Even though professional baseball has been eclipsed in popularity by football and ceded its cultural capital to basketball, the sport has managed to retain its longstanding position as the thinking person’s game—a deliberate, unflashy pastime beloved by stat-heads and amateur historians. In the age of the iPhone, baseball continues to resemble a nineteenth-century novel: sprawling, anecdote-jammed, and rather tedious at times. George F. Will, the conservative columnist and long-suffering fan of the hapless Chicago Cubs, sums up the sport’s cerebral nature in his 1990 book, “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball”:
These lines wouldn’t have seemed out of place in “Pitching in a Pinch: Baseball from the Inside,” a book written in 1912—four years after Will’s beloved Cubs last won the World Series—by Christy Mathewson, the Hall of Fame pitcher who popularized the idea of baseball as an intellectual endeavor. In his book, Mathewson asserted, “To be a successful pitcher in the Big Leagues, a man must have the head and the arm.” Sportswriters have echoed him continuously over the past century.
Before Mathewson broke into the majors with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball was widely thought of as a degenerate game. In the late nineteenth century, big-league rosters were populated by the uncouth sons of farmers, coal miners, and factory workers. Even though the game elevated the players financially, at least temporarily, their social status was another matter. Many hotels and restaurants refused to admit visiting baseball players, fearful that their rowdy, drunken behavior would drive away high-society clients. Connie Mack, the imperial manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, recalled that when he started as a player, in the eighteen-eighties, “the game was thought, by solid, respectable people, to be only one degree above grand larceny, arson and mayhem, and those who engaged in it were beneath the notice of decent society.”
By the time Mathewson came up as a rookie, perceptions of the game were slowly changing. As the historian Philip Seib writes in his book “The Player: Christy Mathewson, Baseball, and the American Century,” nearly twenty-two per cent of big-league rookies between 1901–10 had attended college—a figure that increased to twenty-eight per cent in the following decade. At the same time, the American and National Leagues made concerted efforts to curtail disorderly behavior at ballparks, making it more appealing for families and well-to-do fans to attend games. As a result, attendance doubled in the opening decade of the twentieth century.
Mathewson personified baseball’s gradual shift from a degenerate to a respectable, even wholesome, game. A strapping right-hander from Factoryville, Pennsylvania, he had served as class president at Bucknell University, and was also the second vice-president of the American Checkers Association. He was a pious Christian, and abstained from pitching in Sunday games. Legend has it that umpires often consulted with him on disputed calls. He was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, educated, tough, well spoken, and, most important, the dominant pitcher in the National League over his sixteen-year career. In a deliberate efforts to position baseball as the national game at the turn of the twentieth century, the major leagues eagerly upheld Mathewson as the sport’s consummate player and citizen.
Literature was one of the chief means by which Mathewson promulgated his belief that baseball required equal parts brawn and brains. “Pitching in a Pinch,” which was recently reissued by Penguin Classics, is his most celebrated work, and for good reason. Mathewson called attention to the inner workings of the sport—the strategies and signals that teams developed to outmaneuver their opponents: bunts, stolen bases, defensive shifts. These proved particularly crucial during the dead-ball era in which Mathewson pitched, when deep fences and soft baseballs made game-altering home runs rare and pitchers’ duels the norm. A theme that Mathewson returns to throughout is the pinch—a pivotal, pressure-filled moment when the contest hangs in the balance. “It is in a pinch that the pitcher shows whether or not he is a Big Leaguer,” Mathewson writes. “He must have something besides curves then. He needs a head, and he has to use it.”
An even more entertaining distillation of Mathewson’s philosophy can be found in the series of young-adult novels that he wrote with the New York Herald writer John Wheeler, from 1910-17. Mathewson’s unparalleled fame—Wheeler remarked that schoolboys across the country were “acquainted with the exact figures which have made up Matty’s pitching record before they had ever heard of George Washington”—helped them find a large audience. Long since out of print, these novels sought to convince young readers and parents alike that baseball was an edifying pursuit that fostered character and intellect.
In Mathewson’s 1914 novel, “Pitcher Pollock,” Tom Pollock, a farm boy, moves to the city of Amesville, Ohio, to attend high school. Mr. Cummings, the owner of the department store where Tom works after school, notices his baseball skills and teaches Tom how to mix up his pitches to fool batters. During one of their practice sessions, Tom declares that he needs a break. When Mr. Cummings asks if Tom’s arm feels sore, Tom replies, “No, sir, it’s my head. I never knew before that a pitcher did so much pitching with his head!” Tom develops into the town’s star pitcher, so much so that a former athlete, Mr. George, asks Tom’s coach, Bat Talbot, about the possibility of Tom trying out for a professional club. When Bat declares that Tom is too smart to play baseball for a living, Mr. George says:>
Such passages seem designed to reassure skeptical parents that contemporary players are worthy of their kids’ adulation. Mathewson was determined, in these books, to present baseball as a game perfectly suited for bright, upright men—men like Mathewson. Or, as a character states in his final novel, “Second Base Sloan,” “You can be a professional ball player now and be a gentleman, too.”
Perhaps the most radical idea that Mathewson advanced in these books—especially in his début novel, “Won in the Ninth”—is that uneducated players soon would no longer be able to compete with their cerebral peers. For Mathewson, the rising percentage of college-educated players entering the big leagues was irreversible, and dimwitted free swingers and fireballers would shortly go the way of the gloveless catcher. Of course, this scholarly revolution never came to pass in the majors—in 2012, only 4.3 per cent of big-league players had earned a four-year college degree—but Mathewson nonetheless helped change the perception of the game. His writings advanced the idea that baseball players aren’t empty vessels in the field, operating primarily through instinct and raw talent. They are analytical thinkers who must be able to execute and amend strategies on the fly in order to outsmart their competitors.Contemporaries of Mathewson frequently said things that could have been lifted directly from his books. There are several examples in “The Glory of Their Times,” Lawrence S. Ritter’s seminal book of baseball oral histories. Mathewson’s longtime teammate Fred Snodgrass, who attended St. Vincent’s College and eventually became the mayor of Oxnard, California, proclaimed, “Players in my day played baseball with their brains as much as their brawn. They were intelligent, smart ballplayers. Why, you had to be! You didn’t stay in the Big Leagues very long in those days unless you used your head every second of every game.”
Even players who never attended college bought into the idea of baseball as a thinking person’s game. Sam Crawford, the eccentric Hall of Fame outfielder who turned professional upon graduating high school in 1898, hailed his contemporaries as more tactical and quick-witted than the lumbering sluggers who emerged after Babe Ruth’s extraordinary power surge transformed the game: >
Babe Ruth seems the antithesis of Christy Mathewson—an uneducated, unmannered galoot whose voracious appetites and towering home runs shepherded in the power game that Crawford lamented. But Ruth himself was an acolyte of Mathewson’s philosophy, in word if not necessarily in deed. In 1920, Ruth published a young-adult novel of his own, “The Home-Run King: Or How Pep Pindar Won His Title,” that extolled the virtues of education, clean living, and inside baseball. It reads like a lost volume from Mathewson’s Y.A. series, with one key difference. While Mathewson’s books lauded industrious characters who resembled the author, Ruth’s novel urged readers not to follow the example of the boorish Yankees slugger, who by the time it was published had surpassed Mathewson as the sport’s top icon.
The tension between Mathewson and Ruth—between the brainy strategist and the brawny slugger, the upright gentleman and the coarse rogue—remains nearly a century later. Despite Mathewson’s prediction that naturally gifted players “were no match for the scientific brainy players of inside baseball which had developed in the college,” many of the game’s stars, from Mickey Mantle to Reggie Jackson to Nolan Ryan, are remembered more for their Ruthian ability to overpower opponents. All the same, Mathewson’s framing of baseball as a thinking person’s game endures.
Luke Epplin’s work has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, n+1, and The Paris Review Daily. Follow him on Twitter at @lukeepplin.
Photograph by Matt Slocum/AP.
