The Old Ball Game (11 page)

He was just turned seventeen years old when he left school, packed his valise, and took off on the journey down to Olean. He would find his way back to education, but never again did he return to stay in the only hometown he had ever known. Only he would never let himself forget the ghastly way he fought and lived as a child. He would not let those hard memories die. When he became successful, Muggsy always had a dog in his childless home, and every dog he owned—most of them Boston bull terriers—he would name “Truxton.” And every morning, he would sit down with his dog and partake of the same breakfast: orange juice, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. He would feed his dog a little bit of bacon, and then this is the refrain John J. McGraw would scream out: “It's Truxton against the world!”

The Mathewsons were of Scottish descent—Mattesons, originally—arriving in Rhode Island way back in the seventeenth century. Matty's grandfather moved the family to Factoryville, Pennsylvania, in 1847, where he constructed a log cabin for his family. Factoryville, near Scranton, is also, by the by, almost directly due south of Truxton—not even two hours' time now down the present U.S. Interstate 81. The town was perhaps half-again Truxton's size, with six or seven hundred souls, when Christopher Mathewson came into this world at the family house on August 12, 1880. He was named for a childless uncle, who paid
Matty's father a thousand dollars for the honor—the first instance, so far as we know, of naming rights being paid in baseball.

As for the name Factoryville, it is altogether misleading and was indeed detested by its rural residents. The place, you see, was hardly some smoky factory town. Instead, it was named for a cotton mill that failed early on. In point of fact, Factoryville was a bucolic place, green and altogether country, unsoiled by industry or by the mean anthracite fields that lay only a few miles south.

Mathewson's father, Gilbert, had, like McGraw's father, served in the Federal Army but, unlike the Irish immigrant, he had signed on willingly for the cause of union. Some years later he married Minerva Capwell—she from a family of means—and so they had a swell house in a valley as Mr. Mathewson practiced gentleman farming. A babbling brook flowed through the property. There was an apple orchard and farm animals, and little Christy learned to throw by chucking stones at blackbirds, sparrows, and squirrels. He would even attribute his fabulous control to what he learned, flinging at wildlife. As for his general athletic ability, that may have come primarily from his mother's side. Minerva was known as “Nervy” for having had the guts, as a kid, to break a giant of a mean, stubborn horse.

Christy was the first born. Another son, Cyril, came along two years later, but he died in infancy. This seems to be the only sadness that the happy Mathewson family had to endure while Christy was growing up, but it was quickly overcome by the arrival of other healthy children, all arriving precisely at two-year intervals: Christine in '84, Henry in '86, Jane in '88, and the baby Nicholas in '90. The Mathewsons were neat and organized. Christy picked up the trombone and played it in the town band. He was, of course, an excellent student and gave no trouble whatsoever at Keystone Academy, a local Baptist prep school founded by his own grandmother.

Christy's mother dreamed that her eldest son would find the calling and become a Baptist preacher. Here, Minerva Mathewson
explained, is how she raised him: “I was always particular about regular hours of sleep and plenty of plain, wholesome food, good milk, fresh air. And the Golden Rule.”

Early on, though, “Husk,” as he was called, was renowned in Factoryville for his pitching. As young as fourteen, strong but a bit knock-kneed, he was pulling in a dollar a game pitching, against much older opponents, for the Factoryville nine. The first time he was chosen to pitch for the town team was “the proudest day of my life,” especially since he won his own game with a big hit. He batted cross-handed then, which came naturally, he decided, since he hoed the garden that way. Soon, although he was nowhere near as adept as McGraw at selling his talents, he was picking up another dollar pitching for Mill City, seven miles away. He was so good that on one occasion, when his mother said he couldn't pitch because he hadn't finished hoeing the family potato patch, his teammates came over, and, rather like Tom Sawyer's buddies whitewashing the fence, they finished working the field for him so that Matty could start against Honesdale.

Everything just seemed to flow so naturally for Christy Mathewson. When he was seventeen, walking around Scranton, the big city, staring at the sights, he dropped by a YMCA game. One of the teams was short a pitcher, and someone spotted Matty in the stands, eating peanuts. He was called down, “leaving quite three cents worth of peanuts” behind, put on the only uniform available, which was much too large for him, but (of course) he won the game, striking out fifteen. By the end of that summer he was making twenty dollars a month, plus his board, pitching semipro ball up at Honesdale. “This seemed like a princely sum,” Mathewson said in recollection, “and I began to speak of J. P. Morgan and me.” Soon he put his mind to it and stopped batting cross-handed. And then there was Bucknell and field goals and the class presidency and the Giants and Manager
McGraw and Jane. No one ever worked any harder, but it all seemed so effortless, so obviously a matter of destiny.

The first professional game that John McGraw played in, at Olean, on May 18, 1890, he fielded the first ball hit to him at third and threw it away. He made seven more errors before the game mercifully concluded. He lasted five more games before Olean let him go, but somehow McGraw found a smaller town and a lower classification—Wellsville in the Western New York League—and there, although playing infrequently, he managed to take the field at every position but catcher and, wielding what was called a “wagon tongue,” he batted a handsome .365.

McGraw, during his brief stint with Olean

From Wellsville he caught on with a barnstorming team that played all over Cuba that winter in hideously bright yellow uniforms. A kid who had never been anyplace more exotic than Syracuse, McGraw found that he loved the travel, loved the adventure. He had never cared much for learning before, but now that he was out of Truxton, out on his own, he was drenched in curiosity. He adored Cuba, and thereafter he would regularly return. Indeed, McGraw is given credit for naming the joint in Havana so identified with Ernest Hemingway. As the story has it, McGraw would tease the owner, José Abeal, about his balloonlike sleeves, which would, McGraw groused, get in the way, “slopping up the place.” Hence: Sloppy Joe's.

In 1912, on one of his many visits to Havana, he discovered daiquiris at the famous La Floridita Bar, and so familiar a patron was he that the proprietor named another rum drink after him, calling it the “Jota Jota”—using the two Js in McGraw's initials. Apparently it remained on the bar menu at La Floridita for more than another half century, until Fidel Castro, that knowledgeable baseball aficionado, found out what the Js stood for and demanded that any such drink named for a Yanqui ballplayer be expunged.

In 1890, though, the seventeen-year-old McGraw didn't drink. Maybe he had lost his virginity in a Havana whorehouse. He sure as hell hadn't in Olean or Wellsville. He never did smoke. “You'll find cigarette stubs on the guideposts to baseball oblivion,” he once declared. Never in his life could he even tolerate a woman who smoked. But back then, all he wanted was the chance to play ball, and luckily for him, when the pickup team he was with came back to the States, it played an exhibition game in Florida against the big league club from Cleveland and McGraw got three hits. Reports of the cheeky little scuffler got out, and he went to Iowa for seventy-five dollars a month to play for the Cedar Rapids Canaries. He hit a respectable, if not spectacular, .285
there, attracting the attention of a Baltimore scout who was looking for players for manager Bill Barnie.

“You can tell Barnie I'm just about as good as they come,” McGraw declared, and sure enough he was invited to move up to the Orioles. Muggsy had managed to go from signing a contract in Truxton when he was still sixteen years old to making the big leagues in only sixteen months, when he was yet just eighteen.

As quickly as he took to Baltimore and thought of it as home, though, McGraw soon began spending much of his off-season back in New York state. During his brief, dispiriting sojourn at Olean, he had met a young Franciscan priest, Father Joseph F. Dolan, who was on the faculty at nearby Allegany College (which would become St. Bonaventure). Following the 1892 season, McGraw began a correspondence with Father Dolan, and eventually they struck a deal: if McGraw would help coach the college's baseball team during the winter (using the basement of one of the little school's three buildings), he would be provided room and board and be allowed to take courses for free.

He signed up for English grammar and composition, history, and mathematics, and became a devoted student who eventually made the honor roll. Indeed, so well did the arrangement work that not only did McGraw return to college the next winter, but he brought Hughie Jennings along with him. This was the winter when McGraw taught Jennings not to shy away from inside pitches. It was the start of something even more profound for Jennings, too, for while he was no more schooled than McGraw—having grown up in a poor mining family in Pittston, Pennsylvania, not far from Mathewson's hometown—Jennings continued with his education to the point where he eventually gained a law degree.

This made McGraw tremendously proud—perhaps especially because he never earned enough credits for his own degree. Nonetheless, although it is impossible to know how much
the four winters spent at college taught him, they clearly gave him a grounding in the culture and a confidence in society that he otherwise would never have enjoyed. He became more secure, able to comfortably counter the stereotype of the time of the dumb and drunken Mick . . . and/or the dumb and drunken ballplayer. Perhaps just as important, McGraw never showed the resentment to college-boy players that others of his background did. It seems almost impossible that he could have ever become close to Mathewson had he not himself also spent some time, seriously, at higher education. Just as Blanche McGraw felt so sure that Jane Mathewson—who had attended a coordinate female institution with Bucknell—must be looking down her nose at her, so surely did McGraw sometimes feel diminished in certain company. But he had been to college, he had studied the likes of Latin, literature, geometry, and history— and in his speech and his references, he came across as the educated man. And he truly was, even if he also remained coarse and bellicose all his life (although, most generously, Matty said only that McGraw's “oratory would make a Billingsgate fishwife sore”).

Nothing infuriated Muggsy more than when others put down ballplayers as truant dopes. It is instructive that, when he wrote his memoirs, out of the blue, the
very
first subject he chose to discuss was education. He began his book by explaining that he has always sought college boys because such a type “tries to find his faults” while “the unschooled fellow usually tries to hide his.”

Invariably, whenever McGraw was asked to assess the demands of baseball, he paid as much attention to the requirements of the mind as of the body. The Reverend Christian Reisier of Grace Methodist Episcopal Church on West 104th Street always gave an annual baseball sermon, which would be attended by some of the Protestant Giants or Yankees. In 1913, before the Giants played the A's in the World Series, the Reverend Mr. Reisier took to the
pulpit the subject of “Who Will Win?” Specifically, he cited Mathewson as “the finest illustration of the well-pressured man,” adding the innocent canard that young Matty had been introduced to the game by a Methodist minister.

Naturally, the papist McGraw could not be expected to worship in such a heathen venue, but he did accept the minister's invitation to write to the parishioners about the value of the great game. Here was his summary of the sport he loved: “Naturally, I think baseball is the most admirable pastime in the world . . . a keen combination of wit, intelligence and muscle. . . . It develops the mind, establishes discipline and gives to those who take part in it sound bodies, clear heads and a better sense of life.” To Muggsy, baseball was never just sport. It was important to him that he credited it as an uplifting experience.

His own college education concluded after the winter of'95, though, because after Baltimore won the pennant again in '96, he rounded up some of his Oriole buddies and off they went on a grand tour of Europe. Along with Keeler, Jennings, and Kelley, McGraw also invited the team's most erudite member, Arlie Pond, a young pitcher who was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins (indeed, he would soon enough desert baseball to become an army surgeon, serving for many years in the Philippines). The five Orioles steamed to Liverpool, where, to his dismay, McGraw overslept on the Sunday after their arrival so that he missed mass for the first time in many Sundays. But, notwithstanding this spiritual lapse, he led the troupe on, to London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris.