The Old Ball Game

Praise for
The Old Ball Game
:

“[Deford] tips a journalist's fedora, rather than a child's cap, to one of the most remarkable pairings in sports history.”

—Alan Schwarz,
The New York Times Book Review

“Deford's dual biography is more than simply sketches of two starkly different personalities. It re-creates the early-twentieth-century period, explaining the mood of the country and the nascent stages of a game in flux.”

—David Plaut,
USA Today Sports Weekly

“One of our more melodious sportswriters . . . Deford is in command of this story, as much a piece of social as of sporting history. Characters are made real. . . . Deford writes with a cunning sparkle in his eye. . . . It's Deford's reach of baseball knowledge, its color and historical circumstance—all the minutiae that pile up into a grand and recognizable edifice—that sets this one apart.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Frank Deford writes the kinds of sentences that you find yourself rereading for the sheer pleasure of it. The Old Ball Game was never more fun, or more real, than it is in the pages of his marvelous book.”

—Jim Bouton, author of
Ball Four

“Frank Deford brings his hall-of-fame talent to the story of two of baseball's greatest hall-of-famers—Mathewson and McGraw—baseball's original ‘M and M' boys. By temperament, they could hardly have been more different, but the game brought them together, and together, their impact on the game was profound.”

—Bob Costas, commentator, NBC and HBO Sports

“Deford's mastery, like Mariano Rivera, the Yankees' late-inning maestro, demonstrates the most enviable traits associated with excellence in any field: it is smooth and effortless.”

—Erik Spanberg,
Creative Loafing

“A breezily incisive look at the sport when it truly was America's pastime . . . The surprising similarities between today and yesteryear pulse through
Game's
narrative.”

—Michael Roberts,
Westword

“Deford does an excellent job of relating the story of Mathewson and McGraw and the excellence they forged with the New York Giants.”

—Richard Weigel,
Daily News
(Kentucky)

“Baseball lovers and history buffs alike will delight in reading . . . [this] fascinating story. . . . Thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable. He is not only well-acquainted with the game of baseball in general but he is also highly conversant with the history of turn-of-the-century American popular culture.”

—Patricia D'Ascoli,
Fairfield County Times

“Throughout his long and distinguished career as the secretary of sport in the nation's cabinet of letters, Frank Deford's many admirers have hoped he might turn his attention to baseball. Now finally comes his vivid account of a seminal partnership between the All-American boy, pitcher Christy Mathewson, and his Giants manager, the All-American striver, John ‘Muggsy' McGraw. Their unlikely association suggests that in this country gentlemanly skill and brazen pluck were not competing qualities, but dual virtues required in tandem for a man to get ahead on the ball field—and everywhere else. Deford imbues his account with signature skill and pluck of his own, displaying the shrewd cultural observations, the feel for Americana, and the exuberant, disarming prose that have made him an unmatched interpreter of games and the people who play them.”

—Nicholas Dawidoff, author of
The Catcher Was a Spy
and
The Fly Swatter

“Frank Deford knows more baseball and writes with more graceful good humor than any man I know.”

—Richard Ben Cramer, author of
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life

Also by Frank Deford

FICTION
Cut 'n' Run
The Owner
Everybody's All-American
The Spy in the Deuce Court
Casey on the Loose
Love and Infamy
The Other Adonis
An American Summer

NONFICTION
Five Strides on the Banked Track
There She Is
Big Bill Tilden
Alex: The Life of a Child
The World's Tallest Midget
The Best of Frank Deford

THE OLD BALL GAME

Frank Deford

H
OW
J
OHN MC
G
RAW
, C
HRISTY
M
ATHEWSON,
AND THE
N
EW
Y
ORK
G
IANTS
C
REATED
M
ODERN
B
ASEBALL

Copyright © 2005 by Frank Deford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

All interior photos reprinted with kind permission from the following sources:
Transcendental Graphics: Photos appear on pages
2
,
22
,
55
,
70
,
79
,
84
,
113
,
126
,
131
,
136
,
140
,
166
,
175
,
181
,
183
,
186
,
195
, and
202
. Bettman/Corbis: Photos appear on frontispiece, and pages
197
and
208
. Bucknell University Archives (with special thanks to Bob Gaines):
Photos appear on pages
33
,
35
,
52
,
171
, and
200
. AP Photos: Photo appears on page
162
. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY: Photos appear on pages
6
and
218
. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to correct any errors or omissions brought to their attention in future editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deford, Frank.
The old ball game : how John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York
Giants created modern baseball / Frank Deford. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4627-5
1. New York Giants (Baseball team)—History. 2. McGraw, John Joseph,
1873-1934. 3. Mathewson, Christy, 1880–1925. 4. Baseball—
United States—History. I. Title.
GV875.N42D44 2005
796.357′64′097471—dc22    2004062313

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com

For Sterling Lord

There's only one Christy I know at all,
One Christy I ever saw.
He's the one that discovered the fadeaway ball
And he pitches for Muggsy McGraw.

—Ring Lardner

Although neither one of them ever seems to have mentioned it for posterity, John J. McGraw and Christopher Mathewson must surely have first encountered each other on the warm afternoon of Thursday, July 19, in the year 1900, at the Polo Grounds in the upper reaches of Manhattan on an occasion when, as was his wont, McGraw made an ass of himself.

Inasmuch as people at that time were more correct and less impatient than they would be a hundred years later, that summer of 1900 was taken as the last year of an old century rather than the first of a new one. For purposes of symbolism this was good, for it wouldn't be until two years later, in the genuinely new twentieth century, that McGraw and Mathewson would start to work together in New York, there to have such a profound effect upon their sport that they would raise it to a new eminence in the first city of the land, and then beyond, into Americana.

How odd it was, too, how much Mathewson and McGraw achieved together, for never were two men in sport so close to one another and yet so far apart in ilk and personality. Well, maybe that was why they were good for baseball, because they offered us both sides of the coin. Mathewson was golden, tall, and handsome, kind and educated, our beau ideal, the first all-American boy to emerge from the field of play, while McGraw was hardscrabble shanty Irish, a pugnacious little boss who would become the model for the classic American coach—a male version of the whore with a heart of gold—the tough, flinty so-and-so who was field-smart, a man's man his players came to love despite themselves. Every American could want to be Christy Mathewson; every American could admire John J. McGraw.

The handsome Christy Mathewson

Nevertheless, that midsummer's day at the Polo Grounds, when the two young men first saw each other, it was not a formal meeting. McGraw might not have even noticed Mathewson, who was what was then called a “debutante”—a raw rookie, just arrived in the National League only a week or so beforehand. Still only nineteen years old, the pitcher had enjoyed an absolutely spectacular tenure at Norfolk in the Virginia League. There, in barely half a season, he had won twenty games while losing only two. The Giants had paid the princely sum of fifteen hundred dollars to purchase young Mathewson, but his initial appearance two days previous, on Tuesday, July 17, had been an abject disaster. At Washington Park in Brooklyn, against the defending champion Superbas, he was sent in to relieve Ed Doheny who, according to one unforgiving newspaper account, “hardly had the strength to get the ball to the plate.” Well, to give the devil his due, it was estimated to be 110 degrees down on the diamond. Notwithstanding, the last straw for Doheny was when he allowed a Brooklyn runner to steal third “while he was collecting his thoughts and looking for a breeze.”