'I THOUGHT I'D KILLED HIM'

Griffin was not the type. The Boston Red Sox had to put him on the disabled list twice in 1972 and 1973 after he was hit by pitches, and he still wouldn't get off the plate. He was a 6-0, 160-pound cliche: a tough, good-field, no-hit second baseman having a career year. He was hitting .347 on April 30, 1974. Peter Gammons, who covered the Red Sox for the Boston Globe, wrote the next day that Griffin likely was Boston's best player, behind Carl Yastrzemski.

Nolan Ryan's curve, coming into focus after seven seasons in the majors, fooled Griffin. He wouldn't let it happen again. He often told teammates he didn't like facing Ryan, whose pitches would be clocked the fastest ever that season. But Griffin hated even more to be fooled.

He opened his stance on the second pitch, apparently to bunt. Ryan, noting Griffin's position, came high and inside to foil it.

And then the ball just took off.

Ryan offered no warning to Griffin. Over the years, any time a pitch would get away from him, Ryan would yell at a batter. He had no time to call out to Griffin. Ryan thought it was a good, tight pitch right up to the terrible moment it spun toward Griffin's head and hit him, just above his left ear.

"I didn't know how bad he was until I got up to the plate," Ryan said. "He wasn't moving. His eyes were rolled back up in his head. I thought I'd killed him.

"That was the first time it ever crossed my mind I was capable of killing somebody."

The capability remains with Ryan, nearly 20 years later. His good fortune is that he never has demonstrated it. Only one man has died after being hit by a pitched ball in a major league game. Doug Griffin did not. The injury caused him to miss 51 games, though. He played only 154 over the next three seasons, retiring after the 1977 season, at 30. Acquaintances say he was not adversely affected by Ryan's reckless fastball. He got out of the game, they said, because he couldn't hit a curve.

Ryan long ago learned to live with, even appreciate, the frightening side effects of his raw speed. He recalls often and easily a high school playoff game in which he hit the lead-off batter on the helmet, breaking it.

He hit the next batter on the arm, breaking it.

"The third guy went up to his coach and begged him not to send him up there," Ryan said.

"I didn't blame him. I wouldn't have gone up there, either."

By the late 1980s, former Rangers pitching coach Tom House would call Ryan's mechanics the best in the game for a power pitcher. But, in 1974, Ryan had not perfected his delivery. He still released the ball at various points, accounting for the fact that when he was wild, he usually was high.

He was wild in 1974. His bases on balls total went up by 40 from the year before. Otherwise, his record was nearly the same as his 1973 season, which had earned him a raise to $100,000.

He won a career-high 22 games in 1974, one more than in 1973. The pitty-pat California Angels - led by 39-year-old Frank Robinson' s 20 home runs and 63 runs batted in - scored 22 runs in his 16 losses, identical numbers from the year before. For the second year in a row, he threw 26 complete games. His earned run average was up two- hundredths of a point, to 2.89. He became the first pitcher to strike out more than 300 batters three seasons in a row, his 367 just 16 off the record he set in 1973.

Whitey Herzog, who joined the Angels as a coach in 1974 and served as an interim manager between Bobby Winkles and Dick Williams at mid- season, saw quite a difference in the pitcher his old team, the New York Mets, traded.

"I don't think anybody ever had a better year than Nolan had in 1974," he said.

Herzog was impressed most by Ryan's durability and that he won on a bad team. Herzog recalled a game against the Red Sox on June 14, when Ryan pitched 13 innings. He struck out 19 batters, one of three times he would do so in 1974, and walked 10, only to receive a no-decision in the Angels' 4-3 loss.

He threw 235 pitches.

The red line for pitchers, at least by 1990s standards, is about 120 pitches. Pitch counts weren't as important in the 1970s. Ryan generally abides by the new standard, though he has objected to pitch limits late in his career.

He had none to speak of with the Angels. Four days after he pitched the equivalent of two games, he threw six shutout innings against the New York Yankees. He gave up three hits and three walks and struck out seven.

Ryan eventually would pay for the abuse. The 1974 season was the last he would pitch when at his best, he said. Elbow problems, an accumulation of stress, would begin the next year, leading to surgery and the slow debilitation of his fastball.

But, in 1974, he still was one of the fastest pitchers ever, so fast that he constantly was compared with Sandy Koufax and Bob Feller. The comparisons led to arguments. The arguments brought a scientific experiment, bent on settling them.

Any previous attempts to quantify the speed of a fastball were spotty, at best. Pitchers often had to hit a target to register the speed, which was difficult for some. To those who saw his fastball, or thought they did, Steve Dalkowski was faster than anyone. He was so fast, so wild, he once threw a baseball through a wooden fence. He broke an umpire's mask.

He tore off part of a batter's ear, as legend has it.

He spent nine years in Baltimore's farm system in the 1950s and '60s and not a day in the major leagues. He had no control, either of his fastball or his drinking. The only time his fastball was ever measured, 45 minutes passed before he got a pitch within range of the machine.

Rockwell International, a defense contractor with expertise in aerospace and electronic technology, hoped for better success with Ryan. The Angels, on their way to a sixth-place finish, hyped the Aug. 20 experiment in Anaheim Stadium.

Ryan worried about the publicity. He thought he might hurt himself, attempting to throw too hard.

"The first warm-up pitch," Ryan said, "they got me at 55 mph. I thought, "This could be embarrassing."

It wasn't. He eventually threw two pitches of more than 100 mph. His 100.9 mph effort is a Guinness record, more than 2 mph faster than the previous listing by Feller.

Ryan believes he has thrown faster, as much as 4 or 5 mph faster, on many occasions. Dick Miller, who covered the Angels for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, said the night Rockwell timed Ryan "was probably the worst night of his life. He was throwing it the worst I'd ever seen.'

But, bad night or not, it is unlikely anyone ever threw 100 mph after nine innings, as Ryan did during the testing.

The more Ryan pitches, the better his control. He used to get faster in a game.

"In my heyday, that was the case," he said. "I would get into a better rhythm, and I'd have better stuff."

The late-blooming formula fit in his best seasons, 1973 and 1974. He won his last seven games in 1973. He won six of his last eight in 1974. He also threw his third no-hitter in two years in his last start, leaving him one short of Sandy Koufax's major league record.

Ruth Ryan already had gone back to Alvin with young Reid by the time Nolan made his last start, against Minnesota in Anaheim on Sept. 28. The Angels "were just playing out the schedule," Ryan said. Ryan thought he was, too. But he struck out 15, walked eight, won, 4-0, and couldn't have been less interested. He had to be coaxed to come out of the dugout afterward.

Ryan doesn't recall much about his third no-hitter. "It was the most vague of them, in my mind,' he said, no more impressed nearly 20 years later.

Some games hold his interest, though, like his first appearance against Doug Griffin since the latter's return.

The 51 games had passed without any words between them. Ryan never has talked to Griffin about the pitch or anything else, for that matter. The closest they came was a telephone call to Griffin's house the night Ryan hit him.

One of Griffin's children answered. Mommy isn't home, Ryan was told. She's at the hospital, with Daddy.

The conversation shook Ryan. He considered what it might mean to his son, Reid, if he had to pick up the phone one day and relate a similar message.

Ryan got over the ill feelings, though. He returned to his intimidating style, moving batters off the plate when necessary, doing his job.

Or at least he did until he faced Griffin again.

Ryan wouldn't throw inside the first two times Griffin batted. He left two fastballs out over the plate. Griffin - crowding the plate, sensing Ryan's vulnerability - hit both to right field for singles.

"The next time up," Ryan said, his expression as stolid as stone, "I knocked him down."