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This profile, 'Durable Ace Cy Young - A 511-Game Winner' by Bob Broeg, originally appeared in the April 17, 1971 issue of The Sporting News as part of a Superstars of Baseball series.
ST. LOUIS, Mo-A cub reporter approached a tall, strong- framed, pipe-smoking gaffer one day at a baseball clambake and inquired: "Did you ever pitch in the major leagues, Mr. Young?"
Denton True Young smiled and his watery old blue eyes twinkled. "Son," he said, "I won more games than you'll ever see."
That's a fact. Few average fans see 511 games, the total won by the Ohio sodbuster whose consistency and efficiency were almost as remarkable as his durability. These qualities are probably the outstanding characteristics of the pitching pioneer who was close to 89 years old when he died in 1955.
If the Young who lived quite old wasn't baseball's best pitcher ever, certainly he was its most successful and hardiest. He pitched 22 years in the big leagues and didn't have the hint of a sore arm until he was 44 and so paunchy that when the foe couldn't hit him, they bunted him into retirement.
Trying to keep up with Cy's accomplishments, much less comprehend them in the light of modern measurements, is as difficult as trying to pry a ball out of the old man's iron grip not too many years before he joined his beloved wife, Robba, in a cemetery high atop a hill overlooking the fertile Tuscarawas River Valley at Peoli, O.
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What feats those ancient eyes had seen and tireless right arm achieved make Cy Young seem in the '70s as both its most amazing physical specimen and its link between the game's primitive infancy and its modern maturity.
To grasp just how much of the sport's history the husky farmer touched, consider, please, that he played in the big leagues against the great Adrian (Cap) Anson, whose career had begun as early as 1871, and he performed against the flawless Tris Speaker, who didn't quit the game until 1930.
When Young joined the Cleveland Spiders in 1890, the pitcher's box was just that, a flat, square area from which the boxman delivered the ball to a barehanded catcher just 50 feet away. By the time Cy delivered his last baseball competitively in 1911, pitchers were throwing as they are today from a rubber atop a mound, 60 feet, six inches from the plate, and to a catcher suited up in armor like a knight of old.
Good at any range
The increased pitching distance did not handicap the 6-2, 210-pound Young. Before the last change in the pitching distance in 1894, he posted seasons of 27, 36 and 32 victories. But after dipping to 25 in '94, he came back to win 35 and then 29 as he continued a string of 14 successive seasons in which he won 20 or more games. He was a 20-game winner for the sixteenth and last time in 1908, when he was 41 years old.
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Five of those seasons in which he won 20 or more, Young gained more than 30 victories, including his first two years in the new American League when he had 33 and then 32 for the Red Sox. The endurance marvel wound up with 10 full seasons in both major leagues, so it was a fitting tribute when former baseball Commissioner Ford Frick established the Cy Young award in 1956 as a pitching supplement to the time-honored Most Valuable Player awards in each league.
The Pitcher-of-the-Year presentation, at the request of the baseball writers, since has been made a dual award so that there is no unfair necessity, for instance, to try to compare a Denny McLain with a Bob Gibson. As a result, the memory of Cy Young is honored at least twice each year.
Well it should be, because he was a great one, you'll have to concede, even if you're a deep-dyed Democrat. Old Cy was an Ohio Republican, of whom there are none whomer, and he not only voted in the course of his career for Republican Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, but he also pitched a no-hitter in each man's administration.
SN
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: APRIL 17, 1971
- Happy days are here again for Reggie Jackson
- $100,000 baseball contracts are coming and could ruin baseball
- Juan Marichal feels great and its bad news for everyone else
- The Mets still can't find a third basemen
Cy Pitched a Perfecto
Young's first no-hitter came in 1897 against the Cincinnati Red Stockings at a time when Cleveland was in the National League. Cy walked one batter and three reached base in the course of a 6-0 contest.
The second one came seven years later when Rough Rider Roosevelt sat in the White House. Cy was positively perfect. A crowd of more than 10,000 sat in at Boston's Huntington Avenue grounds on May 5 to watch the pitching ace of their newly crowned world champions oppose the colorful lefthanded fireballer of the Philadelphia Athletics-Rube Waddell.
Connie Mack called Cy's performance that day the most impressive he ever saw. In the 3-0 game, he struck out eight, retired nine on grounders and 10 on pop flies and short outfield flies. There wasn't a tough defensive chance and, in fact, only one loud foul by Dan Murphy in the fifth inning.
Young was concentrating so thoroughly on the job at hand that he said he didn't realize he had not permitted a base runner until outfielder Chick Stahl caught a high lazy fly to end the game and then rushed in to hand Cy the ball and swarm all over him.
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The pitcher had been so intent on out pitching Waddell that he'd not heard it in the seventh when first baseman Candy LaChance passed him and said, "Ya know, nobody's been down here yet."
Four years later, in 1908, then 41 years old, Young came within a corner-missing pitch of achieving a second perfect game. Facing the Highlanders at New York, the old man walked Harry Niles, the leadoff man, on a 3- and-2 pitch. Niles promptly was retired trying to steal, and Young breezed to an 8-0 triumph, retiring the next 26 batters, aided by his own good play on Neal Ball's fifth-inning bunt and Cactus Cravath's fine ninth-inning catch of a long fly.
Since then, Bob Feller and Jim Maloney have pitched three no-hitters and Sandy Koufax four. Feller, like Young, was elected to the Hall of Fame. Cy was named in 1937. Koufax, ergo, is en route to the distinction, too.
Young, despite his age, would drive often into Cleveland with friends to watch Feller pitch and was very much impressed by the Iowan who also had come from behind a plow to win fame and considerably more fortune than Young. Cy's highest salary was under $5,000, he would say without complaint.
(Editor's note: The image in upper right is not Cy Young but rather Irv Young, dubbed at the time 'Cy Young 2.0')
Oldtimer who thought Young
He was a pliable old-timer who didn't live in the past, even though he had been born just two years after the Civil War and lived until past the Korean War. He was supremely confident in his own ability to win in any era, but he appreciated differences in times and conditions.
"I could throw a 'tobacco' ball, a pitch that was dirtied and a ball that wasn't so lively," he would say at the oldtimers' reunions he attended regularly.
"Cripes," Toots Shor once said after a baseball bash at his bistro in New York, "the old man was the only guy in the joint who could drink more than I did."
Young would amplify the advantages he'd enjoyed, but he wasn't too modest to list the disadvantages, too.
"I had excellent control," he said, "throwing with four different deliveries and wheeling on the batter to hide the ball. I saw some fast ones-Amos Rusie, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove and Feller, among others-but I was among them, too. My favorite pitch was a whistler right under the chin, and, as Ty Cobb said, I had a couple of good curve balls, an overhanded pitch that broke sharply down and a sweeping, sidearmed curve."
Young averaged fewer than two walks a game for the whopping 7,377 innings he pitched in 906 games. As a late-inning reliever, himself a physical freak, Hoyt Wilhelm has appeared in more games now, but, as Leo Durocher would say, there's no way-none-that any pitcher will approach old Cy's average of more than eight innings a game for 22 years on the firing line.
Cy pitched effortlessly and with absolutely no regard, he said, for whether he gripped the ball with the seams, across the seams or on the smooth part.
"I worked hard all winter on my farm, from sunup to sundown, doing chores that not only were good for my legs, but also for my arm and back. Swinging an axe hardens the hands and builds up the shoulders and back. I needed only a dozen pitches to warm up for a ball game."
- Cy Young
At one time he pitched 23 consecutive hitless innings, still a record, and another time the same year, 1904, he went 20 innings in a duel against Waddell and didn't issue a base on balls, but still lost. The man who won the most games, you see, also lost the most, 313, though his career won-and-lost percentage, .620, would be a pennant pace. He was 222-141 in the American League for .612, 289-172 in the National for .627.
"I had the benefit of a larger strike zone-from the top of the shoulders to the bottom of the knees-and I admit some of my cut-plug tobacco would get on the ball," Young explained shortly before his death, "but there were disadvantages other than the obvious financial ones.
"I'm thinking of the poorer fields, poorer equipment, bad food, bad traveling conditions, no shower baths, sooty trains, noisy rooming houses, some of them full of bedbugs that'd keep you up all night."
An incredible work load
Even though the ball might have been juiced up outside, but not inside, meaning it wasn't nearly so lively, and even though ball clubs carried only four or five-man pitching staffs, rather than 10 or 11, how could a man work as frequently as Young? He pitched more than 300 innings a season 16 times, five of them working in excess of 400 rounds.
"My arm would get weak and tired at times, but never sore, even though I worked usually with just two days' rest and often with only one," Young said. "I credited it to my legs and my off-season conditioning.
"I ran regularly to keep my legs in shape. In the spring I'd run constantly for three weeks before I ever threw a ball. And I worked hard all winter on my farm, from sunup to sundown, doing chores that not only were good for my legs, but also for my arm and back. Swinging an axe hardens the hands and builds up the shoulders and back. I needed only a dozen pitches to warm up for a ball game."
| Pitcher | Wins | Seasons | Innings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Cy Young | 511 | 22 | 7,356 |
| 2. Walter Johnson | 417 | 21 | 5,914 |
| 3. Grover Alexander | 373 | 20 | 5,190 |
| 3. Christy Mathewson | 373 | 17 | 4,788 |
| 5. Pud Galvin | 365 | 15 | 6,003 |
If there's a clue to pitching longevity involved in offseason occupations, it might be mentioned that two extremely durable pitchers of more recent vintage, Murry Dickson and Elroy Face, both were winter-time carpenters. They felt that the sawing and hammering motion preserved the strength, suppleness, flexibility and muscle tone of their right arms. They, too, were strangers to sore arms.
Dent Young, as they called him down on the farm, developed those good legs chasing squirrels as a kid, he said, reminding one of how Enos Slaughter, a hustling 20-year wonder of recent times, would outrun hunting dogs to fallen fowl in the duck-shooting season.
Deep in Ohio's fertile hill country, Denton True Young grew up as a powerful farmer and rail splitter. His father had given him as a middle name the surname of a soldier who'd saved the senior Young in the Civil War. Later, someone tried to romanticize it by saying the "T" that was Cy's middle initial stood for Tecumseh, but the Big Chief of pitchers would merely smile and say it just wasn't so.
Late Start as a Pro
It's hard to believe, considering how much ground he covered and how many games he won, that young Dent was all of 23 years old before he went from his home at Gilmore to play baseball professionally at Canton, 50 miles away.
Dent was making $10 a month and his keep on his father's farm. His parents were reluctant to see him leave, but when he talked the manager of Canton's Tri-State League club into upping the monthly ante from $40 to $60, the elder Youngs consented, reluctantly.
The big farm kid who checked in at Canton had hay-shaker written all over. He shuffled hesitantly into the shabby office of the ball club, carrying a cheap cardboard suitcase. His jacket, sizes too small, barely reached below his waist. Its sleeves failed to conceal his brawny wrists. His shirt was stretched across a barrel chest.
City folks laughed and later that season when he was pitching for Cleveland in the National League, fabled Cap Anson called him "Rube," but the nickname, Cy, which seemed to fit, was not bestowed because of the pitcher's bucolic appearance or bumpkin background.
The Cy was short for Cyclone, which someone called him after he'd warmed up in blue coveralls and his pitches had battered the board fence of the Canton ball park, which looked indeed as if a cyclone had struck it. A sportswriter picked up the nickname. Shortened, it stuck-and Dent Young had a new name the rest of his life.
After Cy divided 30 decisions at Canton, he was sold later that season to Cleveland. One story always has been that the financially harassed Canton club needed money and that Davis Hawley, a Cleveland banker and one of the Spiders' owners, got Young by buying the Canton club owner a suit of clothes. But Cy insisted he went for cash-$250.
When Young reported to Cleveland, Patsy Tebeau, manager of the hard-nosed Spiders, told him his pay would be $75 a month and instructed him to work out there while the major league club went on the road. Disgusted with his pitchers on the trip, Tebeau announced when he returned to Cleveland early in August that the kid would pitch the second game of the series against Anson's Chicagos.
The 38-year-old Anson still was one of the best hitters in the game, but Cy remembered later that he wasn't scared or nervous. "All I can remember is that I was mad he said "because Anse had called me 'a big farmer' and 'Rube.' I wanted to show him up more than anything in my life."
He did. Without the effective curve that later helped make him a big winner, Young blazed the fast ball past Anson, striking him out, and winning the first of the 511 by which he would average 23 victories a season for 22 years.
If a pitcher threw so hard, how could a man catch him barehanded?
Young knew a good question when he heard one. "You should have seen those amazing calloused hands," he explained. "Chief Zimmer didn't have a padded mitt when he first caught me. He wore an ordinary dress glove with sole-leather tips sewed on the fingers."
Louis Van Oeyen/ WRHS / Getty Images
Barehanded with no glove until 1897
The first pitcher Young recalled seeing wear a glove was Nig Cuppy of the Spiders. Cy didn't try a glove himself until 1897, noting that Anson played first base barehanded and that the best second baseman of his early career, Biddy McPhee, never did wear a glove.
"The glove changed fielding a lot," Young stated the obvious. "We used to cup both hands and close them over the ball like a clam shell. When the glove came in, players began to depend on the gloved hand to stop the ball and the right hand to hold it. Naturally, their reach and range improved."
The era into which the gentle giant from the Ohio farm country came was a rough one in baseball. He always maintained that Tebeau's Spiders were as rough as the Baltimore Orioles of Hughie Jennings, John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson.
Young told a later Cleveland sports editor, Gordon Cobbledick, about the time, with only one umpire working the game, that McGraw cut across behind the man in blue on an infield out so that he, in effect, went from first to third across the pitcher's mound instead of touching second base, which was required then just as it is now. The Spiders screamed, but the umpire, Bob Emslie, though he could suspect he'd been had, couldn't declare McGraw out because he hadn't seen the play.
The Spiders' left fielder, Jesse Burkett, took matters into his own hands. While Cleveland was arguing, Burkett charged in, beckoning for the ball, and Young threw it to him. Jesse barged into McGraw, knocked him off third base, sat on him and, tagging out the runner, called to Emslie.
Turning, the umpire took one look and, relieved at seeing justice prevail by fair means or foul, jerked up his thumb and called to McGraw, 'Yer out'
Whip hand over Orioles
Young prided himself that he beat the famed Orioles five times in one season and never lost more to them than he won, though he always regarded Wee Willie Keeler, their hit-'em-where-they-ain't outfielder, as the best batter he ever faced.
"Better than Cobb, even though not as good a bunter, and not as good all-round, but tougher for me to get out," Cy said. "With that little bat and his choppy swing, he could hit anything. You couldn't fool him with a curve. I always tried to keep the ball low and I always worked on him with my change of pace-fast, faster and fastest."
When the Temple Cup was inaugurated in 1894 as a forerunner of the World Series, Young was already a star and he proved it in '95 when Cleveland played Baltimore in the best-of-seven series between the National League's two top teams.
Young beat the Orioles three times in a five-game series marked by so much rowdiness that when the Spiders returned to their hotel after the fourth contest, the first at Baltimore, the regulars were forced to prostrate themselves on the floor of a carriage, with the reserves and newspapermen atop them. Police, en route, made 10 arrests, but the carriage still was bombarded with rocks and bottles.
The next day in the kind of sullen atmosphere in which the Spiders needed 40 policemen for protection, Cy beat the Orioles-the "Oysters," he called 'em-for a third time, 5-2, and set up a winning rally .with a double.
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MORE CY YOUNG FROM THE SN ARCHIVES
- From 1978: A legend for durability
- From 1953: At 86 years old, Cy Young still chops his own wood
- From 1952: Pitchers 'babied too much now' according to Cy Young
- From 1907: Meet the next Cy Young
- From 1892: The pillar of Cleveland (cover story)
That year Young had a 35-10 record, the first of four seasons in which he led a big league in victories.
As victory dulled Cleveland fans' appetite, Frank De- Haas Robison, owner of the Spiders, made them virtually a road team in 1898. The next year, after obtaining the St. Louis National League franchise, he switched his Cleveland stars to St. Louis. Included was Young, who was welcomed by a crowd of 11,000 which hiked out to the ball park despite a transportation strike and saw Cy shut out Chicago, 8-0.
Although he pitched well enough in St. Louis, winning 26 games in 1899 and 20 in 1900, Young didn't like the city or its heat, and he missed his Ohio farm. He was in a receptive mood when Ban Johnson, forming the American League, offered him a $600-a-year raise to jump to the Boston Red Sox. Cy's St. Louis salary of $2,400 then was the individual limit in the tight-fisted National League.
The National League misjudged the pitching longevity of the strapping sodbuster, already 33 years old and potbellied. "Young is through," Robison sniffed. "In that bush league he may last another year, but we couldn't have used him."
There's little doubt that inferior competition did help Young at first, just as,, for example, it aided Larry Lajoie, who also jumped leagues, to the highest average of his career. But within three years, when the first World Series was played, the Boston club on which Young teamed with Bill Dinneen, was good enough to upset the heavily favored Pittsburgh Pirates, five games to three.
The Pirates won three out of the first four games and the ho-hums and I-told-you-sos filled the air, but then Young won the fifth game, 11-2. Dinneen took the sixth, 6-3. Young put the Red Sox ahead by beating the Pirates' ace, Deacon Phillippe, 7-3, and Dinneen closed it out with a four-hit shutout, 3-0.
Fittingly, therefore, Cy Young, the old master of both major leagues, pitched in the first official World Series. It was his first and last Series, but not his final distinction. Why, did you know that fair Harvard even asked the Ohio farmer to coach its baseball team in the winter?
An Athlete and a Gentleman
"A testimonial," as Cobbledick wrote, "not only to his eminence as a craftsman, but also to his reputation as a gentleman in an era when that title was given to few professional ballplayers."
Old Tuscarawas preferred, as always, to spend the good rural life back home on the farm, though by continuing to pitch and to win, he couldn't escape further honors.
In 1908, an idea conceived by the Boston Post, a day was held at the old Huntington Avenue grounds for the grand gaffer who had rebounded from two losing seasons for 22-15 in 1907 and then, at 41, had turned in his third no-hitter en route to a 21-11 mark in '08.
A crowd of 20,000 crammed the grounds and about 10,000 were turned away. Young received cash gifts close to $7,500, considerably more than a season's salary, and other gifts of which at least one was unusual. The American League umpires showed their esteem by presenting him with a traveling bag.
Of several trophies, one particularly was unusual, too. It came from the old pitcher's rival players in the American League. Misty-eyed old Cy had no field microphone to help him thank his well-wishers without shouting.
He'd had big thrills in Boston, including the first World Series, which he could relive in later years, smiling.
"Brass bands were all over the place. Men came in long-tailed coats and high hats or derbies. The ladies were bedecked in their ankle-length skirts and picture hats. The bands played all the tunes of the times . . . 'Dixie' . . . 'Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie' ... and all the rest. It was fine, just fine."
But the biggest thrill came the following year in his perfect game against Philadelphia, a club against which veteran writer Fred Lieb, then just a wide-eyed youngster, saw Cy perform one of the finest feats of mound magic. Lieb watched Young, protecting a one-run lead, yield a leadoff triple in the last inning against the Athletics and then strike out three batters on just nine pitches.
Cy liked to remember one considerably less significant. Back in '97, when Cleveland was playing the Philadelphia Phillies, Slidin' Billy Hamilton, the league's leading base-stealer and foul-ball 'hitter, approached Young and bragged that the previous day he had fouled off 29 consecutive pitches against Sadie McMahon of the Baltimore Orioles.
Cy said nothing, but when Hamilton came up the first time that day and punched three pitches foul, the big righthander walked in toward the plate and said, "Look, Billy, I'm putting the next pitch right over the heart of the plate. If you foul it off, the next one goes right into your ear."
Grinning, the gaffer related, "Hamilton got the message. He sent the next pitch on a weak dribble to second base."
Crawford was poison
Essentially, of course, Cy did not believe in pitching over the heart of the plate. He knew, for instance, that Detroit's Sam Crawford murdered a ball inside, so he'd flirt with the ball down and away all day.
"But I defend pitchers who throw the ball into the strike zone at times with a count of two strikes and none," Young said in one of the numerous baseball bull sessions he enjoyed in later years. "I don't think a pitcher can permit the batter ever to type him or take him for granted. Every now and then, on an 0-and-2 count, I'd bring the ball right to the hitter, hoping to surprise him."
Looking at hits allowed in relation to innings pitched, Cy Young worked only 299 innings more than he yielded hits, but he was very stingy with walks, especially after his first four full seasons in the majors, and he became sharp enough to yield just 28 passes in 380 rounds (1904) and strike out 203 men.
"I always said I'd quit when the kids could beat me. But the boys are taking an unfair advantage of the old man by bunting because they know I've got a tough time getting around and bending over my big belly."
- Cy Young
Although he pitched for five clubs, Young actually pitched in only three cities and, as mentioned, St. Louis merely was a short stop between long stints at Cleveland and Boston. He had two trips each into those cities, one in each league.
After the auld lang syne treatment at Boston in 1908, he was sold that fall for $12,500 to Cleveland, which by then was in the American League, too. At 42, he still had a 19-15 season in 1909, but then he dipped to 7-10 and finally to 3-4 in 1911 when he was released in August. He went back to Boston, this time with the National League he'd left 11 years earlier, and won four and lost five.
His last big league game actually was a mighty good one. He lost to a brilliant Philadelphia rookie, 1-0.
"I always said I'd quit when the kids could beat me," he would explain in later years, giving as a punchline the name of his young opponent-Grover Cleveland Alexander.
The fact is, of course, that Cy didn't quite quit at a time when, as he put it, his arm felt as good as when he broke in, "but the boys are taking an unfair advantage of the old man by bunting because they know I've got a tough time getting around and bending over my big belly."
Finally, in the spring of 1912, even that fabulous arm bothered him in spring training with the Braves, and old Cy told the manager, Johnny Kling, "I guess I'll have to call it a career."
Post-retirement return to the farm
So he went back to the farm country from where he'd left in 1890 with a long-armed buggywhip delivery which destroyed those six planks behind home plate at the Canton ball park. He'd gone away as Dent Young and he returned as Cyclone-no, as Cy Young.
A fairly prosperous man for his times, Cy turned to his Ohio farm, the white place with the big pillars. He farmed contentedly until his wife, the former Robba Miller, died in 1933. Shortly thereafter, he sold his holdings and moved in with friends and neighbors, the John Benedums, working the fields at Peoli until he was well past 80.
Between times, he went to many baseball reunions, including noteworthy ones at which he stood out as the link with the distant past. Included were the first Hall of Fame induction at Cooperstown in 1939, the National League's 75th birthday celebration in 1951 and the American League's half-century celebration the same season at Boston.
"You'd think they could give an old fella $75 or so," he said quietly at one reunion, indicating that he'd felt the financial pinch in his old age.
From the time he reached 80, the citizens of Tuscarawas County held a big annual birthday party on March 29 for their most famous neighbor. The indoor outing outgrew the high school gymnasium in Newcomerstown and threatened to tax the facilities of the largest gathering place in New Philadelphia, O.
A recreation park, complete with swimming pool and baseball field, was named for Cy Young in Newcomerstown in 1950. Five years later in November, rich with memories, Denton True (Cy) Young sat in his favorite arm chair at the Benedums, looking out the window, when the heart that had beat through doubleheader victories and incredible endurance effort beat its last.
Cy was something, all right. The dean of American sportswriters, Grantland Rice, introduced him to members of the press covering the 1940 World Series in Cincinnati. "Gentlemen," said Rice, "I'd like you to meet the greatest pitcher who ever lived-Cy Young. He won 511 games."
The old fellow shook his head. "Five hundred and twelve, Granny," he said. "I won one they didn't give me credit for."
