During the most recent television show My Questions and Your Answers, a young contestant was asked:
“Who was Cy Young?”
Without flinching, with the naturalness of someone who thinks he knows the answer, he said:
“Cy Young is the trophy given every year to the best pitcher in each Major League.”
The contestant, therefore, was very well informed about the award, which has been awarded since 1956, but he did not know who Denton True Young was, the pitcher with the most wins and also the most losses in history, 511-316, who pitched from 1890 to 1911.
Now, 113 years after Cy Young retired from baseball, in addition to those two records, he still holds others, equally unbeatable.
Why was he such a winner?
The answer was born the same day when Denton True lost his name, to later be known as Cy. In early 1890, 23-year-old Denton True was taken to the stadium in Canton, Ohio, a city that had a minor league team in the Tri-State League. There the manager, the coach and a reporter would see him throw.
The ball from one of his first pitches went over the catcher’s head, and when it crashed into the backstop, it knocked him down and beyond broke a chair.
The journalist present published: “They have hired a young man for the city team who throws the ball with the speed of a cyclone.” In English, cyclone.
And Denton True’s own comment was: “I almost finished the stadium.” Since then they stopped using his two names and he is famous with the abbreviation Cy for cyclone.
Of course, no one could measure Cy’s speed, but today’s experts assume that he was consistently throwing the fastball between 90 and 105 miles per hour.
Very soon, on August 3 of that same year, he was already pitching in the Major Leagues with the Cleveland team. Later he also wore the Boston uniform.
In the American League’s first season, 1901, Young won the pitchers’ Triple Crown with 33 wins, a 1.62 ERA and 158 strikeouts.
In 1903 he won two games in the first World Series, helping the Boston Americans, now the Boston Red Sox, defeat the favored Pittsburgh Pirates. Young appeared in four of the eight games of that classic, making all three starts and posting a 1.85 ERA in 34.0 innings. l
2024-06-24 10:00:00
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