The Cy Young Award – Baseball’s Greatest Pitching Honor
Cy Young began playing for the National League Cleveland Spiders in 1890. His given name was Denton True Young, and the right hander threw his first game in August of 1890. Cy Young finished with a record of 9-7, his initial campaign in the big leagues; it was a meager start to the most prolific career in pitching history. The next year, at the age of 24, Cy Young went 27-22, starting 46 games. In those days, you were expected to finish what you began and Cy Young did just that. He completed all but three of those starts in 1891. Three was the average numbers of games that Cy Young did not complete during 22 years in baseball. Perhaps the most unbreakable of his many unattainable records is Cy Young’s 749 complete games in 815 starts!
Let’s survey what Cy Young accomplished on the mound. Cy Young won thirty games five times, with a high of 36 in 1892. Twenty wins was nothing for Cy Young, as he did that ten times; he won 19 twice and 18 once. All told, Cy Young accumulated 511 victories. He went over to the St. Louis Perfectos in 1899; they became the Cardinals the next year. In 1901, Cy Young jumped ship and played for the Boston Americans, a squad that would eventually become the Red Sox. Baseball was a totally different game back when Cy Young played, as the single season home run leader would average about 15 round trippers and players did not strike out nearly as often as those of today.
These facts make the work of Cy Young even more impressive. He was regularly among the leaders in strikeouts, finishing with 2,803 of them. Over his many years on the hill, Cy Young faced over 30,000 batters, or an incredible 5,000 more than the second most player, another untouchable record. No pitcher of the modern era has faced more than 23,000. His longevity also produced the most losses, 316, along with the most earned runs allowed (2,147). At the advanced age of 40, Cy Young won 21 games, a feat that he would duplicate the next season and miss by one victory of doing it as a 42 year old. Cy Young finally retired at the age of 44, having allowed 7,092 hits in 7,355 innings of pitching. Is there any wonder the best pitcher annually receives the Cy Young Award?
The first recipient of the Cy Young Award was Don Newcombe, who went 27-7 for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956. For the first seven years in which the Cy Young Award was handed out, a different pitcher earned it each season, highlighted by Whitey Ford’s remarkable 25-4 1961 season. The wondrous Sandy Koufax took it three out of four years beginning in 1963, with Minnesota’s Dean Chance interrupting the string in 1964. The seasons in which Koufax won his Cy Young Awards, he went a combined 78-22, with over 300 strikeouts each year. Had he not been forced to retire at 30 with an arthritic left elbow, serious consideration would have to be made on whether or not to name the Cy Young award after Sandy Koufax instead.
1967 was the first year that each league recognized pitching greatness with a separate Cy Young Award. Boston’s Jim Lonborg won for the American and the Giants’ Mike McCormick took National League kudos. For Mike, it was the only year he won twenty games; he finished only six games above .500 lifetime. Detroit’s Denny McClain won back to back Cy Young awards in 1968 and 1969, the latter one he split with the Orioles’ junkballer, Mike Cuellar. McClain, the last man to win thirty games in the majors, naturally is the only Cy Young Award winner to accomplish this feat.
Joining Koufax as three time recipients of the coveted Cy Young Award was the Mets’ ace Tom Seaver in 1975, and then, a year later, the great Jim Palmer of the Orioles. In 1971, Vida Blue of the Oakland A’s took home the Cy Young Award and league MVP hardware, posting a 24-8 record with 301 strikeouts. Although Blue won at least 18 games five times, he never achieved the level of superiority that many in the game saw for him. The first pure reliever to garner a Cy Young Award was the Dodgers’ Mike Marshall, on the basis of his 15-12 record with 21 saves in a mind numbing 106 appearances in 1974. The Yankees’ Sparky Lyle was the first reliever in the American League to pull off winning a Cy Young Award, in 1977.
Alleged spitballer Gaylord Perry became the first pitcher to cop a Cy Young in both leagues in 1978, as a member of the Padres; he had won with the Indians in 1972. The single greatest season by a Cy Young winner, one could argue, very well might have been turned in by Yankee Ron Guidry, who in 1978 went 25-3 with a 1.74 ERA and almost 250 strikeouts. McClain’s supporters could hold up his 31-6 1968 year, but that season was the “Year of the Pitcher”; Bob Gibson won a Cy Young Award with a 1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts in 1968.
In 1985, the Met phenom, Dwight Gooden, won the NL Cy Young Award with a 24-4, 1.53 ERA campaign. Like Vida Blue before him, Gooden would never reach the pinnacle that he should have. He never won twenty games again, and was in and out of trouble due to substance abuse, something that haunts him to this day. In 1986, young Roger Clemens went home with what would be the first of a record seven Cy Young Awards, when he matched Gooden’s 24-4 mark; he had 20 strikeouts in one game against the Mariners that year, a record that he later would match against the Tigers in the Nineties. In 1990, Bob Welch of the A’s would win 27 games on his way to a Cy Young Award.. It was the sole year that Welch would win more than 17 contests.
Greg Maddux began a run of consecutive Cy Young Award worthy seasons when he took his initial one as a member of the Cubs in 1992; his other three were won with the Braves. Randy Johnson went 18-2 as a Mariner in 1995, then went on to take four in a row as a Diamondback from 1999-2003. Pedro Martinez won a Cy Young Award as an Expo in 1997, and then two more with the Red Sox in 1999 and 2000.
One of the strangest Cy Young Award sagas has to be that of Baltimore’s Steve Stone. He had never won more than 15 games in his first nine years, and then suddenly exploded to a 25-7 record in 1980. Stone won the American League’s Cy Young Award for his efforts, followed it up with a 4-7 season in 1981, and then retired. But for the wierdest Cy Young history, one must study Rick Sutcliffe’s 16-1 season in 1984 as a Cub. Rick made 20 starts that year for Chicago and won 80 percent of them, with the lone defeat. The oddity? Sutcliffe did not come to the Cubbies until June 13th of that year, having started 15 games for Cleveland to a record of 4-5! Talk about a change of scenery being good for you. The combined record of 20-6 was Sutcliffe’s lone twenty win season, good enough to win him a Cy Young Award.
