On July 19, 1910 ... 100 years ago today ... Cy Young won his 500th game, an unfathomable mark by any standard. Young's career is well-known, but the stories and connections to Ohio of the other players in the game are well worth noting.
View full sizeCy Young's 511 victories are a major-league record that most likely will never be broken.To win 300 games is de facto Hall of Fame admission. To win 400 won't happen. And 500 doesn't scratch pipe-dream status. (Consider the active player with the most wins is Jamie Moyer with 267, in 36th place, one better than Indians great Bob Feller.)
It took 11 innings in the nation's capital for the Ohio-born Young to earn the win, one that came at the tail end of a career that would close with 511 victories. While Young would be remembered forever as the standard bearer at his position, the names of most of the other players who played that day would fade. The stories behind who they were, and their many ties to the state of Ohio, remain footnotes at best. And surprisingly, it was many of the Senators who had connections to Ohio.
Of the players in that game -- the second of a doubleheader split -- two would wind up in the Hall of Fame. Two attended college in the Buckeye State. One took his antics to vaudeville. Two died young. Another pulled an amazing stunt, then went into broadcasting with a young Harry Caray.
And the man who would finish No. 2 all-time in wins, Walter Johnson, was on the bench.
The season would be christened April 14 when William Howard Taft became the first president to throw a ceremonial first pitch at a major-league game. From the stands, the Ohio-born Taft tossed the ball to Johnson, and eventually signed it for him.
Neither team was ever a threat to win the pennant. When that Tuesday in July rolled around, 6,000 fans showed up, enjoying temperatures in the mid-70s.
When he took the mound that day, Denton True Young was 43. He was a native, raised in, played in and died in Ohio. Born just two years after the Civil War on March 29, 1867, in Gilmore, Young's career would span 22 seasons after breaking in with the Cleveland Spiders in 1890.
He had a 2-1 lead in the ninth, but Washington tied it. Cleveland won the 11-inning game in about two hours, with Young going the distance for the 5-2 win.
In a grand understatement the following day, the Washington Times wrote "Young's record is good for years," a mark "that the present generation will probably never see overthrown."
"I just keep good care of myself in season and out of season," said Young, whom the paper called a "wonder of wonder and marvel of marvels."
The players that day constituted their own collection of marvels, for famous and other reasons.
Of the 23 players in the game, at least seven attended college, a remarkable ratio then. Two Senators -- right fielder Doc Gessler and pitcher Doc Reisling were just that -- doctors. Gessler had gone to Ohio University before moving to Johns Hopkins University, and the Martins Ferry-born Riesling, a dentist, attended Ohio University and Ohio State.
Clyde Milan, who played all of his 16 years with Washington, was a speedy center fielder who amassed 2,100 hits. He scored both of the Senators' runs in the game. A brother, Frank, acted on stage and in television for several decades, performing in "The Petrified Forest" and "Brigadoon," among others.
While Young was at the end of his career, the Senators' John Henry was beginning his. Henry's coach at Amherst College in Massachusetts was paid $600 for him; Henry reportedly got nothing. He made his major-league debut 11 days before Young set his milestone. The following year Henry would set his own mark: Four passed balls in an American League game.
Bob Unglaub would finish his career with the Senators at the end of the 1910 season. He would become the first of anyone in the game to die, crushed while working on trains in 1916. Railroad work ran in the family. Thirty-five years earlier, Unglaub's father, a railroad engineer, was operating a train between Washington, D.C., and Fremont, Ohio, when he spotted an oncoming train. They crashed, but he was lauded for his quick efforts. One of the lives he saved was President Rutherford B. Hayes, a day after the Ohio native left office.
Both managers hailed from Youngstown. Washington's Jimmy McAleer, who had helped establish the American League, spent most of his career playing for professional teams in Cleveland.
Like so many managers who would come after him, Deacon McGuire had been a catcher in his playing days -- which spanned 26 seasons. Early on, he shared catching duties in Toledo with Moses "Fleetwood" Walker, the last black player to play in the major leagues before Jackie Robinson. (Toledo played in the American Association, which was considered a "major league.") In 1910, McGuire actually played a game, at age 46. (He went 1-for-3).
A manager playing at 46 was far from the oddest achievement for players at Young's 500th win. Two years earlier, Washington's Gabby Street caught a ball tossed from the top of the Washington Monument -- more than 500 feet and more than 300 pounds of energy. He wasn't hurt. But while catching Johnson five days later, he broke a finger on a foul tip. Street eventually teamed in the broadcast booth at the beginning of Caray's career in the 1940s.
If Street's life were colorful, Germany Schaefer's was a kaleidoscope. The 5-9 infielder, who called himself "Liberty" when World War I began, is said to have inspired a rule change as a result of his "stealing" first base from second. His on-field horsing around led the way for other diamond clowns -- as well as his own vaudeville act that reportedly may have inspired a couple of musicals, including "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Schaefer was good enough, though, to last 15 seasons before he died of a hemorrhage in 1919.
The Senators' Kid Elberfeld had an opposite personality. Elberfeld, yet another Ohioan -- born in Pomeroy on the Ohio River -- was nicknamed "The Tabasco Kid" for his temper. His leaning-in, at-the-plate stance led to him being plunked 165 times, 14th on the all-time list.
A final, tragic footnote: Fred Perrine, who umpired the game, suffered "sunstroke" at a game that several reports say took place in Cleveland. He was committed to a hospital for the insane, and reportedly killed himself a few years later.
While Young would dazzle hitters from the mound, Nap Lajoie would be the team's offensive force, leading the league with a .384 average while pounding 227 hits. Both were selected for the Hall of Fame in 1937.
Their teammate Jack Graney did not make the Hall of Fame, but the Ontario-born outfielder is in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. He also went on to hold at least one distinction: He was the first batter to face a young pitcher named Babe Ruth.
For the rest of the season, the Naps (fifth place) and Washington (seventh) would make no run at Philadelphia, both finishing more than 30 games back.
Young retired after the 1911 campaign. He died Nov. 4, 1955, in Newcomerstown, Tuscarawas County, and is buried in Peoli. The award named after him, honoring the best at the position he mastered, was first awarded in 1956.
Research for this story came from newspaper accounts, Society for American Baseball Research, Shirley Povich's "The Washington Senators," baseball-reference.com, "Total Baseball" and others.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: mbona@plaind.com, 216-999-5012