 "Certainly a Hero, and Even a Paragon of Virtue?" | 2009-02-19 |
| - Reviewed By taxdawg |
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 -- Mathewson's personality, baseball friendships, family life, etc. The Cubs-Giants rivalry could have been given greater scope. But I acknowledge these things are more difficult in writing about old timers, with witnesses dead and limited information at hand. Bottom line: "Matty" is a good studious read for baseball fans with an interest in his era.
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| "The life of Christy Mathewson, a man who did a great deal to change public perceptions of baseball players" | 2007-09-25 |
| - Reviewed By (cashbacher@yahoo.com) from Marion, Iowa United States(cashbacher@yahoo.com) |
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 member of baseball's hall of fame and it is unfortunate that he did not live long enough to be there in person. His health failed him very quickly after he retired from baseball, there is some evidence that the tuberculosis that took his life was brought on by his being gassed during World War I. While he had his faults, compared to those around him, they were few and far between. It has been said that Base Ruth did the most to help make modern baseball what it is today. I agree with that, but also firmly believe that Christy Mathewson occupies second place on that list. His approach to the game and the example he set in life did a great deal to elevate professional baseball players in the mind of the public. His life was an interesting and productive one, you can honor his memory be reading this book and learning all about him.
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 "A Serviceable, Readable Biography, at Best" | 2005-06-19 |
| - Reviewed By Historian from Washington, D.C., United States |
Ray Robinson is a sports journalist and editor, and this book is very much in the genre of many other conventional sports biographies. It is a good, serviceable biography; but it is far from great. In it, we learn about one of the earliest stars of major league baseball. Christy Mathewson had been born in 1880, attended Bucknell University and gained fame there as both a football and baseball player. He signed with the New York Giants and played sixteen seasons with them; arguably the most dominant pitcher in major league baseball during his time in the Majors. While with the Giants, Mathewson won 20 games thirteen times and 30 games four times. During that same period, he won at least 20 games twelve consecutive years (1903-1914). A power pitcher, Mathewson had the most wins in Giant franchise history (372), and had more than 2,500 strikeouts. Perhaps his most dominant performance came in the 1905 World Series when he pitched a record three shutouts in six days against the Philadelphia Athletics, leading the Giants to the championship.
Robinson does a credible job telling the story of Mathewson's remarkable career. He expends considerable effort narrating the dramatic events of his various pitching performances. He also delves into the story of Mathewson's close relationship with his Giants manager, the legendary John McGraw, who is credited with working effectively with a sensitive and talented player to make him more dominant than he might have been otherwise. Robinson also explores the role Mathewson plays in helping to remake the image of major league baseball from one of rowdy hooliganism into one of the "national pastime." Mathewson served as a model of clean living when the sport was known for its hard-living, hard-drinking players. He became a role model for young boys, and MLB exploited his lifestyle to remake its image. He enthusiastically aided this process, and even wrote a series of boy's books advocating a moral, strenuous lifestyle.
Of course, Mathewson served as the perfect example of "clean living" for MLB because of his dominance on the mound. Accordingly, in 1936 he joined four other MLB legends--Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, and Walter Johnson, none of whom exemplified "clean living"--as the first class of baseball players to be inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. It was a posthumous induction because Mathewson had died in 1925, at age 45, of tuberculosis.
Ray Robinson has written a solid, readable biography of Matty. I give it three stars because it fails to go beyond the basics of what we already know about him, and has no references or even a bibliography with other works to read on the subject. |
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| "Wonderful but not memorable" | 1998-07-19 |
| - Reviewed By Anonymous |
| Ray Robinson does a fine job depicting one of baseball's greatest pitchers from Christy's grand beginnings to his unfortunate plight in the end. The book gives a fair amount of detail about the game's first national idol but lacks punch because of the mostly serene nature of "BIG 6's" life. To the extent that the book is kind of fluffy for its depiction of a man who is nearly perfect-save for incidences like his punching a vendor during a melee-it is almost Rockyesque in that one cannot help but wish they were a personal friend of Christy.It is currently the best I've read on the perfector of the fadeaway. |
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| "Please don't just fadeaway..." | 1997-07-23 |
| - Reviewed By Anonymous |
| This is the best effort by Ray Robinson to date. The book starts off slowly but eventually picks up steam. Robinson effectively captures the era but really does not give you an awful lot more. Christy Mathewson was one of the best pitchers ever in my opinion (based on my research). I just wish that Ray Robinson could have confirmed it with the decisiveness one would come to expect from a seasoned author. Instead, I was left to wonder why certain facts were omitted and why he did not do more to make Matty an American Hero. A few more efforts like this and Christy Mathewson and others of his era will emulate his trademark pitch...Fadeaway! Anthony DeMedeiros, Toronto, Ontario |
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