Tag Archives: Walter Young

14 May

big boys

Keep seeing these references to Aaron Judge’s size, which is an impressive 6 feet 7, 282 pounds. A chart in the May 15-22 Sports Illustrated lists New York Yankees star Judge, Frank Howard (6-7, 255) and Nate Freiman (6-8, 245) as the biggest position players “by a combination of height and weight.” Not sure where this leaves the late Walter Young. The former Purvis High star, who had 10 big league hits, including a homer off R.A. Dickey, with Baltimore in 2005, checked in at 6 feet 5 and somewhere in the vicinity of 315-320 pounds. Some sites listed his weight at much more than that. Young is generally considered the heaviest position player to appear in an MLB game.

06 Oct

‘gentle giant’ remembered

Stumbled across a very nice tribute to Walter Young on a blog site called crawdadsbeat.com. It’s worth a read. The former Purvis High baseball and football star played one of his 11 pro seasons for the Hickory Crawdads and apparently made a big impression, on and off the field. Young won the South Atlantic League MVP with the Crawdads in 2002, when he hit 25 homers and drove in 103 runs. He hit 175 homers all told, one in the big leagues. Drafted in the 31st round out of Purvis in 1999 by Pittsburgh, Young was listed at 6 feet 5, 320 pounds when he was called up by Baltimore in 2005, making him possibly the largest man to play in an MLB game. Young retired from baseball in 2009 and was working for the Lamar County School District at the time of his death from a heart attack on Sept. 19. He was only 35.