Nolan Ryan is ridiculously overrated!

I'm sick of hearing people tell me that Nolan Ryan is the best or even one of the best pitchers in baseball history! In my opinion he was good, but he wasn't even close to being the best pitcher in MLB history for the reasons set forth below.

Ryan was wild and had control problems his entire career. Yes, it is true that he's the all-time leader in strikeouts with (5714), no-hitters (7), and he did win 324 games. However, he's also the all-time leader in walks issued (2795 - more than 50% more than the #2 person!), lost a whopping 292 games (#3 all-time), and his winning percentage was a pedestrian 52.6%.

Ryan seemed to be more intent on blowing the ball by batters instead of simply getting them out. I have no doubt that many of his 292 career losses were due in large part to walked batters who later scored. In 1974 Ryan struck out 367 batters, but also walked 202 batters! That's just sloppy.

I realize that a number of Ryan's fans aruge that his lost so many games because he was on bad teams. Unfortunately, that's simply a shallow argument. For example, Steve Carlton was on a pathetic Philadelphia Phillies team in 1972 that only won 59 games! However, Carlton led the NL in wins that year with 27, 45.7% of his team's victories that season! Simply put, the great ones find ways to win games despite being on poor teams. Randy Johnson has also managed to win many games despite having been on some terrible Mariners and Diamondbacks teams.

Moreover, Ryan failed to win a single CY Young Award during his 27-year career! In fact, Ryan only finished 2nd in the Cy Young Award voting once (in 1973). If he truly were the greatest, he would have won multiple Cy Young Awards.

Finally, I can think of a number of pitchers currently playing who have had beeter careers than Ryan - Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, and Pedro Martinez, to name a few.