Forgotten Tragedy: Despite untimely death, Ross Youngs’ story often overlooked

Editor’s Note: This story, written by Sam Blair, was originally published in the Dallas Morning News.

 

So much about Ross Youngs and his rare baseball career seems unforgettable, yet most of it has been forgotten.

In triumph, he was a superb right fielder, batter and baserunner on the best New York Giants teams of the legendary John McGraw era. In tragedy, he was the Lou Gehrig of the 1920s, a hustling young athlete from Texas who died in his prime.

Youngs was only 30 when he died October 22, 1927, in his hometown of San Antonio. He was a victim of Bright’s Disease, or nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys which medical science was not yet able to overcome.

But unlike Gehrig, the Iron Horse of the New York Yankees who died of a rare muscle disease at 37 on June 2, 1941, Youngs never had an opportunity to stand at home plate and say thanks and farewell to a packed stadium of hushed fans.

He played his last game for the Giants on Aug. 10, 1926. Too sick to continue, Youngs went home to San Antonio, still optimistic he could recover and return to his club in ’27.

Dick Kinsella, the Giants’ scout who discovered Youngs in 1916 when he played for Sherman, Texas, in the Western Association, visited him in San Antonio early in the ’27 season and had to fight back tears at the sight of Youngs, his body wasted away from 170 to little more than 100 pounds. “The hand of fate is heavy upon him,” Kinsella told McGraw and the Giants, confirming what they feared despite Youngs’ positive letters to them.

A two-mile procession followed his body to Mission Park South Cemetery. At his graveside were his estranged wife, Dorothy, who brought their baby daughter Caroline, whom he had never seen, from New York for the funeral. They were yet another symbol of the sad ending to a remarkable career.

Typically, the guy popularly known as “Pep” Youngs was a gamer to the end. His nephew and namesake, 62-year-old Russ Middlebrook Youngs, says his father told him that a doctor pronounced his uncle dead once, “then he came back and lived three or four more weeks.”

In 1926, his final season, Youngs’ hit 306 in 95 games, although his health was so poor McGraw hired a male nurse to travel with the team. Always a favorite of the demanding McGraw and dedicated to the manager and the club which gave him a shot in the big leagues while still a teenager, Youngs also tutored his 17-year old successor in the art of playing right field in the strangely shaped Polo Grounds. The kid was named Mel Ott.

Youngs hit .322 in 10 seasons with the Giants (1917-26) and appeared to be McGraw’s choice to some day succeed him as manager. McGraw, who retired in 1932 after 33 years as a major league manager, including 30 with the Giants, called Youngs “the greatest outfielder I ever saw on a baseball field.”

“Ruth knows batters, and he plays them correctly, “McGraw said. “He can camp under a high fly as well as the next man. he has one of the greatest throwing arms ever seen in the outfield. But when you have said this, you have said it all. Babe is rather clumsy. He isn’t especially fast. He’s not a great outfielder. Pep Youngs is all these things, and he also has a whip as deadly as a rifle.”

McGraw said this in ’24 when Youngs also had his finest season as a hitter (.356). Pep already enjoyed other distinctions.

In Game 3 of the 1921 World Series against the Yankees, he became the first player in Series history to get two hits in an inning when he doubled and tripled in an eight-run seventh. The Giants won 13-5, and took the Series, five games to three. In the ’22 Series, they swept the Yankees in four games with Youngs hitting .375.

Still, the swift, aggressive Texan was a truly fearsome figure in the field.

In an exhibition game with the Chicago White Sox in the spring of 1923, Willie Kamm singled to right field but Youngs rifled a throw to home plate that trapped Earl Sheely, who was trying to score from second. Pep sprinted in from right field, joined the rundown between third and home and tagged Sheely out. Thus he earned both an assist and putout.

So skillful was Youngs’s fielding balls off the wall at the Polo Grounds, which measured only 259 feet down the foul line, that Waite Hoyt said, “he played that carom as if he’s majored in billiards.”

And nephew Ross Youngs, born two years after his uncle’s death, said his father, Arthur Byrd Youngs, told him about some of Pep’s other fielding gems in the Giants’ home park. “Once he ran into the stands, scampered up a few rows among the fans and caught a foul. Another time he raced in, made a shoetop catch of a Texas Leaguer and tagged out a runner between first and second for an unassisted double play.”

Frankie Frisch, another Giants star of the Youngs era who went on to more greatness with the St. Louis Cardinals, years later put Youngs’s ability in perspective for a later generation of fans.

“He was built like Enos Slaughter, short, stocky and played with Enos’ hustle — and had even more ability.”

Youngs had other admirable qualities. By all reports, he was friendly, caring, and generous. Too generous, in fact. When he died, it was estimated he was owed $16,000 by his many debtors, and his family never collected a penny of it.

He didn’t drink or smoke but loved to bet $100 per hole when he played golf at the San Antonio Country Club since he could shoot in the 60s and was considered the best golfer in major league baseball, it wasn’t much of a gamble.

But after his early death, this legend soon gained another quality. The memory of Ross Youngs became invisible.

In 1936, the Baseball Writers Association of America voted to elect the first class for the new Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. Youngs finished 20th and in succeeding years received little support, finally disappearing from the ballot.

It wasn’t until 1972 that Youngs was elected to the Hall of Fame as a Veterans Committee candidate. Former commissioner Ford Frick, an old baseball writer who remembered Youngs in his prime, championed his cause. So did Bill Terry, his old Giants teammate and Hall of Fame first baseman who took the job that Youngs didn’t live to fill — as McGraw’s successor.

So it went for Ross Youngs for so long — unforgettable in life, forgotten in death.

Although he was one of the biggest stars in America’s biggest city during the Golden Age of Sport, the quiet, dutiful Youngs simply played great baseball for the glory of the Giants.

His daring style on the basepaths made the fans gasp. He may have been the best of his era at breaking up double plays with his fierce body blocks on the pivot man at second base. but whenever they cheered him for any type of play, he awkwardly touched his cap and hurried into the dugout. In this way, he gave a great show but never was a showman.

San Francisco attorney Duane Garrett, a collector and auctioneer of baseball memorabilia and also a historian of the Giants franchise on both coasts, believes the chemistry of those historic Giants teams probably increased Youngs’s natural modesty and later anonymity.

“First, McGraw had a dominant personality, and Youngs, the ideal team player, readily accepted it,” Garrett said. “Also, look at all the future Hall of Famers on those Giants teams. Frankie Frisch, George Kelly, Freddie Lindstrom, Travis Jackson, Casey Stengel, Dave Bancroft, Bill Terry. With so many other stars around him, Youngs quietly played his own brilliant game.”

Ross Middlebrook Youngs was born April 10, 1897, in Shiner, Texas, the second of three sons. His father was a railroad worker but suffered from a disability and moved his family to San Antonio when the boys were young. He made some money from ranching, then left his family. His wife, Henri Middlebrook Youngs, then reared her sons in a close, strong family.

“She ran a small hotel in downtown San Antonio, and my dad got a newspaper route to help support the family,” the surviving Ross said. “I heard from an old friend that my dad was a better ballplayer than Ross, but he became a used car salesman in San Antonio. The youngest brother, Jack, wound up with Humble Oil in Houston as an accountant. Ross was good in all sports — a star running back in football, a 9.8 sprinter when that was a great time for 100 yards, a fine golfer — but baseball always was his love.”

While attending West Texas Military Institute (now TMI) in San Antonio, Youngs received football scholarship offers from major colleges across the nation but wanted a professional baseball career. He played briefly for Austin in the Texas League in 1914, hitting only .097 in 10 games. In 1915, he went to Brenham (Mid Texas League) and Waxahachie (Central Texas League), but both leagues disbanded during the summer.

He first flourished as a switch-hitting infielder at Sherman in 1916, hitting .362. Giants scout Kinsella recommended Youngs so highly that McGraw paid the Sherman club $2,000 for him and told Youngs, 19, to report to the Giants’ spring camp in Marlin, Texas, in 1917.

McGraw loved Youngs’s natural athletic ability and his attitude but realized he was not a good infielder, making too many plays off balance and hurrying his throws. He farmed him out to Rochester of the International League and told manager Mickey Doolan: “I’m giving you one of the greatest players I’ve ever seen. Play him in the outfield. If anything happens to him, I’m holding you responsible.”

Pep Youngs played splendidly for Rochester, hitting .356 in 140 games before McGraw recalled him to the Giants to finish the season. He hit .346 in seven games, and McGraw knew he had a new right fielder. In 1918, Youngs’ first full season in the majors, he became purely a left-handed hitter and finished with a .302 average.

After Youngs’s death, McGraw had two photos on the wall of his clubhouse office. One was of Youngs, the other of legendary pitcher Christy Mathewson, who had died of tuberculosis in 1925, nine years after he pitched his last game for the Giants.

There are three theories about how Pep Youngs contracted Bright’s disease.

His nephew said, “My dad said Ross would never drink water during a game because he was afraid it would slow him down. That might have hurt his kidneys.”

Some baseball people believed Ross Youngs, John McGraw’s protégé, died of a kidney ailment in 1927.

Youngs seriously injured his kidneys when he threw so many cross-body blocks at second base to break up double plays.

McGraw biographer Charles C. Alexander said Youngs’s severe urinary track infection resulted from migration of an earlier streptococcal throat condition into his kidneys. Alexander credited this information to Dr. Jesse H. DeLee of San Antonio, “who has thoroughly investigated Youngs’s medical history.”