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  • The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathew-son, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball
  • Harry Jebsen Jr. (bio)
Frank Deford. The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathew-son, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005. 224 pp. Cloth, $24.00.

Frank Deford writes with a felicitous pen and with a charming approach to the game of baseball. He creates beautiful images of the game and in an almost melodramatic manner ties the lives of Muggsy (John McGraw) and Matty (Christy Mathewson) together.

His writing is peerless, to borrow another baseball nickname. When describing McGraw's penchant for gaining weight. Deford states that McGraw went "from being a beardless Katzenjammer Kid to a paunchy dead ringer for W. C. Fields" (p. 66). Throughout the book, Deford's delightful images spark the reader's mind if they are old enough to remember either the crazy Katzenjammers or the quaint, naughty, and off-beat humor of W. C. Fields's comedy. Perhaps the only visual image of the two friends that Deford evaded was that of Mutt and Jeff; but I may have just missed it.

Mathewson and McGraw, Deford asserts, were not natural friends: one calm and deliberate, one not; one a decade older than the other; one quietly self-assured and confident, one clearly not; one of traditional American Protestant stock, the other Irish; one a man of education and degrees, and one without an education but with a significant capacity and desire to learn. They never should have been friends or personal confidants, but they were. There clearly is a magnificent story involved in the relationship of perhaps baseball's greatest pitcher and its greatest manager.

They certainly were among the class of the period and stand among the tallest idols in the pantheon of baseball figures. But to be credited with the creation of modern baseball is an over-simplification that will not hold up. That story is far more complex and maybe even, dare it be said, not entirely focused in New York.

Granted, McGraw and Mathewson brought successful baseball back to Gotham. They rescued the game from the clutches of the Tammany Hall-based Andrew Freedman, restored the Giants to a dominant role in the National League, and together had a flourish that was attractive to the press. Attendance soared; when the old wooden Polo Grounds burned down, it was replaced with a modern steel structure, and the Giants were always competitive if not always dominant in the senior circuit under McGraw and with Matty on the mound. Their differing qualities attracted a metropolitan fan base for the Giants. [End Page 137]

Deford fits the two Hall of Fame members into the surging nature of New York in the age of ragtime. Mathewson appealed to the traditional, up-scale Anglo-Saxon element, while McGraw was attractive to the high-energy ethnic citizens who were pouring into the metropolis in the early twentieth century. McGraw's friends included Gentlemen Jim Corbett, who often worked out with the team and the high-profile George M. Cohan, both of whom were a part of the East coast gambling interests as well as baseball "junkies." McGraw himself enjoyed the company of gamblers and often sought an early ejection from games in order to get to the track. McGraw found the dastardly Hal Chase, who lived in the same building, to be a "charming sort" to whom he "took a real liking" (p. 178).

But in making the assertion that these two figures created modern baseball, Deford goes beyond facts and correct interpretation to shape his image of the two friends. In order to make McGraw more central to the creation of the early game of baseball, he credits the Baltimore Orioles, McGraw's original team, with the development of the strategy of having the pitcher cover first base on a ground ball to the right side of the infield. Clearly the St. Louis Browns were using this coverage in the early 1880s, as Captain Charles Comiskey, whom Deford loathes—"a dreadful human being" (p. 99)—forced Browns pitchers to cover the base or to be embarrassed...

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