Pitching in a Pinch or, Baseball from the Inside

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Introducing a reader to Christy Mathewson seems like a superfluous piece of writing and a waste of white paper. Schoolboys of the last ten years have been acquainted with the exact figures which have made up Matty’s pitching record before they had ever heard of George Washington, because George didn’t play in the same League.

Perfectly good rational and normal citizens once deserted a reception to the Governor of the State because Christy Mathewson was going to pitch against the Chicago club. If the committee on arrangements wanted to make the hour of the reception earlier, all right, but no one could be expected to miss seeing Matty in the box against Chance and his Cubs for the sake of greeting the Governor.

Besides being a national hero, Matty is one of the closest students of baseball that ever came into the Big League. By players, he has long been recognized as the greatest pitcher the game has produced. He has been pitching in the Big Leagues for eleven years and winning games right along.

His great pitching practically won the world’s championship for the Giants from the Philadelphia Athletics in 1905, and, six years later, he was responsible for one of the two victories turned in by New York pitchers in a world’s series again with the Athletics.

At certain periods in his baseball career, he has pitched almost every day after the rest of the staff had fallen down. When the Giants were making their determined fight for the championship in 1908, the season that the race was finally decided by a single game with the Cubs, he worked in nine out of the last fifteen games in an effort to save his club from defeat. And he won most of them. That has always been the beauty of his pitching—his ability to win.

Matty was born in Factoryville, Pa., thirty-one years ago, and, after going to Bucknell College, he began to play ball with the Norfolk club of the Virginia League, but was soon bought by the New York Giants, where he has remained ever since and is likely to stay for some time to come, if he can continue to make himself as welcome as he has been so far. He was only nineteen when he joined the club and was a headliner from the start. Always he has been a student and something of a writer, having done newspaper work from time to time during the big series. He has made a careful study of the Big League batters. He has kept a sort of baseball diary of his career, and, frequently, I have heard him relate unwritten chapters of baseball history filled with the thrilling incidents of his personal experience.

“Why don’t you write a real book of the Big Leaguers?” I asked him one day.

And he has done it. In this book he is telling the reader of the game as it is played in the Big Leagues. As a college man, he is able to put his impressions of the Big Leagues on paper graphically. It’s as good as his pitching and some exciting things have happened in the Big Leagues, stories that never found their way into the newspapers. Matty has told them....