Matty, an American Hero: Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants

In the early 20th century, baseball players were viewed as rough, crude, vulgar and ignorant. Christy Mathewson; the Big Six or Matty as he was commonly called possessed none of those traits. College educated, with a strong moral compass and integrity respected by all. He is one of the greatest pitchers of all time; 373 career wins and four seasons with 30 or more wins. Playing most of his career in New York when the Giants were the city's number one team. With Matty on the mound, the Giants won 5 National League pennants and 1 World Series championship.

Through the end of the 19th century, baseball had a roughshod reputation: Uneducated and unrefined players drove many a respectable family to opt for a picnic instead. One man was the big force in countering that image: New York Giant righthander Christy Mathewson. The quintessential baseball hero and a first-year Hall of Famer, he is the subject of this biography by veteran baseball writer Ray Robinson. On the field, Mathewson won 373 games and lost only 188, and he pitched 79 shutouts. As Robinson emphasizes, Matty was the greatest control pitcher of his time, which seemed to be a by-product of his intelligence. In the World Series he was 5-5 but that should have been much better: His ERA was 0.97. Against the Philadelphia A's in the 1905 World Series, Matty pitched three complete-game shutouts, the best pitching performance to this day in the Fall Classic. Matty grew up in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, and at Bucknell University he achieved academic as well as athletic distinction. Even though he left after his junior year (as Robinson puts it, "he became Bucknell's most famous dropout"), he was seen as baseball's first college boy. Matty was so intent on leading a virtuous life that in addition to moderation in drinking and swearing, he refused to pitch on Sunday. (However, he changed his tune on the subject after his playing career, something I found out first from this book.) In the days when there was only one umpire on the field, an ump who had not gotten a clear view might defer to Matty for the correct call because Matty "had a widespread reputation for integrity and probity." If Matty was not at his best on a given day, Robinson observes, people would speculate that this checkers champion was staying up too late playing the then-popular board game, rather than what might be supposed in the case of modern athletes. Indeed, Mathewson as presented by Robinson is an authentic virtue-laden scholar athlete. Robinson gathered a lot of quotations, and he enlightens the reader on lesser-known matters such as Christy's days at Bucknell and his World War I experience that led to his premature death from tuberculosis. We even learn that the Giants traveled to Cuba and that Christy pitched against a pitcher nicknamed "the black Mathewson." Robinson captured the passion of Mathewson's World Series moments --including the heartbreaking defeat in the 1912 World Series. Some moments of Matty's pitching rivalry with Three Finger Brown are included, but after Mathewson beat Brown 1-0 in a 1905 game, it was one of baseball's jinxes that Brown beat him nine straight times (not mentioned by Robinson) while the Cubs were winning pennants. Setting that detail aside, there is something more about Mathewson the reader wants to know. Sure, an occasional failing was acknowledged, and some end-of-book tributes from writers and others were given. But inside the narrative I would have liked to see more concentrated focus on emotional content --

It is a historical anomaly that at the end of the nineteenth century the violent game of football was a sport for the privileged gentleman yet baseball was the game of the uneducated, profane and in essence the masses. Football was confined to the college campuses, which at that time, meant it was restricted to the wealthy. Baseball was a popular sport, yet the players were often little more than thugs. Nearly all of the players were from the lower classes, which meant they came from working class backgrounds such as the steel mills or coal mines. Professional baseball players were generally denigrated in society, at that time it was not an occupation that was looked upon as a stellar career. Christy Mathewson entered the major leagues from college, one of the first players who attended college before playing. He was one of the most intelligent men ever to play the game; he was capable of playing championship caliber checkers against several players simultaneously. Mathewson was also an excellent card player; he regularly accepted challenges from others as he moved from place to place. In his role as a gentleman baseball player, he did a great deal to transform the image of the baseball player from that of an uneducated brute to someone to be emulated. He served as a positive role model for children interested in pursuing a sports career and was idolized by the sports media of the time. Mathewson was also a very good and durable pitcher, his 373 career wins ranks him second all time behind Cy Young and Walter Johnson. In this book, Robinson captures Mathewson as he was, considered standoffish by some, yet a consummate professional on the mound. His relationship with his manager, the volatile John McGraw, was an unusual one as Mathewson, McGraw and their wives once shared an apartment. Given McGraw's temperament, this would truly be another example of "The Odd Couple." Robinson never apologizes for some of the negative comments made about Mathewson, merely pointing out that many of those instances can be explained by the context of the times. In general the country was uneducated with racial and personal slurs being part of daily speech. Babe and Rube were common nicknames of professional baseball players, being synonyms for naïve and ignorant. A deaf man was given the nickname "Dummy" and a Native American was usually called "Chief." Mathewson's time was also one of great transition in major league baseball, the American league was formed and considered inferior by the older National league. Players were very poorly paid, a consequence of the reserve clause which bound a player to a team and which allowed him to be traded against his will. Robinson points out that one of the reasons why the World Series was continued is because it was a significant financial windfall for the players. Groups of players also regularly barnstormed around the country and even overseas, in many cases to earn enough money to live. Mathewson was a charter membe