Baseball's Legendary Cy Young
A Pitcher So Good They Named an Award After Him
Any Major League pitcher coming off a season in which he won 23 games, posted an ERA of 2.63 and even registered a save would rightly consider himself to be a contender for the Cy Young award.
But that stat line doesn’t represent a single glorious season. Rather, those amazing statistics represent Denton True “Cy” Young’s average season over a 22 year big league career.
Born on March 29, 1867 on a farm near Gilmore, Ohio, the kid known as Dent Young became a sensation with Canton of the Tri-State League in 1889. Soon he had picked up the nickname “Cyclone” because of the speed of his fastball as Young would regularly splinter outfield fences with his warm-up tosses.
After his first pro season in which he went 15-15, the Canton team offered Young up to any Major League club that would meet its asking price. Only the National league’s Cleveland Spiders would pony up the $500, But Young was worth every penny.
He made an immediate impact, tossing a 3-hitter in his debut. That prompted the National Sports Weekly to write that Young was, “speedier than (Chicago’s Bill) Hutchison and has a drop ball that’s a killer.”
Young’s 22 year career started with the 1890 Cleveland Spiders. After 9 years there, he spent 2 years in St. Louis before moving to the American League’s Boston Americans in 1901. He remained in Beantown for 8 years before returning to Cleveland’s American League team, the Naps, in 1909. He’d wind up his legendary career by going 4-5 in 80 innings for the late and unlamented Boston Rustlers in 1911.
Over the years, Young piled up stats that boggle the mind, especially when compared to the pampered moundsmen of today. Consider these all-time records: Most career starts (815), most complete games (749) and, most significantly, most career wins – an astonishing 511.
Among all those games, Young tossed 3 no-hitters. His first came in a 6-0 Cleveland triumph over Cincinnati in 1897, his last in 1908 as the Boston Red Sox downed the New York Highlanders 8-0. Each of those gems featured but a single walk to blemish the scorecard.
But Young’s greatest single game came in 1904 against the Philadelphia A’s. It was a classic match-up of Hall of Famers, with Young on the bump for the Boston Pilgrims (soon to be Red Sox) while the legendary Rube Waddell toed the rubber for Philly. The Pilgrims prevailed 3-0 with Young firing the first perfect game in Major League history.
Young logged more innings than anyone before or since (7354.7). He was so durable that he exceeded 400 innings in 5 different seasons and 300 innings in 11 others. He pitched, and won, both ends of a double header in 1890 and threw a 15-inning complete game shutout over Detroit in 1904.
Despite the workload, Young claimed to never have had a sore arm. But he also never did any unnecessary throwing. He refused to pitch in spring training, instead concentrating on strengthening his legs. And his goal was not to strike batters out, but to make them put it in play in order to throw as few pitches as possible.
Whatever Young’s method, it worked. He went the distance in 90 percent of his starts and often pitched in relief on his off days.
Cy young was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1937 and lived long enough to see Commissioner Ford Frick name the award for the most outstanding pitcher in the Majors in his honour.
