You get it.
You get it like you’d never get it if you weren’t standing right here, in a cemetery barely bigger than a postage stamp, in front of the headstone marking the grave of Denton True “Cy” Young.
You understand why a man who’d seen big cities and all they had to offer — nightclubs, fancy restaurants, shops stocked with everything you need and, what’s better, everything you don’t but covet anyway — would, once his playing days were over in 1911, once he’d won more games than any hurler in Major League Baseball history, come right back here.
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Back to a tiny Ohio farm town, a place so obscure that even people who’ve heard of it often mistakenly break the name in two — spelling it “New Comers-town.” So small that, then and now, the number of people calling it home would barely top 4,000.
You get it when you stand on the little hill behind the Peoli United Methodist Church, where the weathered headstones seem to clutch the ground a little tighter when the wind blows — like it’s doing right now — and where Young and his wife were buried, she in 1933, he in 1955.
There’s green in every direction, the bright bunched green of tree-nubbed hills and, in the flat parts, rows and rows of ripened corn. You can hear Holstein cows commenting in the distance. Birds add their two cents worth. Cars slide by at widely spaced intervals.
The place makes you understand why Young, whose name is emblazoned on an award bestowed annually on the best pitchers in the National and American leagues, came back to stay.
Cy Young: It’s a name everybody knows, because the award is so prized by players. The roster of Cy Young Award winners — Bob Gibson, Jim Palmer, Steve Carlton, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux — includes the biggest names in the game. Initiated in 1956, the Cy Young Award is the kind of distinction that fronts a pitcher’s biography forever, as in “the Cy Young Award-winning Randy Johnson.” Once secured, it’s a permanent prefix.
Few people outside Newcomerstown, though, could tell you much at all about the man behind the prize, the man born two years after the Civil War who, you could argue, ended up influencing baseball in three centuries.
You don’t know that much yourself, so you go looking for what’s left of him: memories of memories. You drive through the curvaceous farmland of central-eastern Ohio, past cornfields that march right to the edge of the road and look as if, given half a chance, they’d cross without a second thought. You drive past diners advertising “Hot Lunch.”
You drive past John Deere dealerships with their bright green machines parked out front, the big tires black and ravenous for work. You drive past twisty rivers. You drive until the absence of billboards — those overgrown louts on stilts that menace so many highways — begins to impress itself on your brain and you believe, against all reason and logic, that you’re tunneling across time as well as turf. The spell of the past snags you and puts you away, like an infielder does an easy pop-up. You’re lost to the present, good for nothing but nostalgia. And then you come to Young’s grave on Rt. 258 just outside Newcomerstown, close to the small farm to which he repaired once he’d finished his 21-year professional career.
Behind the small church
This is where they brought him that early November day in 1955, after a heart attack felled him. The cemetery is right behind a small brick church with a white wooden bell tower. Extrapolating from the names carefully chiseled in the headstones, you surmise that Young rests amid his wife’s relations — the Millers — and rubs elbows as well with a goodly number of Hollingsworths and Simmermans and Colleys and Whitings and Woods, the other surnames that appear with regularity here. Some of the headstones date to the mid-1800s.
There is nothing like a cemetery to remind you that life, anybody’s life, is little more than a hiccup between two eternities. And nothing like a ballplayer’s grave to remind you that numbers rule: “From 1890 to 1911,” reads the inscription on Young’s pale granite headstone, “Cy Young pitched 874 Major League baseball games. He won 511 games, three no hit, and one perfect game in which no man reached first base.”
Cy Young also lost more games than any other pitcher in history: 313. Clearly, there’s a lesson here about success and failure, about the symbiotic nature of those two fates. You can’t win unless you’re willing to lose.
Young lost a slew of games along the way, to be sure, but one thing he never lost was the respect of the people of Newcomerstown. His name is all over the place: at the McDonald’s just outside of town, in which a glass trophy case bolted to the wall brandishes pictures of Young, who looks moody and preoccupied in the way that all ballplayers of an earlier era look moody and preoccupied; on the public athletic facility, which includes a tidy baseball diamond, a pool and basketball courts; on the ball-shaped chocolate suckers sold here by local Little League teams to help finance new lights for their ballfields, the curly signature “Cy Young” spelled out in white chocolate icing.
The rest of the world may be a little fuzzy on who Cy Young actually was, but not these folks. You can ask just about anybody you meet here — young or old or in between — about Young, including people who were born long decades after the pitcher’s death, and you’ll get a friendly nod.
“Oh, yeah,” says Brock Hursey, 21, who is shooting hoops at Cy Young Park. Shirtless in the midmorning sunshine, Hursey catches a rebound and props the ball against a lean hip. “Everybody around here knows about him. It’s something you grow up with.”
`A big deal’
On downtown streets, the name “Cy Young” still resonates. “Yeah, it was a big deal,” growing up in a town that the pitcher called home, says Jim Williams, 42, a lifetime resident who is taking a walk before the serious heat kicks in.
He stops to talk to Doug Bell, 39, a tall, wiry truck driver sporting a green baseball cap and a ginger-colored mustache who is hosing down his rig in a gas station parking lot.
Bell, a stickler for detail, says knowledgeably, “Newcomerstown claims Cy Young, but he really grew up on a little farm outside of town.” This sounds like the stuff of long and fierce debate: Can you be of a town if you weren’t really in the town proper?
Newcomerstown is also proud of another native son associated with athletic glory, Bell reminds you: Woody Hayes, the legendary Ohio State University football coach who was born over on Canal Street — actually in town, Bell adds.
But the late Hayes is hotly controversial: Some see him as a bully and a thug, a man who presided over the heartbreaking change in college football from a wholesome amateur pastime to the grim, quasi-pro victory machines of the present era, the ones that ooze corruption and exploitation. Others revere him as a demi-god of the gridiron. “My cousin played for Woody Hayes,” Bell says. In these parts, most everybody’s cousin played for Woody Hayes.
Young was no Hayes. Nobody argues over Young. In the biographies, in the recollections of a Newcomerstown resident who knew him, in the stories told by those too young to have known him but who listened as children to the tales of their grandparents and great-grandparents, Young was a simple, humble, self-effacing fellow.
He liked a good joke but wasn’t apt to crack one. He wasn’t fiery or colorful or quotable. He wasn’t a braggart. He didn’t drink to excess. He was a bit sentimental. He regularly went deer-hunting, just as he’d done as a boy. He didn’t rub anybody the wrong way.
He was, in short, an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift: He had a fastball that could tie up a hitter like the ribbon on a Christmas package.
So this isn’t a story about the dark side of a baseball legend, about how the world ignored a man’s sinful behavior because he could thrill the crowds. Nor is it a story about how a town turned its back on a local boy once his glory days were over. Nor is it a story about a local boy who turned his back on his hometown once he’d made it big, never returning, never sending so much as a “So long, suckers!” postcard. Those are familiar narratives, the templates for our modern sports morality tales.
Nice quiet story
Young’s life story is none of those things — which is probably why it isn’t terribly well-known. Frankly, it lacks pizazz. There’s no tidy, sin-and-redemption inevitability about it. Instead, it’s a quiet, sedate kind of story about a shy farm boy with a special talent who went out and made his mark on the world and then came back to the place where he felt most comfortable: home.
The plaque at Cy Young Park seems to get it just about right: “In his youth on a nearby farm, Cy played baseball for love of the game, a quality that remained with him throughout his long life.”
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That’s not just a plaque-writer’s wishful thinking. John Heller, 82, remembers how Young helped the young ballplayers in Newcomerstown. Once retired, once settled back on his farm, the pitcher spent hours each week coaching and encouraging the local kids, the ones who dreamed of making the big leagues. “He was a great, great supporter of Little League and all the local teams,” says Heller, a slender, courtly man.
Heller and his wife, Jean, live in a pleasant brick house on one of Newcomerstown’s main streets. If you stop by, they’ll offer you a cool beverage and a comfortable chair. If you’re persistent and persuade them that yes, you really do want to hear about it, they’ll talk about the old days in Newcomerstown, the days when families would gather in the violet-tinged twilight to watch the local ball teams play, keeping an eye out for the same sort of natural talent that propelled a quiet fellow named Young to the world’s biggest baseball stage.
Never far from baseball
For many years, Heller’s father and grandfather ran Heller Brothers, the oldest manufacturer of industrial files in America, and John Heller went to work there, too, when he finished school. Heller Brothers, like many companies in small Midwestern towns, sponsored an amateur baseball team. When John Heller was a kid, he served as the team’s mascot. That’s when he got to know Young, who never roamed far from a baseball diamond.
Heller Brothers was sold to another owner in 1955; its workforce has been vastly reduced. But Heller and his wife stayed right here in Newcomerstown, anyway, for the same reasons that Young stayed: It’s what they know. It’s who they are.”I don’t mind the big city,” said Jean Heller, 73, a petite woman with lively, dancing eyes, “but when I visit my son in Columbus, I’m ready to come home.”
She remembers Young as vividly as her husband does, even though she, too, was just a kid when the famous pitcher strolled the streets and ball fields of Newcomerstown. “He was a nice person and everybody liked him,” she says.
Adds her husband, “The town cared a lot for him. I won’t say `took care of him.’ But they looked out for him.”
Professional athletes in an earlier era didn’t get rich. This was long before TV and commercial endorsements poured into the game, before the multimillion dollar contracts stuck like wadded-up gum wrappers to the cleats of even mediocre players. Young, Heller says, never made more than about $7,000 a year playing ball. Especially in later years, he needed a little help to make ends meet. And the people of Newcomerstown came through.
Why wouldn’t they? Young was one of their own. He may have been in baseball’s Hall of Fame — elected in 1937 — but “he’d call me by name,” Heller says. He isn’t surprised that Young returned here, even after all the glory and excitement of the bigger, flashier places, the ones with the magical names such as Boston, Cleveland and St. Louis, the cities in which Young played.
“This,” Heller says simply, “is where he started.”
Cyclone fastball
Now about that nickname. Denton True had a right-handed fastball he could sling past your ear before you even knew he’d released the dang thing. One day in Newcomerstown, the story goes, a buddy told him to throw at a nearby wooden fence. Young obliged.
Next thing anybody knew, the fence shattered. It looked, witnesses claimed, as if a cyclone had hit it. So they called the kid “Cy.” The “Denton True” moniker faded away and would only resurface again for official purposes many, many years later, when it showed up on his tombstone.
It’s a shame, in a way, that he isn’t known as “Denton True Young,” because that’s a good, solid, American name, clear and purposeful.
“Cy” is a fine nickname, but “True” is a heck of an epitaph.