UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Baseball Life

Reed Browning

Winner of the Casey Award for the Best Baseball Book
of the Year

Finalist for the Seymour Medal of the Society for American
Baseball Research

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

The first major biography of an American legend

He was the winner of 511 major league baseball games, nearly a hundred more than any other pitcher. He threw three no-hitters, including the first perfect game in the new American League. He was among the original twelve players inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame, and his name is now attached to the game's most prestigious pitching award. Yet for all his accomplishments, Cy Young remains to most baseball fans a legendary but little known figure.

In this book, Reed Browning re-creates the life of Denton True "Cyclone" Young and places his story in the context of a rapidly changing turn-of-the-century America. Born in rural Ohio, the son of a Civil War veteran, Young learned his trade at a time when only underhand pitching was permitted. When he began his professional career in 1890, pitchers wore no gloves and stood five feet closer to the batter than they do today. By the time he retired in 1911, the game of baseball had evolved into its modern form and claimed unquestioned status as America's "national pastime."

As Browning shows, Young's extraordinary mastery of his craft owed much to his ability to adapt to the changing nature of the game. Endowed with an exceptional fastball, he gradually developed a wide array of deliveries and pitches—all of which he could throw with astonishing control. Yet his success can also be attributed, at least in part, to the rustic values of loyalty, hard work, and fair play that he embraced and embodied, and for which he became renowned among baseball fans of his day.

"The most in-depth study to date of one of baseball's greatest pitchers, a name known by all, but a man known to very few. Young's career spanned an incredibly long period in baseball history, one in which the game was transformed several times. Browning's biography illuminates those changes. I think it will be the authoritative book on Cy Young."

Warren Goldstein, author of Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball

Reed Browning is professor of history at Kenyon College.

Biography / Sport History / American Studies
320 pp., 24 illustrations
LC 99-088275
$32.50t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-262-3
2000

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By the Same Author

Baseball’s Greatest Season, 1924
Reed Browning
A lively account of the year Washington won it all
Finalist for the Seymour Medal of the Society for American Baseball Research
232 pp., 29 Illus.
$19.95t paper, ISBN 1-55849-487-1
April 2005
For more information, click here.

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