The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball (review)

If you're dismayed about today's professional athletes and out-of-control fans, you might want to look at baseball as it was played one hundred years ago. This is the focus of sports journalist and novelist Frank Deford in The Old Ball Game, a baseball history that follows the careers of Christy Mathewson, the star pitcher, and John McGraw, the crafty, pugnacious manager, who guided the New York Giants to their first World Series title in 1905. Deford theorizes that the two Hall-of-Famers, though oddly paired, helped to lift baseball to national-pastime status years before the Babe Ruth-led Yankees won their first World Series, and at a time when horse racing, boxing and even cricket were grabbing the national sports headlines.

Figure 1.

McGraw, a star player for the Orioles in the 1890s, joined the Giants in 1902 as player-manager, and over the next thirty years, his teams made nine World Series appearances, taking home three titles, including two (1921 and 1922) against the upstart Yankees. A smart tactician, he managed his teams to 2,840 victories and helped develop the hit-and-run and "Baltimore chop," among many other offensive strategies. He was sharp when it came to evaluating talent; his players responded to his fiery leadership, and he was an ambassador for the game, taking players on off-season tours around the world, once playing a game near the Egyptian pyramids.

Yet McGraw was symptomatic of baseball's problems at the turn of the century. A notorious gambler, he managed during an era when it was common for players to bet on baseball, sometimes on their own team. According to Deford, gambling and "fixes" were rampant in baseball even before the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal. It may surprise readers that fans were more rambunctious then than today, inclined to attack players, managers and umpires by heaving rocks and "spears" fashioned out of umbrella tips. McGraw often was the center of the melees, provoking outbreaks with the "vilest tongue" in the game. He brawled with opposing managers and spiked umpires to express dissatisfaction with their calls. As the game struggled for respectability, "Muggsy" McGraw was the face of baseball.

After a rocky rookie season, Mathewson considered becoming a Presbyterian minister and fulfilling his mother's dream. It was to the benefit of baseball that he persisted and found his way to the Giants. In Deford's view, Mathewson was the cure for baseball's ills. One of the first athletes to come to the pros from college—Bucknell (only 6 percent of Americans at that time graduated from high school)—he was a right-hander feared for his fadeaway pitch that broke in to right-handed batters. Over a seventeen-year career, most of it during the so-called dead-ball era, he won 373 games, earning at least twenty games in thirteen straight seasons, including an astonishing thirty-seven victories (and a 1.43 ERA) in 1908. In his most impressive feat, "Matty" pitched three complete game shutouts in the 1905 Series, holding the Philadelphia A's to fourteen hits and one walk in leading his team to the title.

During a corrupt era, Mathewson was renowned for his honesty and sportsmanship. The 1908 World Series offers a prime example. Already leading the series 3-2, the Giants were poised to take the deciding game. With the game tied 1-1 in the home half of the ninth inning, Giants shortstop Al Bridwell singled in the apparent winning run. But an alert Cubs player noticed that the Giant on first base, Fred Merkle, had failed to advance to second as required by the rules. Once the ball was retrieved and the infielder stepped on second, the inning ended without a score. The Giants protested the call, and an appeal was made, but, based...