On this day in 1981, Nolan Ryan threw the fifth no-hitter of his career, and in a piece for American Thinker, columnist Silvio Canto Jr. marked the anniversary with a personal recollection of the night he watched the final innings unfold.
The game, as Canto describes it, landed at the intersection of a pennant race and a national broadcast. The Houston Astros were locked in a divisional battle with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week carried the action to a nationwide audience. Canto writes that he caught only the last few innings β enough to see the finish.
In the ninth, Ryan struck out pinch-hitter Reggie Smith for his eleventh strikeout of the game. Ken Landreaux and Dusty Baker then grounded out to close it. As Canto notes with a touch of retrospective irony, that was the same Dusty Baker who later retired as manager of the Astros.
Two More No-Hitters, and the Ones He Missed
What Canto finds most remarkable is what came after: Ryan threw two more no-hitters. The sixth arrived nine years later, against the Oakland Athletics, but Canto admits he slept through it β a Pacific time start that, as he puts it, Central Time viewers hate. He woke the next morning annoyed at himself for not drinking more coffee and staying awake. The seventh came in Arlington, and incredibly, Canto recalls, it was not televised. Most fans, he says, heard that one on the radio.
That sense of anticipation is what Canto identifies as the core of Ryan’s appeal β the feeling that something special might happen every time he took the mound. He quotes Talmage Boston, author of Baseball and the Baby Boomer, writing for the Society for American Baseball Research, who argued that the most enduring memory Texas Rangers fans have of Ryan’s five seasons in Arlington from 1989 to 1993 was not a statistic but a sound: the bellowing grunt that could be heard throughout the ballpark each time the forty-something power pitcher delivered his fastball.
Canto also shares a near-miss of his own. In 1989, he was at the stadium when Ryan took a perfect game into the ninth. The Detroit Tigers broke it up with one out, and Canto missed his chance to watch history in person.
A Career That Overlapped Five Presidencies
The column then shifts to a bit of political trivia that Canto can’t resist. Ryan’s first two no-hitters came during Richard Nixon’s presidency, the next two under Gerald Ford, the fifth under Ronald Reagan, and the final two under George H.W. Bush. Canto’s conclusion is wry rather than dogmatic β maybe Ryan simply liked the GOP, he writes, or maybe that’s just what happens when voters elect a Republican in seven of the elections between 1968 and 2004.
It is the kind of observation that fits the American Thinker format: a sports memory wrapped in a light political aside, written for readers who might appreciate both.
The Longevity That Made the Moment Possible
What the column quietly underscores is how unusual Ryan’s career arc was. A pitcher who throws a no-hitter in 1981, during a pennant race, on national television, and then throws two more across the following decade, is not a normal career. The 1981 gem came in the middle of a season split by a players’ strike, adding another layer of strangeness to a year that already had plenty. The Astros and Dodgers were fighting for the National League West, and Ryan’s performance in that context carried extra weight.
For Canto, though, the memory is personal before it is historical. He describes following the Astros again on a Friday night, watching them lose to the Athletics β a team he refers to with a shrug as the “whatever they call themselves” A’s β and noting that his local Rangers had lost earlier, so he and other Texas fans were briefly rooting for Oakland. The vibes worked, he writes. The A’s won.
That present-day rooting interest is what gives the column its shape: a fan still watching baseball decades later, still measuring the current season against the ones he remembers, still slightly annoyed about the no-hitter he slept through.
The column closes with a brief note directing readers to the author’s blog for posts, podcasts, and videos, followed by the publication’s standard appeal for reader donations. The piece is illustrated with a photo of Ryan credited to Chuck Andersen via Wikimedia Commons.
What stays with a reader is the image Canto returns to through Talmage Boston’s quote: not the numbers, not the records, but the sound of a man in his forties throwing a baseball as hard as he could, loud enough to be heard from anywhere in the park. On the anniversary of no-hitter number five, that is the detail worth keeping.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/1981-nolan-ryan-s-no-hitter-5/