A couple of baseball stories I hadn't heard, in re Nolan Ryan's second no-hitter

I was paging through my dad's copy of Nolan Ryan's autobiography and ran across the following anecdotes from his second no-hitter, which was called by notorious funnyman umpire Ron Luciano.

Here's Luciano talking about how much speed Ryan had that night:

I called three straight strikes on Mickey Stanley: "Boom! Sounds low on the corner. Boom! Sounds like the inside corner of the plate. Boom! Sounds like you're out."

Stanley turned around and said, "Thank you."

I said, "What?"

"I couldn't hit one of those pitches no matter what," Stanley said. "Those were the greatest pitches I ever heard."

The last batter to the plate was Norm Cash, and we'll let Ryan take it himself from here:

I looked at Norm stepping into the batter's box, and I knew what he was holding in his hands wasn't a baseball bat.

"Ron, what's he got?"

Luciano acted as if I was bothering him. "What're you talking about?"

"Check his bat!" I shouted. "Check that thing."

Luciano took the piece of wood out of Norm's hand and looked it over. I found out later it was a leg he had ripped off the snack table in the clubhouse.

"Norm, you can't bat with this old piano leg." Ron was scolding Norm like a child. "Get rid of it."

"But, Ron, I've got no chance with a bat. Lemme try this..."

Ryan in his younger days, of course, was a right-handed Randy Johnson: you took your life in your hands when you stepped in the box -- and everybody knew it -- because (a) he threw the ball about a million miles an hour, and (b) he never was quite sure just exactly where the thing was gonna go when it left his hand.

You guys remember John Kruk's All-Star at-bat against the Big Unit, right? Johnson's first pitch was a screaming fastball that would have been straight at Kruk's head if only John had been eight feet tall. Kruk hit the ground in abject little-girl terror, and then proceeded to strike out on the next three pitches, on every one of which he swung while literally falling backwards out of the batter's box. I can't believe nobody's ever posted the video of that at-bat to YouTube; I laughed 'til my sides hurt.

Ray Chapman is famous mostly for being the only guy ever to get killed by being hit by a major-league fastball; but he also once walked away from the plate when batting against Walter Johnson with an 0-2 count. The umpire hollered at him, "Hey, wait, Ray, you got another strike."

"Keep it," Ray answered shortly, "I don't want it."

I can only presume Kruk had never heard that story, because watching him that night you sure did get the feeling that the only reason Kruk didn't become the first guy in history to strike out on one pitch (namely, that first screaming wild pitch) is because he didn't realize that was an option.

[pleasantly reminiscent sigh] Good times, man.