…but Gordon Edes has a point: We should rename the Cy Young award after Satchel Paige.
Let’s rename the award after a man who won more games than Young, struck out more batters than Nolan Ryan, pitched in at least twice as many games as anyone else, and had a persona that rivaled Babe Ruth’s.
The name is Leroy “Satchel” Paige, and it deserves to be etched on a trophy that would guarantee he will not be forgotten.
I agree for a couple of reasons: first, it would rightly continue to bring attention to baseball’s greatest sin, the institutional racism that reigned from the 1880s to 1947. Josh Gibson probably was a better hitter than Babe Ruth, and Satchel perhaps the greatest pitcher ever to play the game, but we’ll never know just how good they were because they weren’t allowed to play in the major leagues.
Second, while Cy Young’s 512 major league wins are perhaps baseball’s last unbreakable record, we shouldn’t forget that he was pitching in a different time. Quite simply, it was a lot easier for a pitcher to last a long time in the dead-ball era, when every hitter wasn’t a threat to put the ball out of the yard. A pitcher could relax a little more, throw some easy ones, induce a lot more grounders. Satchel pitched in times that, while certainly not the equivalent of the (hopefully recent past) steroid era, were a lot more analogous to the way baseball is now than Cy Young’s era.
So I’m with Edes… let’s rename the Cy Young Award after one of the greatest pitchers and greatest entertainers ever to play the game.
Tags: Baseball, Cy Young, Gordon Edes, Satchel Paige
Doesn’t Cy Young also have the most losses in MLB history, or am I thinking of someone else?
Edes’ column = Fail (even if only to push the new book on Paige)
“Josh Gibson probably was a better hitter than Babe Ruth, and Satchel perhaps the greatest pitcher ever to play the game, but we’ll never know just how good they were because they weren’t allowed to play in the major leagues.” = Epic Fail.
Here is one for ya: If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands.
Did you ever think that Gibson’s and Paige’s stats may have been a bit inflated do to their watered down talent pool and/or fact that there are little to no accurate stats from the Negro leagues? I mean, from what statistical model can you extrapolate their success to MLB? Its not like you watched them in person. Should we use 80% of his fictitious stats to get an idea of how good he really was? How good is someone who “may have embellished 20 percent of what he did”?(from Edes column)?
For the record, isn’t Jackie’s “42″ retired in every ballpark enough for your guilt? Does that not remind every fan, every game about MLB’s past “institutional racism”? But I guess we could make an announcement before each game how evil Major League Baseball has been to blacks, even when they broke the color barrier down much earlier than other establishments in this country.
Will all due respect, your blog would be much better if you refrained from commenting on subjects you know little about…