"All us Youngs could throw. I used to kill squirrels with a stone when I was a kid, and my granddad once killed a turkey buzzard on the fly with a rock"
About this Quote
There’s a swagger here, but it’s the old rural kind: competence that doesn’t need a stopwatch, just a story. Cy Young isn’t merely bragging about an arm; he’s placing pitching inside a family tradition of practical accuracy, where throwing is learned the way chores are learned. The squirrels and the turkey buzzard aren’t colorful footnotes - they’re proof of a childhood spent outdoors, improvising games that doubled as survival skills. In that world, “control” isn’t a coaching point; it’s dinner, pest control, and pride.
The line “All us Youngs could throw” quietly shifts the spotlight from individual genius to lineage. It’s an origin myth that turns talent into inheritance, not luck. That move matters for an athlete whose name became a statistic (the Cy Young Award): he’s reclaiming the human scale behind the legend, before radar guns and biomechanics, when a great pitcher could be imagined as the best thrower in the county.
There’s also a darker subtext modern ears can’t ignore: casual violence toward animals as a marker of toughness. The story depends on that normalization. It signals a time when masculinity and skill were measured in what you could hit, at distance, with whatever you had. For today’s audience, it reads as both authentic and unsettling - which is why it sticks. The quote preserves baseball’s folk roots: America’s pastime narrated like frontier brag.
The line “All us Youngs could throw” quietly shifts the spotlight from individual genius to lineage. It’s an origin myth that turns talent into inheritance, not luck. That move matters for an athlete whose name became a statistic (the Cy Young Award): he’s reclaiming the human scale behind the legend, before radar guns and biomechanics, when a great pitcher could be imagined as the best thrower in the county.
There’s also a darker subtext modern ears can’t ignore: casual violence toward animals as a marker of toughness. The story depends on that normalization. It signals a time when masculinity and skill were measured in what you could hit, at distance, with whatever you had. For today’s audience, it reads as both authentic and unsettling - which is why it sticks. The quote preserves baseball’s folk roots: America’s pastime narrated like frontier brag.
Quote Details
| Topic | Grandparents |
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