Perspectives on Cy Young
He was the old fat guy who won 511 games, but there’s a lot more than meets the eye
By
Eric Enders
Published in the Major League Baseball 2001 Yearbook (February 2001)
Ask a modern fan about Cy Young,
and you’ll probably hear that it’s the name of the award Pedro Martinez
takes home every year. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find out he’s the
pudgy guy who won an astounding 511 games around the turn of the century. But
today, aside from that one staggering statistic, Cy Young is baseball’s most
anonymous legend.
Denton True Young got his
nickname in the minors after he threw a wild pitch that tore a couple of wooden
planks loose from the grandstand. An observer said the park looked like a
cyclone hit it, and from then on box scores listed him as Cyclone Young. His
nickname was the most colorful thing about him. As a superstar in the rough and
tumble world of turn-of-the-century baseball, Young was something of an anomaly.
He wasn’t a profane brawler like John McGraw, an raucous carouser like Ed
Delahanty, or a lovable eccentric like Rube Waddell. Cy Young was a bashful
farmer whose idea of a good time was chopping wood.
Today we think of Cy Young as fat
largely because candid snapshots didn’t become common until Kodak introduced
the Brownie box camera in 1900 – meaning that all the action photos we have of
Young are from the second, pudgier, half of his career. But far from being a
turn-of-the-century David Wells, the young Young was unusually tall and
prodigiously strong, one of the most powerful athletes of his day. He was the
second-winningest pitcher of the 1890s, posting 267 victories for the Cleveland
Spiders and St. Louis Perfectos (although it wasn’t until 1904 that he pitched
his own perfecto, the first perfect game of the 20th century). In
1901 the country’s top minor league, the American League, made an attempt to
gain major league status, and one of its first moves was signing Young to give
the new league a degree of legitimacy. But by 1901 Cy Young was 34 years old
and, many people thought, washed up. “Young is through,” St. Louis owner
Charlie Robison said after Young left the Perfectos. “In the new bush league
he may last another year, but we couldn’t have used him.”
As it turned out, Cy Young still
had 225 wins ahead of him. Pitching for the Boston Pilgrims, he was not only the
new bush league’s biggest name, but also its best pitcher, leading it in wins
(33), strikeouts (158), and ERA (1.62). In 1903 he won two games in the
inaugural World Series, helping the Pilgrims to a series victory and silencing
those who questioned the new league’s competitiveness.
The most remarkable aspect of Young’s career, and his life, was longevity. When Young started pitching in the mid-1880s players didn’t wear gloves, a walk was six balls, and foul balls didn’t count as strikes. Pitchers had to throw the ball “high” or “low” at the batter’s request. By the time Young retired in 1912, baseball was essentially the same game we know today. When he retired his 221 AL wins were the most in league history, and his 290 NL wins were still sixth on the senior circuit’s career list. Young spent the last 40 years of his life as the Grand Old Man of baseball, attending old timers’ games, smoking his pipe, and reminiscing about baseball in the good old days. Like his playing career, his life spanned what seems like most of American history. The son of a Union soldier, he was born less than two years after the Civil War ended. By the time he died at age 88, the U.S. had sent its first troops to Vietnam. Meanwhile, his record for lifetime wins has stood since 1903 and, barring drastic changes in the way the game is played, will never be broken. Not bad for a guy who never even won the Cy Young Award.
EricEnders.com
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