OFF BROADWAY

Nolan Ryan liked New York in the rain. He just didn't care for it dry. From Ryan's Alvin, Texas, perspective, New York had too many people, too many buildings, too many cars. But, when it rained there, he would put on his jogging clothes, collar his big, black Labrador and head for the park.

Even his wife, Ruth, said she wasn't sure why he liked to run in the rain. More than 20 years later, he said it was the only time he could be in the park, alone.

Just him, his dog and the rabbits.

"The rabbits would come out in the rain," Ryan said, "and the dog would chase them."

He thought a moment, smiling, the image as cool on his memory as a damp cloth.

"That was about the neatest experience I had in New York."

The recollection said everything about why Nolan Ryan did not throw any of his seven no-hitters in New York, did not strike out his 5,000th batter in New York, did not win his 300th game for New York. His love of nature and need for space made New York a tight, uncomfortable fit. His feelings prompted a trade request late in the 1971 season and a dilemma for the New York Mets.

They thought he disliked New York so much he might quit, as he had, indeed, considered. So Ryan, in effect, coerced what Whitey Herzog calls "one of the worst trades in the history of the game."

Of course, it wasn't Ryan who asked the California Angels for Jim Fregosi.

The four-for-one trade in December 1971 - Ryan, outfielder Lee Stanton, pitcher Don Rose and catcher Francisco Estrada for Fregosi, a 32-year-old former All-Star shortstop - was the culmination of several factors. The most important was the Mets' belief that Ryan, who led the Mets in losses in 1971, never would realize his great potential. The media were demanding a trade to jolt one of baseball' s most lethargic offenses. And, of course, Ryan wanted out.

Fregosi played little more than one season with the Mets before they sold him to the Rangers.

Ryan won 19 games in his first season with the Angels.

Herzog, the Mets' player personnel director in 1971, said the trade didn't look so bad when it was made because the Mets had so many good young pitchers.

New York had Tom Seaver, who had perhaps his best season in 1971 and still barely won 20 games. The Mets, who hit .249 and scored nearly 100 fewer runs than in 1970, finished third in the National League East for the second consecutive year, 14 games behind first-place Pittsburgh. They could pitch, though. Seaver had a career-low 1.76 earned-run average and a career-high 289 strikeouts. The Mets had lefthander Jerry Koosman and righthander Gary Gentry, who threw almost as hard as Ryan, Herzog said.

They had Jim Bibby, Tug McGraw, Dan Frisella, Jim McAndrew, Jon Matlack . . .

"We had so many (expletive) arms," said Herzog, now the Angels' general manager, "it was unbelievable."

Mets manager Gil Hodges, who died of a heart attack before the start of the 1972 season, said after the Ryan-Fregosi trade that, of all his pitchers, he would miss Ryan the least. The comment stung Ryan, though he hadn't done much to disprove him.

Ryan went 10-14 in 1971 with a 3.97 ERA and 116 walks in 152 innings. Hodges, who had predicted greatness for Ryan in the spring of 1970, apparently lost patience despite Ryan's military obligations, which continued to ruin his rhythm.

But Hodges also had to consider his spindly offense. He had won with a far-ranging platoon system in 1969. But, by the end of the 1971 season, third base had melted into a not-so-hot corner, a position where the Mets had started 10 players in 10 seasons.

They had looked for help before. Ryan almost went to Atlanta in the spring of 1969 for third baseman Joe Torre. But the Braves wanted Amos Otis, a rising young outfield star the Mets were trying to make into a third baseman. Otis was one of seven "untouchables" on the team, a list that did not include Ryan. The Mets said no. Torre went to the St. Louis Cardinals for Orlando Cepeda instead.

The Angels didn't particularly want Ryan, either, or so it seemed. The Angels' general manager at the time, Harry Dalton, asked for Gentry, one of the untouchables. Dalton later told Ryan he didn't really want Gentry and only asked as a negotiating ploy. His intentions were to take Ryan, though he didn't need to be so duplicitous with the Mets.

The Mets wanted a third baseman. They planned to move Fregosi from shortstop, where he had been a six-time All-Star. He was a career .268 hitter only two years removed from a season in which he hit .278 with 22 home runs and 82 runs batted in.

The problem was that Fregosi was coming off his worst season: a .233 average, five homers and 33 RBIs in 107 games. His ailments included the flu, a sore arm, a pulled leg muscle and surgery for a nerve tumor on his foot.

"I don't know what Gil was thinking," Herzog said of the trade. "Jimmy had been a good player, but he was done. I didn't know anything about it. They called me and told me to contact Lee Stanton and tell him he'd been traded for Fregosi. I thought that was the trade.

"And I wouldn't have traded Stanton for Fregosi."

Stanton hit .251 with 12 home runs, second on the Angels, in 1972.

Fregosi - overweight, his reflexes too burnt out to play third base - hit .232 with five home runs.

Bob Murphy, the Mets' radio play-by-play announcer since the club' s inception, blamed the New York media for the trade. He said the media put pressure on Mets chairman of the board M. Donald Grant to make any trade after doing nothing in the winter meetings.

Grant once blamed Jack Lang, a long-time New York sports writer. Lang, in his book The New York Mets: 25 Years of Baseball Magic, wrote that Grant bowed to media-created pressures about the club's inactivity. Fifteen transactions were made involving 50 players in one five-day period.

The deal with the Angels came five days after the winter meetings, on the last day of the inter-league trading deadline.

"Only a few voices of protest were raised over the deal," Lang wrote.

The Ryans were not among the protesters.

"I hated that place," Ryan said of New York. "I'd get cabin fever, sitting around the house. Then you'd drive to the ballpark and, no matter what time you went, there would be traffic and people getting in fights, honking, flipping people off, yelling."

Ryan said he paid twice what he could afford to rent a house in Bayside, a neighborhood in Queens, the most suburban of New York's boroughs. He wanted a yard, a space between the concrete slabs to grow tomatoes, which he distributed among his neighbors.

But even this relative tranquility was not always serene. Ruth' s brother, in town on a visit, once went to the park to play basketball.

"He got over there just in time to see these two kids roll the Good Humor man," Ryan said.

"You never saw anything like that in Alvin, Texas."

The Ryans, who have lived nearly all of their lives in Alvin, did little to take advantage of what New York had to offer. Ruth, bored for the most part, thought she should be playing on a tennis team or in college. She did neither. Then she became pregnant in the fall of 1971. Nolan feared for Ruth's safety when he was on the road. She was frightened, too, "but I never really wanted to tell him that."

The Ryans kept to themselves. Arthur Richman, who was the Mets' promotions director, said he never bothered to book Ryan on speaking engagements as he did other players.

"One day, Nolan grabs me by the arm," Richman said, "and he says, 'How come you never get me any bookings?' I told him, 'I don't think you feel like talking.' He just laughed.

"Nolan and Ruthie are as fine a pair of people you'll ever meet. All these years, they never got famous on me."

They never got famous in New York, anyway.

Ryan knew he wouldn't. He knew it was time to leave when he rode home from a game in September 1971 with Bob Scheffing, the Mets' general manager. He told Scheffing, a man he liked and respected, he wanted to be traded. Scheffing told him he would try to oblige.

The call came on Dec. 10.

"Nolan," Scheffing said, "you're going to sunny California."

Ryan, who had hoped to be traded to Houston, figured he meant the Los Angeles Dodgers or, at worst, the San Diego Padres. Scheffing told Ryan his new teammates were the Angels, none of whom Ryan knew, all of them playing in a league he knew nothing about. He was out of New York, at least. But for what? All he really knew about the Angels was that they didn't hit any better than the Mets and one of the few Angels who could hit, Alex Johnson, had pulled a gun in the clubhouse.

"Aw, hell," Nolan said, only to himself.