Free The Old Ball Game by Frank Deford Page B

audience. But major league baseball was a staple, even if the coverage was often captious and dismissive, and usually written in so rococo a style that, looking back, the critic Jonathan Yardley observed: “The sports pages seemed to be a bad dream by Sir Walter Scott.”
    The newspaper custom bothered to identify the players only by their last names. By the same token, the writers themselves were almost never given bylines. (The most famous was Bat Masterson, the old gunslinger, who had decamped to New York earlier in ’02, having hung up his six-shooters to become both a deputy U.S. marshal, as appointed by Teddy Roosevelt, and asports columnist with the
Morning Telegram
. Masterson’s sports specialty was boxing, though.)
    In the event, as soon as McGraw came to town, the Giants were accorded much greater and more enthusiastic coverage. After all, McGraw was, simply, news. Mathewson, as we shall see, was not so much news as he was a reliable feature, like the weather or the comic strips. He could do no wrong. As newspapers began to use players’ first names, many of them, even as commonplace as “Jack,” say, or “Bill,” would be referred to, like that, in quotation marks. Mathewson’s never was so adorned. It was almost as if “Matty” was a title. Here, for example, is a newspaper photo caption of the Giants’ 1913 starters: “Tesreau, Matty, Marquard and Demaree.” And when Matty won, as he usually did, this was proof again that some good things you could count on—even in dog-eat-dog Noo Yawk. If Matty lost, it was an aberration that must be explained, invariably chalked up to bum luck or poor hitting or fielding by his ungrateful teammates. But somehow, Matty wasn’t really news in the conventional sense. He was just Matty.
    It was the custom at that time for major league teams to employ many of their off days picking up extra money playing local sandlot nines, and so it was that when McGraw first took over the Giants and sent Mathewson to the pitcher’s box it was, of all things, against the Orange Athletic Club, over in New Jersey. That was July 22. Matty gave up a run to the amateurs in the very first inning, too, and while it is unclear how long McGraw used him, the Giants eventually prevailed 3–2, and McGraw was satisfied enough to give Matty a start two days later in Brooklyn. That was the real beginning of their beautiful friendship, as Mathewson shut out the home team 2–0 on a five-hitter. The
Sun
even proclaimed that “it was the most perplexing pitching snag the Brooklynites have struck this season.” Not only that, but now the
World
lauded the erstwhile sluggish Giants as “McGraw’s hustlers.”
    However, as nice as any victory and the team’s shiny new image was, McGraw had already written off 1902. He spent muchof the balance of the season away from the team, scouting prospects and trade bait for 1903. The team managed to win only forty-eight games, finishing fifty-three and a half games behind the Pirates. Mathewson led the staff with fourteen victories, and although he lost seventeen games, he pitched eight shutouts and posted an earned run average of 2.11. On his off days, closely monitoring Iron Man McGinnity when he pitched, Matty even picked up a much better change-up. It would be another thirteen years before Mathewson would win less than twenty games or lose more games than he won in a season. Anyway, he was going home to Pennsylvania with hopes of convincing Jane to become his wife.
    As for McGraw, he was especially pleased that, at the end of the season, John Brush, “the Hoosier Wanamaker,” unloaded his controlling interest in the Cincinnati Reds and bought the Giants from Freedman. Brush was a semi-invalid who walked with a cane, suffering as he was from rheumatism and some disease of the nervous system (that possibly had been caused by syphilis). He was not the easiest of men,