The Old Ball Game (17 page)

Only one more Giant did the crowd call for. And finally here he came, McGraw emerging to address the multitude. As befits a Napoleon, his speech, as it often was when he was neither at the bar nor upon the field of play, was courtly. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Muggsy proclaimed solemnly, “I appreciate the great victory as well as you. I thank you for your patronage and hope to see you all next spring.”

So he would. But who would have ever imagined that it would never again be the same for Matty and Muggsy as it was on this one most glorious of all Baking Days.

By 1912 the
Literary Digest
would write: “The name of Christy Mathewson . . . is known to about as many people as that of any man in the United States except President Taft, Colonel Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan.” Inasmuch as Roosevelt had been president before Taft and Bryan had run for the office three times, that shows what kind of popular company the pitcher was in. Not only that, but for all his fame, Matty's personal reputation remained impeccable. Ray Robinson, Mathewson's biographer, writes: “It is a safe prediction that no sports figure will ever again approach the hold that Matty once had on America in the early days of the new twentieth century.”

In a sense, Mathewson had it both ways. The public thought he was faultless, while those who knew him thought Matty was wonderfully human. Donald Honig, the sports historian, wrote: “He was the first truly national baseball figure who captured the country's admiration and hero worship by combining all the elements of baseball, religion and American culture. . . . In a broadly 'religious sense,' he epitomized humanity as it was created in the
Garden of Eden. He lived and played in a ‘garden paradise,' a pure specimen of the ideal ballplayer and created being.” Not surprisingly, Honig felt that Mathewson was such a paragon that he lifted the whole sport of “baseball's pure, idyllic status” to a higher level.

Yet if Mathewson was somewhat distant from most of his fellow ballplayers, they liked him a great deal. On his own terms, Mathewson was a regular guy. How else could he get along so well with McGraw? In the term of that time, he was no “prig.” Said Laughing Larry Doyle: “We were a rough, tough lot in those days. All except Matty. But he was no namby-pamby. He'd gamble, play cards, curse now and then and take a drink now and then. But he was always quiet and had a lot of dignity. I remember how fans would constantly rush up to him and pester him with questions. He hated it, but he was always courteous. I never saw a man who could shake off those bugs so slick without hurting their feelings.”

By the same token, Mathewson would pull down the shades in his sleeping car so that he would be protected from the view of fans who came out to the station specifically to catch a glimpse of him. He drew a firm line in these matters. “I owe everything I have to the fans when I'm out there on the mound,” he declared, “but I owe the fans nothing and they owe me nothing when I'm not pitching.”

When the city of New York gave its first baseball parade in honor of the 1905 champions the next June 12, Mathewson seems to have smiled down almost beatifically upon the worshipers who lined the great route that went from Union Square to city hall. He was placed in the only white automobile—with McGraw and Turkey Mike Donlin—in the cavalcade that included all the Giants (plus those old reliables DeWolf Hopper and Gentleman Jim Corbett). He was well recovered from his spring's bout with diphtheria by now, and he greeted his fans jauntily, “his arm flung with careful carelessness over the back of the automobile.”

“Turkey Mike” Donlin sporting his Giants World's Champions jersey

As the
Times
reported, “Big Six” was the cynosure. “‘Hooray for Matty,' yelled a dirty little street arab.

“‘Who is that they are cheering?' asked a man who was caught in the crowd.

“‘Aw, doncher know Matty?' asked the boy in tones full of disgust.”

On the mound, Mathewson would brush back batters and occasionally even argue with umpires. Never, though, was there any trash-talking to the hitters he faced; he left that to McGraw. “Repartee is not my line,” Matty said. But neither did he take any guff from Muggsy. There's a story told by Jimmy McAleer, a contemporary manager of the St. Louis Browns, about how McGraw would let Mathewson position his outfielders—a responsibility he denied all his other pitchers. In a key game, Muggsy suddenly
decided to regain that power. He signaled to the outfielders to shift their spacing. They followed his command. Mathewson glared at McGraw, then turned around and tried to reposition the outfielders as he desired them. The poor outfielders, in McGraw's thrall, wouldn't budge. Mathewson glowered at McGraw, then simply reared back and struck out the side, not allowing anyone to hit a ball to McGraw's outfield. Muggsy got the point. He didn't want Mathewson just firing for strikeouts. He immediately resumed his old practice of letting Matty position his outfielders his way.

It didn't hurt Mathewson's image that he was also exceptionally handsome. His countenance was friendly and kind and touched with sympathy. He parted his wavy brown hair in the middle and filled out a suit nicely. Altogether, he was the exemplar of the Gibson Man, that fresh-faced, well-groomed, broad-shouldered, quintessentially turn-of-the-century American male. Who knows how many young men stopped wearing mustaches because Matty was clean-shaven? Women would send him mash notes (which Jane would politely answer). One contemporary summed up Mathewson this way: “He talks like a Harvard graduate, looks like an actor, acts like a businessman and impresses you as an all-around gentleman.”

He read seriously and regularly, taking such works as those by Victor Hugo, William James, and Charles Lamb on the road with him. Horticulture interested him. He played golf in the low seventies and was superb at cards. Heywood Broun, the journalist, was Matty's regular partner at bridge and whist. He was also a ruthless poker player and accomplished at chess. Mathewson's best game, though, was checkers. At one point he was elected second vice president of the American Checkers Association. Mathewson would take on all comers, playing up to half a dozen games simultaneously. He could even play blindfolded, because he had numbered the board in his own mind and needed to be told only where the checkers were. Regularly, whenever he would lose two or three games on the mound, some critic would write
that Mathewson was wasting his concentration on checkers. McGraw, though, would never have any of that. On the contrary, he took great pride in that a baseball player could be so good at a game of the mind. Muggsy would even often take Mathewson over to the Lambs Club to, in effect, show him off beating everyone at checkers.

If Matty had any physical defect, it was his unusually high voice. (One thinks of Jack Nicklaus or Mike Tyson, who also have voices that don't seem deep enough for their big, athletic bodies.) So a few of his detractors did call him “Sis.” He was also known as “Old Gumboots” for his slightly knock-kneed gait. But that was about as critical as anybody could get of Christy Mathewson. Well, Damon Runyon thought he was a bit much when Matty told him: “I think any man who cheats on his wife would betray his country.”

The comparison with the fictional Frank Merriwell was a common one. In fact, so closely was Matty identified with that make-believe idol that Edward Stratemeyer, a children's books producer who would also develop the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew thrillers, took advantage of Mathewson's hero status to create a character named “Baseball Joe.” Stratemeyer had no shame; Baseball Joe was almost indecently drawn from Mathewson. Writing under the pseudonym Lester Chadwick, Stratemeyer wrote at least fourteen Baseball Joe books.

Our hero, Joe Matson, resided in the bucolic town of Riverside, where he lived an exemplary life; indeed, art followed life so closely that Momsey wanted him to be a minister. But Joe was just too good at baseball. From prep school at Excelsior Hall, Joe proceeded to Yale (just like Merriwell), and then, in
On the Giants
, he went on to play in New York for Manager McRae (hmm). It was a busy time for Baseball Joe, as he knocked out a kidnapper with an iceball and then saved his chaste girlfriend Mabel by hurling a stone at a leopard that was menacing her. (Never mind how the great jungle cat got to Riverside.) Then came the real
good news. “The Giants, Sis!” Joe hollered, opening a letter from Manager McRae. “The class of the National League. I'm getting right to the top of the ladder. I'm going to play with the first team in the biggest city in the most famous grounds in the United States!”

Whether or not Mathewson thought he was being ripped off, he then got into the game himself. Working with a writer named John Wheeler, Matty began turning out children's novels. Wheeler always maintained that he really only edited Mathewson's work. Anyway, Mathewson was given full credit, thusly:

By CHRISTY MATHEWSON (“Matty”)

These books were pretty juvenile, written for a somewhat younger crowd than the Baseball Joe series. They bear such titles as
Pitcher Pollock, Catcher Craig, First Baseman Faulkner.
You get the idea. Tom Pollock, for example, is a bashful, redheaded orphan with a faithful dog named Star, who lives alone in Amesville, Ohio (pop. 25,000), where he works in a hardware store and “in high school, was a person of prominence.” Tom certainly does not have a girlfriend because “pretty young ladies were things he had little to do with.” Whew. But, of course, Tom wins the big game against Petersburg with the same guile as Matty.

“Arm getting tired?” asks the coach.

“No, sir, it's my head. I never knew before that a pitcher did so much pitching with his head.”

“Bully work, Pollock!”

So, however much Wheeler might have contributed, Mathewson did use his books to justify his own career and air his beliefs. In
Second Baseman Sloan
, for example, the hero is assured that “you can be a baseball player and a gentleman, too.”

Matty also wrote his own memoir,
Pitching in a Pinch
, which was a fairly good seller; it even had a special Boy Scout edition. (“Pinch” at that time was something of a synonym for “crisis.” McGraw pretty much invented the position and the term “pinch hitter” by regularly using a reserve named Sammy Strang in that
capacity.) Touching all the bases, Mathewson also was credited with coauthoring a Broadway play in 1913 with one Rida Johnson Young. It was entitled
The Girl and the Pennant.
The plot concerns a young woman who inherits her father's baseball club, and then falls in love with the pitcher who wins the big game. It was, however, something less than a hit, closing after twenty performances.

At that time it was not unusual for baseball players to work in vaudeville in the off-season. After all, professional athletes and entertainers were held in the same dubious regard. So it was that after the 1910 season, Matty and his catcher, Chief Meyers, performed for seventeen weeks in a sketch written by a sportswriter, Bozeman Bulger, that was called “Curves, 1910.” At a time when Mathewson was probably the highest-paid player in the game, earning $10,000 a season, he made far more in vaudeville, cashing in at $1,000 a week. But as much as Matty liked money, he was too shy on stage—remember: “Repartee is not my line”—and so he did not return to vaudeville in subsequent seasons. Matty did, however, perform in several one-reel films, with such titles as
Breaking into the Big Leagues, The Umpire
, and
Love and Baseball

He also became pretty much of a match for Dan Patch in the endorsement field. He lent his name to razors, sweaters, a parlor baseball game, Tuxedo pipe tobacco (“Tuxedo gets to me in a natural, pleasant way”), and Coca-Cola (Matty's “proof of its wholesomeness”). Mathewson also was called upon to publicly assure Americans that he was going to buy more stocks after the market took something of a tumble, and he started his own insurance agency, but he drew the line at licensing a “drinking and dining place” to open under the name of The Christy Mathewson.

That made his mother happy. She had reluctantly come to accept the fact that her eldest wasn't going to become a preacher, but she had concluded that Matty did indeed have a ministry of sorts. “His work has brought him before the multitude in a kindly manner; his example is a cleanly one,” Minerva Mathewson said. “He reaches the masses of the people in his own way, and he must give them something through his character.”