Serious students of baseball history can tell you that Cy Young won 511 games in his 22-year major league pitching career from 1890-1911. When the Boston Americans (later known as the Red Sox) took the field in the first World Series in 1903, it was Young who was on the mound.
Even a casual baseball fan could tell you about the Cy Young Award, presented yearly to the best pitcher of each league. Not many, however, could tell you about the Fourth of July game in 1935 when the still spry and scrappy 68-year-old Young and a collection of mostly not-so-famous old-timers descended upon Bass Park in Bangor to play a team of local talent.
Why would such an event have even happened?
The tour was advertised as a “Traveling Baseball School,” and was the brainchild of a Walter J. Foley of Framingham, Massachusetts. His dream was to have a team of old-timers travel the country to play local teams and, prior to the game, conduct a baseball clinic. Boys under 16 could get free admission to the training by simply arriving with a copy of The Sporting News.
The ambitious tour was planned in hopes that these old-timers could last a few innings against minor league, college and independent teams. Young was contracted to pitch one inning of every game for $250 a month. Why would baseball’s most celebrated pitcher even consider this barnstorming tour?
He was lonely. His wife Robba had died in 1933 and the couple had lost their only child a few hours after birth in 1907. Being surrounded by those memories left him feeling despondent.
He stayed active in local politics and fought to save the post office in his hometown of Peoli, Ohio, because, “the boys won’t have any place to loaf!” he exclaimed. He played in an old-timers game and also on a team of teenagers looking for a pitcher. But nothing seemed to fill the void.
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“Somehow after she died, I didn’t want to live there anymore,” Young would later say of his farm in 1944. “So I sold the place and moved down the road.” He donated or sold almost everything he had. Someone even bought Cy’s old rake for $1.50.
So he set out on the barnstorming tour with other old-timers, none of them as famous as him.
Most of the big-name players failed to show, and only small crowds came to see these stars of yesteryear who bounced from town to town in a secondhand bus. Young even reached into his own pocket to help with expenses.
“The boys had to eat,” he said.
The tour was a flop and by June he had returned to Ohio, living in an apartment and working at a five-and-ten.
But Young had one more game with the old-timers still. In Bangor.
Foley wanted to keep the scheduled game in Bangor and sent train fare and expense money to Young and others. The “immortal troupe of stars” as they were deemed by the Bangor Daily News, met in Boston on July 3 and boarded a bus, arriving in Bangor by early evening.
The VFW and Earl Heal of the Bangor Police Department made the spectacle happen. Heal organized the team with local players from the area. The “recently beautified” Bass Park hosted horse racing earlier in the afternoon. Around 3:20, the old-timers held a clinic with youngsters and answered questions. The game began an hour later.
This group of legends included a couple of big names, but mostly players with brief careers and others not even identified: Nick Altrock, Billy Jones, Barney Friberg, Buck O’Brien, Freddy Parent, Big Ed Walsh, “Big Jeff” Pfeffer, Roy Rock, Chet Nichols, Bucky Burke, Morrie Baschang, Frank Fahey, Joe Casey, Jack Ryan, Gene Demoe, Joe Cole, and Tom Connelly.
“The time-yellowed pages of baseball history were thumbed back some 20 years,” wrote Bill Geagan of the Daily News, describing the unique outing. “Old Cy Young and his immortals of the diamond stepped from between its musty covers, to once again wear the spangles and spikes of the game they love.”
Young was described by Geagan as, “a wrinkled remnant of his once great self” who still “showed fleeting flickers of his old form.”
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Young pitched a scoreless first inning, and then sat down to watch the rest of the game. Big Ed Walsh, whose 1.82 ERA over his 14-year career still ranks number one all time, pitched the rest of the game effectively. Showing his old form, the Bangor Daily Commercial said time had been “touching him but lightly.”
But effectiveness was not the case for local Bangor pitcher Jimmy Vanadistine, who gave up five runs in the first inning and three each in the second and third. Fortunately Nick Altrock, hailed as the clown of baseball at that time, kept fans entertained with his silly antics and jokes.
“The attraction was unique,” the Daily News reported on the old-timers’ 12-5 win. “The ball playing was good, the weather man smiled brightly and the day was a big success except for the very poor attendance, which totaled only a few hundred people.”
Young returned to Ohio. On the Fourth of July 30 years prior he had pitched all 20 innings of a game for Boston; now he had pitched an inning in Bangor at the age of 68. But it was a scoreless inning, like many others he had thrown in his life.
Bob LeMoine, a Maine native, is a contributor to various projects for the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2016 he was a co-editor with Bill Nowlin on Boston’s First Nine: the 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings. A future article of his for the Baseball Research Journal will tell more of the story of Cy Young and the barnstorming old-timers tour of 1935.
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