Denton True “Cy” Young pitched for five teams in his 22-year baseball career (1890-1911). His first eight years were spent with the National League Cleveland Spiders. Such was his lore that the year after his death in 1956 the Cy Young Award was created to honor major league baseball’s best pitcher yearly.

Cy Young’s career perhaps more than any other player is seen as a bridge from baseball’s earliest days to its modern era. When he first began pitchers were required to throw sidearm; foul balls were not considered strikes; walks required eight balls and the pitcher’s mound was five feet closer. Four years into his career in 1893 the year of the cabinet card offered here the above-mentioned rules changed and the modern era as we know it began. One more not commonly known oddity and yet another testament to transitioning toward the game as we know it today was the fact that Young did not even wear a glove until his sixth season. He clearly belonged to both eras; a perception that was never more evident when the idea of the Hall of Fame first came up in 1936. Because there were two voting committees a 19th Century Veteran’s group and a 20th Century group the votes were divided for Cy Young. Therefore he didn’t get in with the initial class. That mistake was rectified the very next opportunity in 1937.

His records and achievements are so eye-popping and otherworldly that if he were pitching today he would probably have received baseball’s first billion dollar contract. The enormity of some of the numbers helps explain how he won 511 games; nearly 100 more wins than anyone else and a record baseball statisticians believe will never be broken. He threw over 400 innings in each of his first four years and for 19 years consecutively was in the top 10 in innings pitched. He had 40 or more complete games in a season nine times and it was ten years into his career before he pitched two consecutive incomplete games! All this added up to more records no one will ever come close to; among them 7356 innings pitched and 815 games started with 749 complete; a nearly 92% complete game ratio!

If anyone needs more convincing as to why we give the Cy Young award to baseball’s best pitcher here’s just a little bit more: He was the first to pitch a perfect game in the modern era and threw two other no-hitters. And it was Cy Young who started and threw the first pitch in the first-ever modern era World Series game in 1903 and was instrumental in bringing the championship to the Boston Americans five games to three over the Pittsburgh Pirates. This was yet another example of bridging the old and new eras as he had previously in 1895 pitched the Cleveland Spiders to a 4-1 victory over Baltimore in the “Temple Cup” which was a precursor to the modern World Series. Three of the four wins had been his. It was around the time of the Temple Cup that he came up with a “slow ball” to take the strain off the sheer amount of maximum stress pitches he was throwing. We now know this pitch as a change-up.

He won over 30 games five times and 20 or more a record 15 seasons. Following his election into the Hall of Fame in 1937 and 88 years after he had thrown his last professional pitch Cy Young in 1999 was ranked 14th on “Sporting News” list of “Baseball’s 100 Greatest Players” and named to the “Major League Baseball All-Century Team.”

Presented here is one of only two known examples of this circa 1893 Cy Young Cleveland Spiders Pifer & Becker Cabinet Photo. Remarkably both examples have originated from the personal collections of former Spiders players. The other example once belonged to Cy Young himself and the offered example comes from the estate of former Spiders player Jake Virtue. While Young’s example bore his signature the presented example is in far superior condition that is almost unfathomable for its existence of more than a century-and-a-quarter.  From the crystal clear image to the gold gilt edges of the 4-1/8” by 6-1/2” mount the entire piece demonstrates the highest standards of photographic quality and presentation possible from the era.  This cabinet along with the five other Pifer & Becker cabinets in the Jake Virtue Collection featured in this auction bear the same images featured in one of the nineteenth-century collecting world's holy grail card issues the 1893 Just So Tobacco card set. All Just So Tobacco cards which exclusively feature Cleveland Spiders players are exceedingly rare. It has been estimated that fewer than twenty-five examples in total are known in the entire collecting world with fourteen different players represented. The matching images of these cabinets with their Just So counterparts leaves no doubt that these cabinets are the parents of that revered issue.

PSA has graded this Young cabinet EX-MT 6. Although this technical grade is rarely seen for an item of this age and type it still fails to convey the stunning vibrancy and timeless appearance it projects.  Using all known metrics to assess baseball artifacts of this type this stands among the finest Cy Young card related objects that has ever surfaced in the hobby.  LOA from the estate of Jake Virtue.