Baseball clubs, like all institutions, develop cultures that are reflected in the types of people they employ. In Texas, hitters — preferably power hitters — have always been the priority. “When I got here as a free agent in 1989, that’s already how it was,” Ryan told me. “We already had Juan Gonzalez, Sammy Sosa and Ruben Sierra. And what do we do? Go out and trade for Rafael Palmeiro and Julio Franco.” The team’s stadium, which opened in 1994, was designed to favor hitters, with easily reachable fences and an office building in centerfield to block potentially problematic headwinds.

Between the enervating summer heat and the E.R.A.-inflating ballpark, Texas became a team of last resort for free-agent pitchers. For those who were already part of the organization, regular thrashings were assumed. Ryan sought to change this by finding and developing more talented pitchers, and also by addressing what he considered the root cause of the problem: the cycle of low expectations, insufficient confidence and poor performance. “People came into our organization thinking you couldn’t pitch here, and that’s just wrong,” he said. “We had to get them in the right frame of mind and believing in themselves.”

Days before the opening of the 2009 season, Hicks stopped paying interest on the Rangers’ $525 million in debt and put the team on the market. (Hicks has made a similar hash of another of his sports investments, Liverpool, England’s most decorated soccer team.) By this point, Ryan was already starting to feel a sense of ownership over the franchise. After sitting in on numerous presentations to potential buyers during the early months of the 2009 season, he decided to lead his own group to purchase the team.

AS IMPROBABLE AS the notion of an ex-ballplayer buying a major-league team may sound, it’s important to keep in mind how much Nolan Ryan, whose likeness seems to stare down at you from every corner of the Arlington ballpark, means to the Texas Rangers. The 12-foot-tall bronze statue of him in the centerfield plaza may say as much about the franchise’s history of futility as it does about Ryan — after all, he played just 5 of his 27 seasons with the Rangers and took the ball only every fourth or fifth day at that — but it’s almost impossible to exaggerate Ryan’s celebrity in Texas. He was born and raised there, and between his three cattle ranches­, his stance on the Second Amendment and his reputation for gritty toughness and quiet rectitude, he embodies many of the state’s favorite ideals. He has his own highway, the Nolan Ryan Expressway, and if you spend even a little time in Texas you’re likely to meet a disproportionate number of boys named either Nolan or Ryan. So enamored was Bush of his team’s former ace that he took a detour in 1999 from his presidential campaign to attend Ryan’s induction into the Hall of Fame.

Ryan partnered with Chuck Greenberg, a sports lawyer in Pittsburgh who owns a pair of class-A baseball franchises. They rounded up 18 mostly local investors, including two prominent energy titans, Bob Simpson and Ray Davis, and named their new company the Rangers Baseball Express, a play on Ryan’s nickname, the Ryan Express (itself a play on “Von Ryan’s Express,” a World War II movie starring Frank Sinatra that came out around the time of Ryan’s big-league debut in 1966).

Their purchase of the franchise dragged on for months and was nearly derailed by angry creditors, who balked at the initial agreement last fall, arguing that Hicks and Major League Baseball were conspiring to sell the Rangers to their hometown hero at a hometown discount. In May 2010, after months of legal wrangling, Ryan and Greenberg’s group tried to push the deal through in the form of a prepackaged bankruptcy plan, but a judge ordered a competitive auction. A new group led by the billionaire Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks, entered the bidding. “Once Cuban came in,” Ryan said, “I didn’t think we’d get it done.”

The purchase price ultimately rose beyond what Cuban felt the franchise was worth, and the Rangers Baseball Express won out. Its $593 million bid for the team was accepted on Aug. 4. As fate would have it, this was the anniversary of the most iconic moment in the franchise’s history, which took place in the otherwise-unremarkable season of 1993. Not surprisingly, Nolan Ryan was at its center: then 46 and in the final season of his long career, he drilled Robin Ventura of the Chicago White Sox with a pitch. Ventura, who was 20 years his junior, charged the mound. Ryan put him in a headlock and proceeded to punch away at his head and face.