The Old Ball Game (18 page)

Mathewson ad for Tuxedo cigarettes

Invariably, Matty was not just identified as a mere gentleman, but as a “Christian gentleman.” This was a time when the United States could fairly be called a part of Christendom, and what was known as “muscular Christianity” had gained a respectable foothold, especially midst the prep school and college establishment. No one represented that concept better than Matty. “I feel strongly that it is my duty to show youth the good, clean, honest values that I was taught by my mother,” he said. “That, really, is all I can do.”

He was even honored as one of the four famous muscular Christians that the sports bay in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan is dedicated to. The other three are from the Ivy League's trinity: Walter Camp of Yale, the godfather of football; Robert Wrenn of Harvard, an early U.S. tennis champion who was one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders; and Hobey Baker of Princeton, the first great American ice hockey player and an aviation hero of World War I, immortalized all the more in that he fell to his death in France. Significantly, too,
Matty is the only professional athlete who is celebrated at the cathedral for his sportsmanship, in stained-glass windows that portray such athletic Biblical figures as Esau, Samson, and David.

Matty honored his mother by not pitching on Sundays where it was legal, in Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. This is not to say he wasn't torn on the issue, even as the Sabbath Society zealously fought to deny New Yorkers the sacrilege of watching baseball on the Lord's Day. (The Dodgers tried to get around the statutes by not selling tickets, only asking for contributions, but the constabulary eventually ended that scam.) In 1907, as doubleheaders piled up, Mathewson told McGraw that he could call on him on a Sunday if it was absolutely necessary. It wasn't. But eventually Mathewson came to sympathize with the workingman, who often was able to attend games only on Sundays, and by 1917, when he was managing Cincinnati, he and McGraw broke the law to play a benefit game on Sunday at the Polo Grounds for the war cause. Times were a-changing. The judge not only dismissed the Sabbath Society's charge, but praised Matty and Muggsy for their patriotism.

But it was not only a different day because of the war. Mathewson had himself brought about a change in the way America looked at athletes. For all of McGraw's proselytizing about how bright baseball players really were, his own demeanor always made it difficult for society to heed him. Mathewson, however, was Exhibit A. He certainly was the prime model who encouraged other more educated young men to try and make a living at baseball. (Coincidentally, Mathewson was not only the first famous American professional athlete to be identified with college, but he actually gets credit for coining perhaps the most famous popular expression
about
college. In 1919, writing an article in the
New York Times
, when he referred to the “Fordham Flash,” Frankie Frisch, Mathewson wrote that Frisch “was taking a long hold on his club and the old college try at the ball.” Nobody, it seems, had ever used the term “old college try” before.)

By the time World War I ended, nearly a fourth of all major leaguers had at least attended college. It's certainly true that it was Babe Ruth's heroics that, foremost, saved baseball at this point after the Black Sox scandal, but it's also for sure that because baseball rosters had begun to represent a more genteel cross section of society, it was easier for the public to forgive an institution with a more respectable cadre that upstanding people could relate to. Had it still been McGraw and his immigrant muckers, who would have wanted to save it? Mathewson's image of sweetness and light might have been overdone, but that did serve, in the process of deifying him personally, to uplift his whole profession. “Christy Mathewson,” wrote Grantland Rice, the great sports troubadour, “is the only man I ever met who in spirit and inspiration was greater than his game.”

Benjamin Rader, a prominent sports historian, suggests that by becoming a new kind of hero, Mathewson and the sports idols that followed him played a beneficial part in taking America into the complex new century. “Athletes as public heroes served a compensatory cultural function,” he wrote. “They assisted the public in compensating for the passing of the traditional dream of success, the erosion of Victorian values and the feelings of individual powerlessness. As the society became more complicated and as success had to be won increasingly in bureaucracies, the need for heroes who leapt to fame and fortune outside of the system seemed to grow.”

Funnily enough, John McGraw, if only instinctively, probably was the first person to understand what sort of larger role Mathewson might play in the sport beyond his eminent value to him as a slabman.

Perhaps the greatest loss to television, to the utter visualization of sport at the expense of imagination, is the disappearance of the nickname. Gone, all gone. We're lucky now if a player is known by his number or his initials. That counts for originality.
Yo, Twelve. Yeah, M. J.
Oh, to be sure, there's the odd exception, but Willie Mays and Pete Rose were essentially the last baseball superstars with original sobriquets: the “Say-Hey Kid” and “Charlie Hustle.” Well, Brooks Robinson had a title: the “Human Vacuum Cleaner.” And pale as it was, at least “Hammerin”' Hank Aaron is something. But there's pretty slim pickins in the last half century after “Stan the Man,” the “Yankee Clipper,” and the “Splendid Splinter” retired.

Once Americans could see their heroes, there was no reason to embroider a name to further identify a player. Back when Muggsy and Matty played, though, most everybody was given some sort of nickname. Maybe it just related to his demeanor: “Turkey Mike.” “Bad Bill” Dahlen. “Dirty Jack” Doyle. “Laughing Larry” Doyle. Bugs Raymond. “Cocky” Eddie Collins. Or some idiosyncrasy:
“Shoeless Joe.” “Iron Man.” “Hooks.” Geography: the “Georgia Peach.” “Wahoo Sam” Crawford. “Gettysburg Eddie” Plank. Heritage: All those Chiefs and Dutches. “Harvard Eddie” Grant. The “Duke of Tralee” (Roger Bresnahan). “The Trojan” (Johnny Evers—he from Troy, New York). Some spoke to class: the “Peerless Leader.” “The Grey Eagle” (Tris Speaker). The “Big Train” (Walter Johnson). The “Sultan of Swat.” “Home Run” Baker. “Prince Hal” Chase. Some derived from the physical: Wee Willie. “Reds” galore. So too “Bigs.” And the “Dummys.” “Three-Fingered” Brown. “Handsome Harry” Howell. When Buck Herzog first came up to the Giants, he was assumed to be Jewish. He explained: “You've got me wrong, boys. I'm as Dutch as sauerkraut.” Soon enough, though, given his unfortunate proboscis, Herzog was called “Dick Nose” (if only amongst his fellows).

McGraw, of course, was celebrated as “the Little Napoleon,” which despite its redundancy he naturally adored. For a while when he was younger, he was called “Mickey Face.” For some reason, it appears that he accepted that, perhaps as a badge to his Irishness. But he recoiled at Muggsy, despised it with all the venom in his bile-filled body.

There are two accounts of where the name came from. One has it that there was a comic strip tramp named Muggsy in a Baltimore newspaper that reminded teammates of McGraw. The other is that an unsavory Baltimore ward boss was named Muggsy McGraw. When the smart aleck new
New Yorker
magazine profiled the mature Manager McGraw in 1925, it wrote: “He probably hates that nickname worse than any one thing in the world.” Of course, they entitled the piece “Mister Muggsy.”

As for Mathewson, early on he became known as “Big Six.” Given the wide usage of the proud title, it's surprising that no one then ever pinned down the provenance of the name. It did not, of course, have anything to do with his uniform number, inasmuch as players did not wear any numerals until long after Matty had retired. Some have suggested, though, that the origin
was almost as simple, that it was merely because Mathewson was such an overpowering six-footer-plus back when six feet was tall. Or maybe it came from a “peerless” automobile manufactured by the Matheson Motor Company that was colloquially referred to as “Big Six.”

The even more favored explanation is that a banjo-hitting batter-turned-sportswriter named Sam Newhall Crane, who in his finest early sportswriterese had termed Mathewson a “flame-thrower,” took it one step further and started calling him “Big Six” after a local horse-drawn volunteer fire department engine that could, it was said, outpump Niagara Falls. But why, pray, if Matty was a flamethrower, would you name him after an anti-flamethrower?

“Big Six” with his own board game

Then, in one obscure recollection, long after Mathewson was finished pitching, McGraw himself claimed that it was none other than he who had given Mathewson his esteemed cognomen. As he recalled, there was a Typographical Union Number 6 in New York, which won a big strike settlement, so that day in Cincinnati, when Muggsy was asked who was officiating, he piped up: “Let's put in Big Six.”

It's hard to make the connection, but then, to give the devil his due, McGraw was pretty good at naming things that stuck. As we know, he insulted the Athletics by calling them “White Elephants,” and they have that symbol to this day. Likewise, he's credited with tabbing the saloon in Havana “Sloppy Joe's,” and his regular usage of inserting Sammy Strang to bat in the clutch in 1905 gave us “pinch hitter.”

In '06, McGraw's Giants probably wouldn't have been any match for the Cubs even if Mathewson hadn't missed the first part of the season with diphtheria. Even so, he won twenty-two games, and New York won ninety-six, but even with that outstanding total, the Giants finished
twenty
games behind the Cubs, whose 116-36 record is still the best of the twentieth century (and beyond). At the end of the day, so good were the Cubs that it didn't even matter that McGraw gave one of those wins to Chicago with his forfeit, when he locked out the umpire he was mad at.

The Cubs won handily in 1907, too, piling up 107 victories. They were a marvelous fielding team, featuring the double play combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance (he the “Peerless Leader,” who also managed Chicago). At a time when poems were a staple of the sports pages and sportswriters were not afraid to use words like “gonfalon,” the most famous sports rhyme ever was written by Franklin P. Adams in the
Evening Mail
, immortalizing the six-four-three double play:

These are the saddest of possible words—
     Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Trio of Bear Cubs and fleeter than birds—
    Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Thoughtlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double,
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.

The Cubs also possessed one truly great pitcher, Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown, who was born, as you might imagine, in 1876 and was called “Three-Fingered” Brown because, when he was seven years old, he had stuck his hand in a corn shucker. He lost most of his index finger, and one other digit and his thumb were mangled, but professionally this turned out to be a blessing because his mutilated hand somehow helped him break off a curveball that Ty Cobb called “the most devastating pitch I ever faced.” It was certainly a match for Mathewson's fadeaway, and indeed, Three-Fingered was Matty's greatest rival. Why, in
This Side of Paradise
, F. Scott Fitzgerald's young Midwestern alter ego, Amory Blaine, “was interested in . . . whether Three-Fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie
[sic]
Mathewson.”

The last game Mathewson would pitch would be in 1916, when he agreed to return to the mound for a special engagement against Brown on Labor Day. In honor of this valedictory, both old-timers were presented with bouquets of American Beauty roses. Matty was thirty-six, Three-Fingered thirty-nine, and between them they gave up thirty-four hits and eighteen runs, but Mathewson (who made three hits himself) prevailed 10-8, for his 373rd victory.

In 1908, though, Matty was at the height of his powers, and Three-Fingered had a fabulous season, too: a 29-9 record with a 1.47 ERA. Mathewson, though, was even more magnificent. He was 37-11, 1.43; he completed thirty-four of forty-four starts,
throwing a dozen shutouts. In 391 innnings pitched, he struck out 285 men and walked only 42, barely one per nine innings. The Giants were improved at the bat this year, too, largely because Turkey Mike Donlin had returned after a hiatus in which he had devoted himself to traveling with his bride, Mabel Hite, a beautiful chanteuse. In 1908, though, Turkey Mike was on the wagon and so well behaved that McGraw even made him captain. He hit .334, drove in 106 runs, and kept the Giants in the pennant race. Not only did the Cubs fall back, but the Pirates also moved up in what turned out to be a three-team dogfight, as good a pennant race as ever there has been. The Giants drew 910,000 fans, a quarter of the league total, and a major league attendance record that lasted until 1920, when The Babe and the Yankees passed a million.