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 sports 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 many baseball fans a legendary but little-known figure. This book 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.

"Each year the top pitchers in both leagues are honored with the Cy Young Award, but how many of today's fans really know much about the winningest hurler of them all? Browning digs deep to uncover the real story behind this pitching legend, whose innovations were essential to baseball's growth in the 19th and early 20th century."

USA Today Baseball Weekly
"This will be the standard biography of Denton True Young for a long time to come."

Spitball Magazine
"A carefully researched book written in a straight-forward reporter's style that should satisfy baseball buffs."

(Cleveland) Plain Dealer
"Cy Young beat out nine other nominated books to win the coveted bronze Casey plaque. . . . This is an important biography which gets an A-plus for its originality and coverage of Cy Young's entire life. . . . It is difficult to imagine a more definitive biography of Young ever being done."

Judge Paul Herbert, Casey Award selection committee
"A wonderfully nuanced and researched biography."

Sports Collectors Digest
"An unusually readable book. . . . This biography is exemplary."

SABR Book Reviews
"Browning has filled a void in baseball's biographies of its greats in authoring a 'no stone unturned' book about Young. . . . A superb Young reader, documentary, [and] biography."

Grandstand Baseball Annual

Reed Browning is professor of history and former provost at Kenyon College.

Sport History / American History
320 pp., 24 illus., LC 99-088275
$32.50t cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-262-2
$24.95t paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-398-8
2000 cloth, April 2003 paper
To order the paperback edition online, click on "ADD TO CART."
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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.
$19.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-487-9
April 2005
For more information, click here.

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