Cy Young

1867-1955

American baseball player

Two achievements have made Cy Young an immortal name in baseball, even as other stars of his time disappear into obscurity. His record of 511 career wins, set at a time when pitchers pitched more often than today and completed most games they started, is untouchable now. And soon after his death in 1955, the Cy Young Award was created to honor the two major leagues' best pitchers of each year. Young deserves the award. He dominated the game for the twenty years of his major league career. He bridged the era of baseball's beginnings in the 1800s and the start of its modern era in the 1900s. The star of the first modern World Series, he defined pitching excellence for his time.

His Early Years

Denton True Young was born in rural Gilmore, Ohio, on March 29, 1867, to a farmer who'd been a private in the Union army in the Civil War and his wife. Educated through the sixth grade, Young and his brothers quickly took to the game of baseball, which became popular throughout the country in the 1870s. They'd travel up to twenty miles, probably on foot or horseback, to play. Young's strong arm made him a natural pitcher early on;

he'd practice by throwing balls and walnuts at a target on his father's barn door.

He was still a teen when he and his father moved to Nebraska; he spent two years working as a farm hand and playing in semi-pro baseball games on Saturdays. In 1887, father and son moved back to Ohio. Young spent two more years playing semi-pro ball, pitching and playing second base in 1889 for a team in New Athens that won its local championship. His talent caught the attention of a minor league team in Canton, which signed him in 1890.

The Cyclone

Young acquired his nickname right away. Worried that his new Canton teammates were skeptical of his abilities, he started throwing balls against a fence to show off. "I thought I had to show my stuff," he was quoted as saying in the 1965 book Kings of the Diamond. "I threw the ball so hard I tore a couple of boards off the grandstand. One of the fellows said the stand looked like a cyclone struck it. That's how I got the name that was later shortened to Cy." The local newspaper was calling him "Cyclone" by April 1890. (An alternate tale, less kind, suggests that his teammates took to calling him Cy, then a common nickname for someone who seemed like a country hick. That may have been part of the reason the name "Cyclone" was eventually shortened.)

Reporters were impressed with Young's fastball and curve ball, and he soon became known as the best pitcher in the Tri-State League, even though he was playing for an awful team. In July, Young pitched a no-hitter against McKeesport, striking out eighteen. A fierce competition for talented players that year, brought on by the creation of a third major league, made Young attractive to Cleveland's major league teams. The Cleveland Spiders paid Canton $300 to release Young, and he signed a contract with the Spiders that increased his monthly salary from $60 to $75.

Young pitched his first major league game on August 6, 1890. The press had raved about the arrival of the "Canton Cyclone," Reed Browning recounts in his book Cy Young: A Baseball Life, but the visiting Chicago Colts' player-manager, Cap Anson, is said to have taken a look at Young and dismissed him as "just another big farmer." Upset over the remark, Young gave up only three hits to the Colts, none to Anson himself. The Spiders won 8-1. Afterward, Anson tried to offer Spiders secretary Davis Hawley a thousand dollars to get Young on the Colts. Hawley said no.

By the end of 1890, Young had amassed a record of 9-7, respectable for a rookie. In 1891, he was Cleveland's winningest pitcher, with a 27-20 record, despite a slump toward the end of the year. He was a bright spot on the Spiders, who finished below .500 both years. The next year, Young proved to be the best pitcher in the National League, winning thirty-six games and losing only eleven. That year, the league split its schedule into two seasons, and the Spiders won the Fall Series pennant race, led by Young, who went 21-3. Young won the first game of the championship series against Boston, the spring champs, but the Spiders lost the rest of the games. In December, he was featured on the cover of the Sporting News.. That fall, he married 21-year-old Robba Miller, a neighbor he'd grown up with in Gilmore.

Strength and Stamina

In 1893, to generate more offense, baseball owners increased the distance between the pitcher and home plate by five feet to the current 60 feet, 6 inches. The change ended the careers of many pitchers, who found their pitches ineffective once batters had more time to see them, or who threw too hard and wore out their arms. Young was one of the few pitchers who did as well after the change as before. His thirty-two wins in 1893 were the second highest in the league. His 1894 record of 25-22 was decent, though weighed down by an end-of-season slump. In 1895, his thirty-five wins led the league, and the Spiders finished in second place. In the post-season Temple Cup championship, Young posted three wins as the Spiders beat the first-place Baltimore Orioles, four games to one.

His strength gave him a stamina few other pitchers had. At 6 foot 2 and 210 pounds, he was one of the league's strongest men. Every year, when baseball season was over, he'd go back to his farm to milk the cows and chop wood. He claimed he never had a sore arm. Early in his career, Young was a wild thrower, but over the years he acquired more and more control, and walked fewer and fewer batters. He had a great fastball, and he could fool hitters too. "What very few batters knew was that I had two curves," he once said, according to Rich Westcott's book Winningest Pitchers. "One of them sailed in there as hard as my fastball and broke in reverse. It was a narrow curve that broke away from the batter and went in just like a fastball. The other was a wide break."

Young was one of three pitchers who dominated the 1890s, along with Kid Nichols and Amos Rusie. His statistics dropped a bit in the late part of the decade as the Spiders' fortunes declined, but he still turned in his first major-league no-hitter in 1897, a 6-0 victory against Cincinnati.

At the end of 1898, after the Spiders suffered from falling attendance and a dispute with Cleveland authorities over playing home games on Sundays, team owner Frank Robison moved Young and all the Spiders' other top players to his other team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Young compiled a record of 26-16 in St. Louis in 1899, but the Cardinals finished fifth in the league. In 1900, at age 33, Young had a mediocre year, with a 19-18 record. Speculation spread that his career was almost over.

Star of the American League

When the American League declared itself a major league in 1901, Young left St. Louis and signed with the Boston Pilgrims, who offered him several hundred dollars more than the National League's salary cap of $2,400. Young dispelled the talk that he was washed up, and became one of the new league's biggest stars. He led the league in 1901 with thirty-three wins, 158 strikeouts, and an earned run average of 1.62. The next two years, he also led the A.L. in wins. In 1903, he pitched three straight 1-0 shutouts, including the game that clinched the pennant for Boston. That year, Boston played Pittsburgh, the National League champions, in the first modern World Series. Young lost the first game of the series, but won the fifth and the seventh, and Boston went on to win the series, five games to three.

In 1904, he was just as good. He pitched the first perfect game in the 1900s on May 5, beating the Philadelphia A's 3-0. It was part of twenty-three consecutive hitless innings, still a record: six innings in two relief appearances, the perfect game, and the first six innings of the next game he pitched. He shut out Boston's opponents ten times that year, including three toward the end of the pennant race with New York, which Boston won on the last game of the season.

The Pilgrims slipped from contention for a few years, and Young's record suffered. In 1905, he struck out 208 batters, the most of his career, but his record was only 18-19. His performance dropped off for a couple of years, but in 1908, at the age of forty-one, he posted a 21-11 record and an ERA of 1.26—a career best—and pitched his third no-hitter, beating the New York Highlanders 8-0 on June 30.

Boston traded Young to the Cleveland Naps (who later became the Indians) before the 1909 season began. He won nineteen games that year, but by 1910 his age was finally overtaking his famous stamina. After spending most of his career in great shape, he'd developed a paunch. He started only twenty games and won only seven. Cleveland released him in August 1911, and he signed with Boston. Late in the year, he pitched against Philadelphia's rookie, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and lost 1-0 in twelve innings. "When the kid beats you, it's time to quit," he said, according to Westcott's Winningest Pitchers. He still came to spring training in 1912, but batters were bunting to reach base against him, since his portly figure made it hard for him to field. He retired before the season started.

Retirement

Young went back to his farm in tiny Peoli, Ohio, near Newcomerstown. He stayed close to baseball all his life, going to several Indians games a year and often showing up at old-timers' events. He felt hurt when he didn't get into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in the first round of voting in 1936, but he was voted in a year later. When Young turned eighty, Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck invited him and the entire population of Newcomerstown—about a thousand people—to an Indians game to celebrate. On November 4, 1955, he died of a heart attack in his rocking chair. He was eighty-eight.

"His record of 511 victories in 912 games will never be surpassed," Young's gravestone asserts. It's true. He averaged forty starts a year, while today's pitchers average about thirty-three, and he pitched before relief pitchers were common, so ninety-two percent of his starts were complete games. But his record isn't just the result of pitching at the right time. No other pitcher from his era managed more than about 360 career wins.

At the end of his biography of Young, Reed Browning asks whether Young can be considered the best pitcher of all time. On one hand, Young's contemporaries seemed to consider him "very good but not the greatest," Browning notes. When they were asked to name the best pitcher they'd ever seen, or to choose their all-time pitching staffs, other pitchers, such as Kid Nichols, often beat out Young. On the other hand, Browning points out, Young's long career spanned very different eras of baseball, when rules and strategies changed significantly. "Cy Young lasted as long as he did not simply because he was blessed with a tough body and durable arm," he wrote, "but also because he used his intelligence to study, adapt, and learn." However one defines "greatest pitcher," Browning wrote, "Cy Young is clearly a candidate for the honor."

FURTHER INFORMATION

Books

Allen, Lee, and Tom Meany. Kings of the Diamond: The Immortals in Baseball's Hall of Fame. New York:G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1965.

Benson, John, and Tony Blengino. Baseball's Top 100: The Best Individual Seasons of All Time. Wilton, CT: Diamond Library, 1995.

Browning, Reed. Cy Young: A Baseball Life. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Cy Young Centennial, 1867-1967: July 14 & 15, New Philadelphia & Newcomerstown, Ohio. Newcomerstown, OH: Cy Young Centennial Committee, 1967.

Players of Cooperstown: Baseball's Hall of Fame. Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, Ltd., 1998.

Westcott, Rich. Winningest Pitchers: Baseball's 300-Game Winners. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

Periodicals

"Baseball's Cy Young Dies at 88.#x201D; Cleveland Press (November 4, 1955): 1.

Other

Baseball-Reference.com: Major League Baseball Statistics and History. http://www.baseball-reference.com

Sketch by Erick Trickey