…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.