The Old Ball Game

by Frank Deford

  But any cagey businessman could see that the world was tilting, that respectable women were starting to come out of their houses, and that the future of entertainment lay not with blood and sex but with a more broad-based family appeal. Why, even boxing had given up bare-knuckle fights and put gloves on the likes of John L. Sullivan, and when Teddy Roosevelt got into the White House and finished busting trusts and settling hostilities in the Far East, he called together representatives of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and all but ordered them to create new football rules that would prohibit the flower of the Ivy League from maiming one another for the amusement of carriage-trade crowds.

  Then, too, once the cocky Orioles had been knocked off their perch, it became more difficult for the National League to excuse their roughhouse brand. Baltimore’s reign essentially ended late in September of’97, when the Beaneaters came to town and took two out of three games. The series drew 57,000 cranks, with the final game packing in 25,375—what was surely the largest baseball crowd in history. Boston won 19–10, as the Baltimore Sun lamented in language even more florid than was customary in such an embroidered age: “Let us drop a tear and go on, and let it be a hot and scalding tear, for verily Boston is hot stuff, and her beans are smoking. Let her light her bonfires and regild her State House dome and send forth some modern Paul Revere to ride and spread the news.”

  So the Old Orioles had lost their control of the game. At the same time, popular entertainment was changing. A singer named Tony Pastor, famous for his renditions of such street hits as “The Strawberry Blonde” and “Lulu, The Beautiful Hebrew Girl,” had opened a theater uptown on Union Square in New York in 1885 that promised no blue material. A devout Catholic who dressed in an opera hat, with the kind of handlebar mustache that John McGraw so envied but could never grow, Pastor had created something that would be called vaudeville. It was an immediate hit. Soon, men named Albee and Keith took Pastor’s idea onto the road—circuits—seeding family fare throughout America, in all the same places where Muggsy McGraw and his disciples had played baseball with meanness and crudity before crowds of coarse inebriates.

  Keith’s wife, Mary Catherine, posted rules backstage that left no room for misinterpretation: “You are hereby warned that your act must be free from all vulgarity and suggestiveness in words, action and costume. . . . Such words as Liar, Slob, Son-of-a-Gun, Devil, Sucker, Damn and all other words unfit for the ears of ladies and children . . . are prohibited under fine of instant discharge.” And it worked. Vaudeville took off like a rocket while baseball plateaued, as players proudly held on to their old image of hard-drinking, women-chasing rogues.

  Eddie Cantor, the vaudeville star, recalled that when he was a boy and he did something mischievous, his grandmother would label him with the worst profession she could thing of: “Why, you, you ballplayer you.” And it wasn’t as if baseball itself wasn’t aware of its dubious reputation. The Spalding Guide of 1889 bemoaned: “Saloon and brothel. . . are the two greatest obstacles in the way of success of the majority of professional players.”

  Certainly, as Christy Mathewson finished up his studies at the local academy in Factoryville and began to prepare to matriculate at Bucknell, no one who knew the fine lad from that upstanding family of worthy American stock could expect that he would ever join the debased ranks of baseballists. Why, an infielder named Fred Tenney, who had graduated from Brown and come to the majors in 1894, was, for this, known as “the Soiled Collegian.” Walter Camp of Yale, who was sort of the godfather of football, had written thusly on the subject: “You don’t need your boy ’hired’ by anyone. If he plays, he plays as a gentleman, and not as a professional; he plays for victory, not for money; and whatever bruises he may have in the flesh, his heart is right, and he can look you in the eye, as a gentleman should.”

  But luckily for young Matty—and, although he would never admit it, luckily for the unregenerate Muggsy, too—a baseball writer from Cincinnati named Byron Bancroft Johnson, who was fat, hard-drinking, and loosely principled—exactly the sort of fellow you would never expect to champion gentility—decided to depart journalism in order to take over the operation of a minor circuit, the Western League. One day, spending time at the Ten-Minute Club on Vine Street in Cincinnati, Johnson had an idea.

  It was called the Ten-Minute Club because if you didn’t order a new drink every ten minutes, you had to leave. So here it was, at the Ten-Minute Club, that Ban Johnson ordered another whiskey and began to think seriously about decency.

  FOUR

  While McGraw was playing his last years at Baltimore—split by the season’s sojourn in St. Louis—Mathewson was going to college. This was a time when only about 6 percent of the 76 million Americans had graduated from high school. Indeed, in New York, children as young as twelve were allowed to work if they attended merely eighty days of school a year. Many boys didn’t bother with even that tacit minimum. They were everywhere—guttersnipes, the proper folk called them—trying to subsist as newsboys and street arabs. In such a society, a college man was someone invariably privileged and always special.

  Mathewson’s college tenure, however, was simply brilliant. We can understand better why he got so down on himself when he didn’t immediately prosper with the Giants in ’00, because he had enjoyed nothing but easy success in college. Indeed, from the minute Matty showed up at Bucknell in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and put on his blue freshman beanie in the fall of’98, he did everything, it seems, and all of it well. It was not just sports and his studies, where he earned such marks as 96 in analytic chemistry and German, 94 in Tacitus, and 93 in Horace. He played in the band, sang in the glee club, acted in the dramatic society, participated in the Latin Philosophical, wrote poetry, served on the Junior Ball Committee, was chosen as class historian, and (naturally) made the Leadership Society and was elected class president.

  Bucknell University Football Team, circa 1900.

  Christy in middle row, left, standing.

  Of course, he starred on the baseball team, but he also jumped center for the basketball varsity and was best known for his football exploits. In fact, Matty professed to enjoy football more than baseball. He was called “the infant phenomenon,” or “Rubber Leg,” playing fullback and kicking field goals—at a time when a field goal counted five points, almost as much as a touchdown. Apparently he had the same pinpoint control with his right leg on the gridiron as he did with his right arm on the diamond. After he kicked a forty-eight yarder from an acute angle against Army, Walter Camp himself gave Mathewson his benediction, declaring that he was “the greatest drop-kicker in intercollegiate competition.”

  Thus was Christy Mathewson already the beau ideal in the making, the first all-American boy—or, perhaps more accurately, he was the first flesh-and-blood all-American boy. The honor realistically belonged to a slightly older contemporary, Frank Merriwell of Fardale Academy and then Yale, who was the fictional creation of a hack writer named Gilbert Patten.

  For a sixty-dollar payday, Patten conjured up Merriwell in 1896 for the Tip Top Weekly—what was called a dime novel. Patten dreamed of being a serious author but was never able to pull that off, at least in some part because he could not manage to write sex with any facility. But Frank was chaste, so that was no problem. So, writing as Burt L. Standish (other Patten noms de plume included Stanton L. Burt, Harry Dangrefield, Julian St. Dare, and Wyoming Will), Patten created young Frank, putting him on the playing fields of Fardale. The author chose the name thusly: Frank, for earnestness and candor; Merry, for disposition; Well, for health and vitality. He envisioned his character as “a new style . . . more in touch with the times.” Specifically, Frank Merriwell would be the country’s first sports idol. “I saw the opportunity to feature all kinds of athletic sports, with baseball predominating,” he would write.

  Unfortunately for Patten, Merriwell was more of a success than he ever could have imagined. Like Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan were to become for their authors, Merriwell became an albatross to Pa
tten. He moved him up from the fictional Fardale to the real Yale; he dreamed up an ambidextrous younger brother; he put Frank in this sport and that one, brought in new villains and cliffs to hang from. But on and on went cheerful Frank, from one improbable success to another. Patten would churn out his stories for twenty years until 1916, when the nickelodeon finally put the dime novel out of business and poor Patten out of his misery. For most weeks, all that time, he would spend four days of every week creating a new Merriwell story. Then, relieved, he would spend two days unsuccessfully struggling with sexless adult fiction, finally resting from his labors on the seventh, only to start the process all over again the next week. Frank Merriwell sold 500 million copies before his demise (although he would be resurrected in comic strips, movies, and, as late as 1946–49, as an NBC radio hero).

  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.

  FIVE

  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.