The Old Ball Game (26 page)

Cincinnati Reds Manager Christy Mathewson

Henry only grew worse, and on July 1 he died in Factoryville. There had been four Mathewson brothers. One had died as an infant, another before he was twenty. Now Henry was dead at thirty. Matty, the oldest, the indestructible, was the only one left.

America joined the war in 1917, and so baseball's prominent long affiliation with German America had to be modified. Charles Dillon Stengel, for example, had sometimes been known as Dutch; now he forever became strictly Casey, adopting the initials of his more benign birthplace, Kansas City. Players with such names as Hans or Heinie anglicized them. The Giants had an especially large contingent of German-Americans on the team, and since they also enjoyed a reputation for a fighting spirit, they had been nicknamed McGraw's Prussians. Obviously that didn't sit well as American boys were dying fighting the Hun.

Muggsy had accomplished an amazing turnaround, bringing the team up from the cellar to the pennant in only two seasons. So at the Polo Grounds, before the fourth game of the 1917 Series, the Giants marched out carrying the Allied flags, making a great to-do about fighting “the House of Hohenzollern.” For whatever it did for patriotism, though, it did not help against the White Sox, who gave McGraw and the Giants another beating in the World Series.

Captain Christy Mathewson and his wife, Jane, in 1918.

There was talk during the winter of canceling the 1918 season, but President Wilson wanted baseball to carry on, so eventually a compromise was reached, that the regular season would end at Labor Day. Players, however, were given no exemptions. Many left to work in war industries, in steel mills and shipyards; 255 others would enlist. One of them, Harvard Eddie Grant, would die, cut down in the Argonne Forest.

At thirty-seven years old, Mathewson was well above the draft age, but he did his part, selling war bonds. In April, as the Reds
worked their way back from spring training, he stood on a street corner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and gave this pitch: “Come on up, you folk, and let's start the game. Remember, Old Man Hindenburg's up to bat, and we've got two strikes and one ball against him. Haul out your loose change and help win the pennant in the greatest game ever played, and send that bunch of glass-armed bush leaguers in Berlin back to the bushes.”

Matty thought his Reds had a chance to win the National League, and they did finish third, after Chicago and New York, but it was a desultory season, with players being called up, and the stands all but empty. Even the Giants drew only 256,000. Mathewson had another problem, too. Almost from the day he took over the Reds in 1916, he had begun to suspect that his first baseman, Hal Chase, was fixing games.

In retrospect, it is amazing that Chase was still playing baseball. He had been under suspicion as early as 1908, his fourth season in the majors, and along the way he had approached numerous players to help him throw games. He was absolutely brazen. The
Sporting News
itself even wrote that other players would call out to Chase: “Well, Hal, what are the odds today?”

Fred Lieb, the baseball historian, always suspected that because Chase was allowed to continue his blatant behavior, that this encouraged the White Sox to fix the 1919 Series. Chase was basically and obviously amoral. He was also a magnificent fielder—some say, even now, the finest ever to play first base, better even than Keith Hernandez. Indeed, Mathewson's suspicions first grew when he saw Prince Hal botch some easy tosses when the pitcher covered first, ordinary flips that a fielder of his caliber could simply not mess up. Chase was also a pretty fair hitter. At .339, he led the National League in batting average in 1916, Mathewson's first year of managing in Cincinnati.

Personally, Chase was charming, seductive in every sense. It was said he was not above sweet-talking his own teammates' wives to sleep with him. He was handsome, although an illness in 1909 had
left his face pockmarked, which apparently made Chase even more disagreeable. He would befriend young players, sizing them up, so that he could then tempt the more impressionable ones with offers to help him throw games. Since he had so much practice at it, Chase was also a master at how he, in the vernacular, “laid down.” He would make marvelous plays afield and go for base hits when the game was not on the line, then make almost indistinguishable errors of omission when it counted. It took someone like Mathewson, watching Chase game after game, to see the pattern.

Still, it was late in the 1918 season before Mathewson finally felt confident enough to act. On August 6, at the Polo Grounds, Mathewson heard that Chase had approached a Giants pitcher named Pol Perritt, trying to convince him to throw the game. Mathewson confronted Chase, and after a terrible argument suspended him for “indifferent playing and insubordination.” Despite the fact that Chase was hitting .301, not a single player on the team came to his defense. Garry Herrmann, the Reds owner, supported Mathewson, who then diligently went about the task of obtaining affidavits from Chase's teammates, who testified to his cheating.

Mathewson in his WWI military uniform, c. 1918

Incredibly, it would be John McGraw, Mathewson's friend and the manager of the pitcher whom Chase had tried to corrupt, who would come to Chase's aid and effectively save him from expulsion from the game.

But that betrayal lay ahead. Now, Matty was going to war. After long, searching discussions with Jane, he decided that he could not fail to volunteer for his country. He accepted a commission as captain in the Chemical Warfare Service and stepped down as manager on August 27. Soon he was on a troopship bound for France to join what was called the Gas and Flame Division. Several other baseball players and officials had volunteered for the Chemical Warfare Service, including Ty Cobb, who, at the age of thirty-one, likewise was exempt from the draft.

Matty had always had problems with seasickness. This crossing was difficult, and on top of his
mal de mer
, he fell even more seriously ill, caught in a flu epidemic that ravaged the crowded ship. He landed, weak and still somewhat sick. It did not help, either, that the autumn weather was chilly and damp.

Ironically, too, the Germans were in the midst of failing with their last major offensive of the war. With thousands of American troops pouring into Europe, the hopelessness of the German situation was becoming obvious. Noble as Matty's spirit to volunteer had been, it really served no purpose.

Mathewson was posted first to Blois, then Tours, and then on to Hanlon Field at Chaumont, about 120 miles southeast of Paris. Hardly had he begun classes at Officers Training School, though, when his influenza grew worse and he had to be hospitalized for ten days. Finally released but obviously still somewhat debilitated, he was ready for his training.

The Germans were desperate now and using poison gas profligately on the battlefield. Mathewson's 28th Division suffered large numbers of gas-related injuries. It was Mathewson's job, after his own training was completed, to instruct troops in how to put on gas masks. The men would be sent into large rooms where gas was released. “We weren't fooling around with simulated death when we entered those gas chambers,” Ty Cobb remembered. “The stuff we turned loose was the McCoy.” All of the officers must have ingested at least some gas, because it was their duty to be the last to put on their masks.

And then, in one particular drill, there was something of a panic. “Men screamed to be let out when they got a sudden whiff of the sweet death in the air,” Cobb recalled. “They went crazy with fear, and in the fight to get out jammed up in a hopeless tangle.” Cobb himself had a cough for weeks and lungs full of liquid. He felt that only “Divine Providence” spared him. Mathewson, it seems, missed the hand signal to put on his mask and took in even more of the poison before he could finally snap on his mask and escape. “Ty, when we were in there, I got a good dose of the stuff,” he said. “I feel terrible.”

In fact, when the armistice was declared on November 11, Mathewson was back in the hospital. Then, before he was shipped back to the States in February, he had the duty to examine ammunition dumps in Flanders, where it is quite possible that residual pockets of gas may still have lingered.

He came home to Jane and Christy Jr. with a wheezing cough. Pasty white and with sweat pouring from his brow, he was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis.

Cobb went back to play for the Tigers. It was as if he'd never been away. He hit .384 to lead the majors in 1919. He could never forget that day of panic at the gas chamber, though. “I saw Christy Mathewson doomed to die,” he wrote. “The rider on the pale horse had passed his way.”

Because he had gone off to war, Matty had lost his manager's position at Cincinnati. Given the sudden reversal in the state of his health, he probably wouldn't have been up to the job's demands, anyhow. McGraw took him on as an assistant manager for the Giants, a job Mathewson accepted despite the fact that, of all people, Hal Chase was now a valued member of McGraw's team.

That January, while Matty was still in France, the toothless new president of the National League, an old retainer named John Heydler, who had once been an umpire, McGraw his bête noire, adjudicated Chase's case. The evidence against Chase was overwhelming. McGraw even testified himself that, yes, his pitcher, Pol Perritt, had told him that Chase had tried to get him to throw a game. Perritt's affidavit was introduced. So was Mathewson's. Cincinnati players testified against Chase. But Chase brought along three persuasive lawyers and, without Mathewson there to testify in person, Heydler buckled.

It did not help that, incredibly, McGraw said that he believed Prince Hal's protestations of innocence and wanted him to play
first base for the Giants. “Here I am, trying to prove the charges that Mathewson, McGraw's close friend, has made made against this man,” Heydler whined, “and McGraw is already offering him a job.” So Chase was merely found guilty of acting “in a foolish and careless manner,” McGraw promptly traded for him, and if Mathewson wanted the job with the Giants, he would have to swallow his pride and accept Chase as a colleague. Matty not only put on a good face, but he lied, telling everyone that he'd certainly never accused Chase of cheating. Those charges, he said, had been leveled only by his teammates.

Poor Matty. He compromised himself this one time, it seems, because McGraw was holding out the promise that he would retire in a few years and Mathewson would succeed him. In fact, McGraw would be almost at death's door before he finally took off his Giants uniform. Besides, like so many others, Muggsy— and Blanche, too—had been enchanted by Prince Hal, going back a decade when they were neighbors in the same apartment building. And, as always, McGraw was convinced that there wasn't a player on God's green earth that he couldn't rehabilitate.

But, of course, Chase was incorrigible. Chase was malevolent. He could not be shamed. Somehow, though, he and Mathewson managed to coexist for the whole year without ever talking to each other. One day at batting practice, Larry Doyle's bat flew out of his hands and hit Mathewson. In fact, he wasn't seriously injured, but the whole team rushed to Big Six's side. Except Chase; he did not move. And, sure enough, soon enough, McGraw began to suspect that Chase was throwing games. Yet even then he could not bring himself to confront him or banish him, and rather even than embarrass him, McGraw simply got rid of him by offering him such a small contract for 1920 that it wasn't worth Chase's while to come back from California. Soon Chase was trying to chat up players in the Pacific Coast League, so that he might resume the fixing business in those precincts.