The Old Ball Game (6 page)

Specifically, Frank Merriwell became famous for two things. First was his ability to bring home the bacon, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to pull the fat from the fire at the eleventh hour. Fictional he may have been, but he was a living proverb. Indeed, even for much of the first half of the twentieth century, to “pull a Merriwell” became an expression applied to any unlikely last-minute success. But just as important to Frank's image was his good sportsmanship. Victory was never achieved at the expense of honor. His good deeds were manifold, and those many athletic villains who practiced “muckerism,” which is what gamesmanship was called then, were sure to get bested by Frank in the last chapter. “He's a regular Frank Merriwell” was the highest accolade a young man could be handed.

Bucknell University Baseball Team, also circa 1900.
Chirsty in back row, second from right.

Christy Mathewson was a regular Frank Merriwell. Or, almost: Frank Merriwell was a regular Christy Mathewson. Anyway, both were decent, clean-cut, handsome college men, the ideals of what was known as “muscular Christianity.” (Teddy Roosevelt might have been lumped with Matty and Frank as the third member of this muscular Christian trinity.) The point was that young Christian men didn't have to be wimps. They won games, but they won them only in Jesus' image, playing by the rules. They were the original WWJD, Sports Division: What Would Jesus Do on the field of play?

At a time when muckerism, as particularly expounded by McGraw himself, was the baseball model, Mathewson was the antidote. American boys and their parents had read how Frank Merriwell could win fair and square in fiction. Now Matty would display those same qualities in real life. It was almost too much a coincidence, but the one failing Patten gave Merriwell to make him marginally human was, in fact, the one discernible weakness that Mathewson fell prey to: he loved to gamble. As one of Mathewson's teammates, Rube Marquard, said: “If you had a dollar in your pocket, Matty would never be satisfied until he got that dollar from you.”

Whereas that harsh bit of truth was generally unknown to the legion of Mathewson's worshipers, it's quite possible that many Merriwell anecdotes came, over time, to be attributed to Mathewson. There are tales that umpires would surreptitiously look to Matty on a close play, to get his opinion—a shake or nod
of the head—knowing that he would never call it dishonestly, even to benefit his own team. For example, it has been told in diamond scripture that one time when he slid home, he kicked up so much dust the umpire was blinded, so the trusting arbiter simply turned to Mathewson and asked him for the call. “He got me,” Mathewson replied straightaway, and only then did the relieved umpire cry, “Out!”

“Why would you admit that?” asked the bewildered catcher.

“Because I am a church elder.”

Indeed, there were so many he's-a-regular-Merriwell tales that grew up about Mathewson that, in exasperation, his wife would regularly try to modify the record, Saint Division, saying such things as, “Christy's no goody-goody” and “You really don't think I'd marry such a prude, do you?”

On the other hand, as we shall see, it seems as if Mathewson's word of honor really was, all by itself, what cost his Giants the pennant in 1908.

But if Frank Merriwell and Christy Mathewson diverged in one place, it was that only Christy took filthy lucre to exploit his talent. Most upstanding citizens agreed with Walter Camp and were leery of professional athletes. Jim Thorpe would have to give up his 1912 Olympic gold medals because he had played summer baseball for a few dollars. When Matty was still in college, though, President Roosevelt had not yet forced the National Collegiate Athletic Association into existence, and so Mathewson did nothing illegal when he pitched professionally summers while still playing on the Bucknell teams.

Indeed, in the the autumn of '99, a baseball scout named “Phenomenal John” Smith came to Philadelphia, where Mathewson was playing a football game against Penn, intent on offering the sophomore eighty dollars a month to pitch for Norfolk in the Virginia League the next summer. He met with Mathewson before the game, and Matty was set to accept what he considered to be a
most opulent offer. In the football game, however, he kicked two field goals, so impressing Phenomenal John that, for no rational reason, the scout upped the
baseball
bid to ninety dollars.

Already, the summer before, after his freshman year, Mathewson had plied his trade for a while in the New England League, with the team for Taunton, Massachusetts. This was a rather unremarkable interlude, except apparently it was here that Mathewson picked up his famous pitch, the fadeaway, while watching an old-timer mess around with it.

At first Mathewson just called it his “freak pitch.” It was thrown with the same grip as his regular curve—which Mathewson himself thought was “my very best [pitch], and a surprise for all the batters.” But what distinguished the fadeaway was that it broke in the opposite direction from a curve—in on right-handed batters, away from left-handers. It also seems to have dropped rather dramatically.

Mathewson threw it sort of inside out, so that his palm ended face-up after the ball was released, “twisting off [my] thumb with a peculiar snap of the wrist.” Mathewson realized early on that contorting his arm that way had the potential for great injury, so even after he mastered his freak pitch, he limited himself to spotting it only a few times a game. Sure enough, incredibly, despite all that McGraw used him, he virtually never came down with a sore arm.

When Mathewson first came up to the Giants that July of '00, he didn't really consider his freak pitch to be part of his repertoire. But when he was showing his stuff to George Davis, the player-manager, and Davis walloped a couple of Mathewson's regular curves, Matty trotted out the freak pitch. Twice Davis bit, swinging and missing. “That's a good one,” he hollered to the debutante. “It's a slow in-curve to a right-handed batter. A regular fallaway, or a fadeaway.” Davis encouraged the kid to work on the pitch, which Mathewson did, and once he learned to control it, which was so difficult because of “that peculiar snap of the
wrist,” the fadeaway became his signature. (Curiously, since most batters are right-handed, the pitch absolutely did
not
fade away from them. On the contrary, it ran in. But Davis was a switch-hitter, and he was obviously taking his cuts that day as a lefty against Mathewson, so he did see the ball trace off, which is why the fadeaway earned a somewhat contrary name.)

Happily, Mathewson's frame of mind, so battered by his own desultory experience with the dreadful Giants, improved when he went back to Bucknell after the '00 season. That was largely because it was then that he met Jane Stoughton. A Sunday school teacher who came from a prominently social Lewisburg family, Jane had been engaged to a fraternity brother of Mathewson's, but that romance had ended by the time she met the biggest man on campus. Soon Matty was courting her. His confidence, buoyed by love and by the acclaim for all his usual and sundry campus accomplishments, was such that he left Bucknell as a junior in March of oughty-one to go to spring training. He never went back to Bucknell to get his degree, although there is this, too: just as McGraw chose to return to Baltimore, his wife's hometown, to be buried, so would Mathewson be laid to rest in the place where first he came to fame, where first he met the love of his life.

From 1903 to 1953, major league baseball went through a half century when not a single team in either league moved. Rule changes were minute. While no American institution was more reliable than baseball in the first half of the twentieth century, this incredible period of sustained stability was in direct contrast to what had preceded it (or, for that matter, what would follow). In the early decades of professional baseball, not only did franchises routinely come and go, but so did whole leagues. Because most ballparks were relatively cheap wooden structures, often jerry-built jumbles of kindling constructed by the owner, not the municipality, teams were not tied to their city in any substantive way. The rules were also changed regularly and dramatically as the proprietors sought to find the most attractive game that balanced offense and defense.

In 1892, for example, the National League batting average was .245 and plummeting, so a pitching rubber was stationed in the ground in order to anchor the pitcher, and the distance from the rubbber to home plate was lengthened. At first it was
proposed that the pitcher be stationed exactly halfway between home and second. This would have made the pitching distance sixty-three feet, six inches, eight feet longer than the established distance at that time.

This, however, was deemed too radical, so one of the poobahs idly suggested that they just add five feet to the existing standard. So was begat the curious distance of sixty feet, plus six inches—which is nowadays assumed to be a perfect measure, ordained by God Himself. Anyway, even designed by imperfect man, it worked. Strikeouts were cut in half in 1893, and the league batting average soared to .280.

A few years later, just as Mathewson entered the majors, the pitchers were thrown a bone to even things up more, when it was decided that, before two strikes, foul balls must count as strikes. Home plate itself was changed to its current configuration—rectangle at the top, triangle at the bottom—and enlarged, so that, at seventeen inches across, it presented a target one inch wider than it had been. In a very real way, Mathewson came to play at exactly the right time for a pitcher, just as, two decades later, Babe Ruth would profit as a slugger when the spitball was outlawed and the balls themselves were juiced up. Baseball statistics are not quite as pure as the mandarins of the game would have you believe. The various eras are distinctly different from one another. The 1890s, without foul strikes, equates very nicely to the recent years, with steroids.

But at least as radical as the rules changes was what happened to the very structure of the game. First, after the 1899 season, the National League—which had been the only major league for some time—rid itself of three of its weakest sisters: Louisville, Washington, and Cleveland. A fourth franchise had to go, and clearly it could not be New York, even if the Giants had been at the bottom of the standings along with the artless Colonels, Senators, and Spiders. Instead, even though Baltimore had finished quite respectfully in fourth place and succeeded at the box
office, and was, too, barely removed from its legendary epoch, the Orioles got the death card.

The reason was that Baltimore, always a branch town, had sold out its franchise to Brooklyn ownership before the start of the '99 season. Such was syndicate baseball. The Bridegrooms, after finishing a dismal tenth in '98, then simply plucked Ned Hanlon from Baltimore as its new manager, plus snared three twenty-game winners as well as Kelley, Keeler, Jennings, and “Big Dan” McGann, a slugging first baseman. Renamed the Superbas, Brooklyn then promptly jumped nine positions to win the '99 pennant. Among other things, this positively infuriated Andrew Freedman, who didn't think Brooklyn should even be allowed in the league any longer because, when Brooklyn lost its status as a city and was folded into New York as a borough in 1898, this meant that New York had two teams, and National League rules stipulated only one per city. But nobody took Freedman's whining seriously, and he began to scheme for the ultimate in syndicate baseball, wherein
all
the teams in the league would be owned by one cartel. Unable to pull that off, he became even more penurious, so that the team young Christy Mathewson would soon join grew all the more bereft of talent and unloved by the populace.

On the other hand, given what scraps their Brooklyn owners had left them, the Orioles' fourth-place finish in '99 was extraordinary. Specifically, it was a spectacular achievement by the rookie twenty-six-year-old manager McGraw, whom Hanlon had tapped to succeed him. The Orioles actually gave the Superbas a run for their money right into August, even as McGraw's team was called The Leftovers, The Castoffs, or The Orphans. Tom Murphy, the groundskeeper, formed the name
MCGRAW
in white posies over by the Oriole bench, and Baltimore fans so took to McGraw's minions that the team actually made a slight profit in '99. Not only that, but such attractive scrappers were the Birds that they led the league in road attendance. But never mind.
Even though Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the nation, the syndicate folded the franchise so that the National League could be reduced to a more manageable eight clubs. So off went McGraw to St. Louis for the 1900 season, to pick up his ten thousand dollars in mad money and consider his long-term prospects.

And sure enough, soon enough, Ban Johnson came calling. He was ready to bring large eastern seaboard cities into his Western League, christen it the American League, and make it not only a big league challenge to the National, but decency's darling. Johnson's teams raided the established National League, and about seventy-five players jumped—or, rather, in the argot of the time, they “kangarooed out.” Cleverly, Johnson had his invading troops steer pretty clear of Pittsburgh. That was the smallest city in the National League, so by allowing the strength of the league to flower by the Monongahela, it diminished interest in the franchises in the larger cities. Johnson was a smart cookie. The Pirates dominated the National League until McGraw was able to build up the Giants.