the Jays. "I do know he tries to pull the ball."

Tom Seaver once said that in every pitcher's life there are deliveries, made in critical moments, that have doom written across the seams at the instant of release, and that the pitcher wishes he could reach out and snatch them back. There was something of that in the righthanded Ryan's third pitch to the lefty-hitting Liriano. Ryan saw the ball drift left, from the outside corner to the middle of the plate. Liriano whipped the bat into the ball, and the crack sounded as if a gun had gone off. The ball rose on a hard line over first, hit the ground in fair territory and careered toward the corner. Ryan's head snapped down in anger: "Damn!" Liriano raced to third, quite pleased with himself. "I just do my job," he said afterward. "I'm not sorry."

"That's his pitch to hit," said Ryan, "and that's what he did. It's hard to have a game like that and come out disappointed, but that's the way I am."

As surely as the no-hitter had been there, it was gone, a fading apparition at a seance of 31,473 people. "A shame," said Rangers assistant pitching coach Dick Egan. "He's getting near the end of his career and when he gets that close to a no-hitter, it's almost as bad as losing." But as the shock of history denied wore off, there was a sense of exultation among the Rangers. "It was just so, so thrilling to play behind him," said Buechele. "It's like he could do it every time he goes out."

The high excitement in the Texas locker room stemmed from more than Ryan's 10th career one-hitter. With the 4-1 victory, the Rangers, at 13-4, owned the best record in the majors and were off to the fastest start in the Texas franchise's 18-year history. Said Jim Sundberg, the 15-year veteran who caught for Texas from 1974 to '83 and returned to the Rangers this year. "I go back a long time, longer than anybody, and I have never seen anything like this. Something is happening here."

And it's being felt all the way from Texas to Toronto to...well, the White House.