Cy Young

For the Disney animator, see Cy Young (animator).

For the Major League Baseball award, see Cy Young Award.

Denton True Young (March 29, 1867 – November 4, 1955) was an American baseball pitcher during the 1890s and 1900s. The Baseball Hall of Fame inducted Young in 1937 and he won one championship in 1903 as a member of the Boston Americans. An accomplished athlete, Young won the 1901 AL Triple Crown for Pitchers. The annual award given for the pitcher of the year in each league is named the Cy Young Award. Young played twenty-two years of professional baseball. He set the records for most wins all-time, most innings pitched all-time, most games started all-time, and most complete games all-time. His longevity also allowed him to set the record for the most career losses, despite winning 62% of his decisions. (He was one of two pitchers to lose 300 games; the other was Jim "Pud" Galvin, a 19th-Century pitcher.) His nickname Cy, shortened from Cyclone, was a reference to the speed of his fastball.[1]

Later life & baseball career

Cy Young began his major league career in 1890 with the Cleveland Spiders after grauduating from Marian Central Catholic High School in Woodstock,IL. He allowed three hits in his debut. In 1893, the pitching mound was placed 60 feet 6 inches from home plate. He was one of the few pitchers whose statistical performance did not suffer as a consequence of the move.

In 1899, the Spiders and the St. Louis Perfectos essentially swapped teams by trading rosters. He played for St. Louis in 1899 and 1900, although by 1900, they were renamed and became the Cardinals.

In 1901, he left St. Louis and moved to the American League, which was elevated to Major League status that year. He joined the Boston Americans and spent the next seven seasons with the franchise. In his first season with the Americans, Young earned the AL Triple Crown for Pitchers when he lead the league with 33 wins, 158 strike outs, and a 1.62 ERA.

In 1903, the Americans played the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. Young pitched in the first game on October 1, 1903. He lost the game 7-3, but Boston won the series five games to three. Young finished the series with a 2-1 record and a 1.83 ERA.

Young pitched a perfect game on May 5, 1904 in Boston, against the Philadelphia Athletics. It was the first perfect game in American League history. It was the centerpiece of a sterling pitching streak. During that streak Young set records for the most consecutive scoreless innings pitched and for the most consecutive innings without allowing a hit; the latter record still stands at twenty-four innings. He also had two other no-hitters in his career. Between 1891 and 1896, Young averaged 415 innings per season and he still holds the record for complete games with 749.

Young was honored on August 13, 1908. No American League games were played on that day and a group of All-Stars from the league's other teams gathered in Boston to play against Young and the Red Sox.

Young spent his penultimate year with the Cleveland Naps in 1910. He split 1911, his final year, between the Naps and the Boston Rustlers. In his final game, the last seven batters Young faced hit combined to hit one triple, three singles and three doubles. He retired after the season with 511 career wins. This was 147 more wins than then runner-up, Pud Galvin. Currently, Walter Johnson is second on the list with 417 wins. His unreachable total was echoed one day when, as he told a reporter many years after his retirement, a man walked up to him, seemed to recognize him, and asked, "Did you used to play baseball?" Young told the reporter that he told the man, "Mister, I won more games than you'll ever see."

When Fernando Valenzuela was presented with the Cy Young Award, he commented that he had never heard of Cy Young, but said that Young had to have been quite famous himself to have an award named for him.

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Young was immortalized in the poem "Lineup for Yesterday" by Ogden Nash thus:

Y is for Young,
The magnificent Cy;
People batted against him,
But I never knew why.

In 1993, Northeastern University unveiled a statue of Young outside the Cabot Center, one of its athletic complexes. The statue stands near the spot of the pitcher's mound from Huntington Avenue Grounds, the home field of the Red Sox in Young's time.

In 1999, 88 years after his final major league appearance and 44 years after his death, he ranked Number 14 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team, even though half of his career took place in the 19th century. A memorial to Cy Young was erected in 1955 in Newcomerstown, Ohio just off Interstate 77.

See also

• Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame
• Top 100 winning pitchers of all time
• List of MLB individual streaks

External links

• Baseball Hall of Fame
• Career statistics and player information from Baseball Reference