The first book I ever borrowed from the North Side Branch of the Kellogg Public Library when I was a boy in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson. None of the prose has stayed with me and the chances are the library branch has been replaced by a tavern but I still remember where the book stood on the shelves.
An eternity later in New York I came to know John Wheeler, founder of the North American Newspaper Alliance, and learned from him that he had been Matty’s silent collaborator. Jack Wheeler may have been the first ghost writer in the newspaper business. As a baseball reporter for the New York Herald, he performed this spectral service for Mathewson during the 1911 World Series between the New York Giants of John McGraw and Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. Unlike some spooks of later vintage, Wheeler was conscientious enough to consult Matty before putting the pitcher’s comments on paper.
Matty won the first game but in the second, Philadelphia’s young third baseman, John Franklin Baker, tagged Rube Marquard for a two-run homer that won the game, 3–1. Next morning the syndicated piece under Mathewson’s by-line explained that McGraw had ordered his pitchers to keep the ball down around Baker’s knees but Marquard had got a pitch up and out over the plate where Baker could reach it.
This public censure of the $11,000 Beauty by one of his own sent shock waves through the land, and the sensation grew in the third game when, with one out in the ninth and Matty protecting a 1–0 lead, Baker whacked a home run off the great man himself and won instant immortality as Home Run Baker. The Athletics won in the eleventh, 3–2.
It was a scarifying experience that would have soured a lesser man on the literary life but the $500 Matty got from the Herald eased his embarrassment. That winter he and Wheeler prepared a series on “Inside Baseball” for the McClure Syndicate and later these articles were published as Pitching in a Pinch.
The Herald had a book reviewer named James Ford, a gentleman of stately dignity. Encountering him in a corridor, Wheeler said: “Excuse me, Mr. Ford. Have you read Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson?”
“No,” Ford said. “Have you?”
“Yes, I liked it.”
“Write me a review,” the old gentleman said. The book received what is commonly referred to as critical applause.
Until recent years, connoisseurs of baseball trivia enjoyed asking: “What pair of brothers has the highest total of pitching victories in the records?” Since 1974 the answer has been Jim and Gaylord Perry, but until then it was Henry and Christy Mathewson. Henry was employed by the Giants in 1906 and 1907. In those seasons he worked a total of eleven innings in three games, winning none. The total of games won by the family is 373.
Over seventeen years, Christy worked in 635 games. The first year he joined the Giants, 1900, he was with them only briefly and did not win. In his last year, when McGraw, who loved him, traded him to Cincinnati so he could manage the Reds, he won only four games. In thirteen of the other fifteen seasons, he won twenty or more games a year and four times he won thirty or better. He was one of five players chosen for the Hall of Fame in the first election.
Contemporary literature gives the impression that there was a quality of majesty about the man. Certainly he was regarded as a deity by his fans, who were by no means confined to New York. The late Lloyd Lewis, later celebrated as editor, historian, Lincoln scholar and man-about-Chicago, was one of them during his undergraduate years at Swarthmore. “My whole adolescence,” Lewis wrote, “had been devoted, so far as baseball went—and it went a long way to an Indiana farmboy—to the Giants and their kingly pitcher, ‘Big Six,’ the great, the incomparable Christy Mathewson.”
When Lewis was managing editor of the Chicago Daily News, he contributed a piece to a series his sports editor, John Carmichael, was running under the heading, My Greatest Day in Baseball. He told of cutting classes October 24, 1911, to attend the fourth game of the World Series, which Matty was able to start because a week of rain had intervened after his painful encounter with Home Run Baker. Lewis found a seat in right field as close as he could get to the Giants’ bench and he shivered with pleasure when the Giants came strutting across the field “clad in dangerous black.”
Warming up, Matty “held his head high, and his eye with slow, lordly contempt swept the Athletics as they warmed up across the field.” Unawed, the A’s flogged the great one for three runs in the fourth inning and another in the fifth. “Right in front of me,” Lewis wrote, “an unthinkable thing happened. Hooks Wiltse, the southpaw, began warming up for the Giants. Was Matty knocked out? Another figure rose from the bull pen. Rube Marquard. He didn’t warm up, he only strolled up and down, a great sardonic grin on his face.”
Lewis was numb when he made his way out of the park after Philadelphia’s 4–2 victory. All about him he heard jeers for his hero. “At the end of a dolorous mile I stopped at a saloon. I had never had a drink. Now was the time.
“‘Beer,’ I said, in the voice of Poe’s raven.
“‘You ain’t twenty-one,’ the bartender rasped. Then he took a second look, saw that I was a hundred, and splashed a great stein in front of me. I took one swallow. It was bitter, just as bitter as everything else in the world. I laid down a nickel and walked out.”
Three years later came Lewis’s great day. He saw the Boston Braves humble the Athletics, 7–1, and start a four-game sweep of the World Series.
“Hoarse and happy, I came out of Shibe Park, spent hours hunting that same saloon, but I couldn’t find it. It had to be that one. What I wanted to do was to walk in all alone—find nobody else in there—order two beers, and when the bartender looked inquiringly at the extra one, say to him in a condescending voice, ‘Oh, that? That’s for Mathewson.’”
RED SMITH