March 29 is a special day in baseball. It’s not Opening Day for Major League Baseball. On this day in 1867, the great Cy Young was born into the world. Cy Young is among the greatest pitchers to ever play the great game of baseball. If you are reading this, then at a minimum you already have heard that he has the annual Cy Young Award named in his honor.

Collectors Dashboard aims to honor Cy Young with a reminder of his top stats, where he ranked in baseball history compared to then and now, and also how high some of the Cy Young cards and sports memorabilia can sell for in the modern era. This should show why Cy Young cards and memorabilia can be so pricey. And at the end, if you do not want to try to own a Cy Young card (or memorabilia) you should at least have envy of those who do own them.

The images below within the card sales have been cited for sources and used to show how each of the great examples look.

STATISTICS

While Cy’s 2.63 lifetime earned run average (ERA) is impressive, it is not the highest — that rank is not even 50th place (Ed Walsh’s 1.82 ERA is in first place all-time).

Cy Young’s 2,803 recorded strikeouts isn’t even technically in the top 20 any longer (and way behind Nolan Ryan’s pole position with 5,714 strikeouts).

What Cy Young is known for the best is his 511 career wins. It took him 22 years, but second on the list of all-time wins is from Walter Johnson’s 417 wins over 21 years, and ranks over the 373 counted in a tie by Pete Alexander and Christy Mathewson. It is more than 150 wins higher than Greg Maddux’s modern-era top win pitcher (#8 all-time).

Cy Young pitched from 1890 into 1911, but the aging pitcher had only 7 wins in each of his last two seasons. Keep in mind that pitchers would finish most of their games back in that period. It also wasn’t normal for 43 and 44 year-old pitchers to be hurling back then.

One dubious record that Cy also holds is the MLB ll-time loss record with 316 losses. Still, that’s a .619 Win-loss percentage and he also holds the record for 815 games started and the record for 749 games completed. The MLB wasn’t known for bringing in 6 different relief pitchers in a single game back in the late-1800s and early 1900s.

On a Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Cy Young’s 165.6 “WAR” is the highest, above Walter Johnson’s 152.1 (#2) and Roger Clemens’ 138.7 (#3).

CY YOUNG AWARD

As for the Cy Young Award itself, the honor is handed out each year to the best pitcher in each league. From 1956 to 1966 the Award was handed out to whom was voted best pitcher in Major League Baseball, but since 1967 the award goes to a winner in the American league and in the National league.

The Cy Young Award does not automatically go to the pitcher with the highest number of wins, nor is it based solely upon strikeouts. The recipient of the Award is voted on by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and the pitcher with the highest number of points for first, second, and third place votes from that (current) 28 member committee is the winner.

THANK YOU T206!

One avenue which greatly helped Cy Young among baseball card collectors is that he appears in three variations in the great T206 set from 1909-1911. Had Cy retired in 1907 or 1908, owning a Cy Young card would be a great scarcity. Here are the full T206 statistics from PSA’s graded population reports:

• The basic population reports from PSA have 1,026 total graded examples of the portrait T206 with the green background.
• The “bare hand showing” sideways view of him pitching (yellow background) has just 656 graded examples in the PSA population after “+” and “Q” grades are included.
• The “glove shows” variation of Cy pitching from the front has just 753 combined examples in PSA’s population reports.
• All in all, that comes to 2,435 total graded T206 Cy Young examples for all variations and all qualifiers.

The beautiful T205 “gold border” set from 1911 has only 349 total graded examples in the entire PSA graded population report, and of that 283 have the base grade without any qualifiers. And because that set is so hard to find in any high grade examples there are no PSA 10 and PSA 9 grades. Even then there is just 1 example at PSA 8.5 and 3 graded as PSA 8.

The large format T3 Turkey Red cards currently have only 107 PSA graded examples. In that set, the highest graded example is a PSA 7 and there is only 1 example even at that grade.

There are only approximately 100 total PSA graded examples of the variations within the 30-card set of E98 Caramel from 1910.

There were only 149 PSA graded examples of Cy Young cards in the 1909 E90-1 “American Caramel” series of cards.

AND THE BIG BEAUTY SALES!

Collectors Dashboard wanted to highlight just how much certain Cy Young items can sell for. We have shown the highest prices of several items from multiple auction houses, but we would caution that these do not necessarily have to represent the highest price ever paid for each of these items at all auction houses.

The highest price of any Cy Young item sold so far by Heritage Auctions was a 1908 Cy Young game worn Boston Red Sox Uniform. This was way back on August 4, 2011 and it fetched $657,250.00 even a decade ago. Image here from Heritage Auctions.

Heritage Auctions also sold a 1909-11 T206 Piedmont 150 Cy Young (Bare Hand Shows) graded as PSA Mint 9 on September 20, 2018 for $168,000.00. That same card down to the same PSA certification number was sold on Heritage back on August 27, 2016 for a price of $143,400.00. Image below by Heritage Auctions.

An extremely rare 1891-92 Cy Young cabinet card (Ryder) from the then Cleveland Spiders out of the Jake Virtue Collection was sold for $130,027.00 in the SCP Auctions Spring-2018 auction. SCP also sold a “circa 1893” Cy Young Cabinet card (Pifer & Becker) for $97,508.00 from the same Jake Virtue Collection in the same Spring-2018 auction — and a signed example of the same card from Cy Young’s personal collection had sold via SCP in a Summer-2014 auction event. Image below by SCP Auctions.

A very rare 1893 Cy Young Cabinet Card which was signed twice and graded as PSA/DNA Authentic sold on February 25, 2017 for a sum of $120,000.00.

Heritage’s highest price for a 1909-11 T206 Piedmont 150 Cy Young (Portrait) graded PSA NM-MT 8 sold on September 20, 2018 for $114,000.00. Image below by Heritage Auctions.

Heritage’s highest price for a 1911 T205 Piedmont Cy Young graded PSA NM+ 7.5 sold on February 26, 2022 for $99,000.00.

An autographed 1947 Cy Young single-signed baseball in exquisite condition was sold through Heritage on May 13, 2016 for the price of $43,020.00 at that time. Baseball image below by Heritage Auctions.

PWCC Marketplace sold a 1910 E98 Set Of 30 Cy Young Red Back example, likely from the Black Swamp Find due to its PSA 10 Gem Mint status for the price of $100,000 on September 15, 2020. Image below by PWCC Marketplace.

A 1903 E107 Breisch-Williams Cy Young graded only as a PSA sold for $45,000 in the 2017 Fall Auction at Robert Edward Auctions.

That should be solid enough of provenance and examples to know that Cy Young’s prized cards. particularly the rarest and best graded examples, can fetch more than a pretty penny.

One issue which is hard to imagine is that Cy Young wasn’t in Baseball’s first Hall of Fame class in 1936. Those first five slots went to Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, and unsurprisingly to the then-recently retired Babe Ruth. Cy Young made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York in the second class in 1937 along with 7 other great legendary baseball players, managers and executives.