“I’m doing great,” he said. “I never got sick behind it, I drove myself every day to chemo, I never missed a day of work. … I had an MRI the other day, and the tumor actually shrunk some.”
Through all the doctor visits, the Texas native has managed to oversee the Kingwood-based baseball facility he’s owned since 2011. “The Madden Zone,” open five days a week, features 12 batting cages and pitching machines for Texas prospects, like Young once was.
“It just happened to happen to me,” Young told the New York Daily News in 2009. “I don’t feel like I deserve it, but I’m known for it. Everything that could happen, happened.”
Young rather humbly laid out his blessings elsewhere in that interview: kids and grandkids, a wife he loved, a chance to coach kids in a game that clearly mattered a great deal to him. There is gratitude for the ride that he had, which added up to five big-league seasons spent with three teams, and there is somewhere down in the subtext a certain wry understanding that the course of that ride was not really his to choose.