The mysterious Mr. Mathewson

Was the Hall of Fame hurler hiding a secret?

Christy Mathewson might have been baseball’s first folk hero. Tall, handsome, college-educated, a bit of an author, he also happened to be greatest pitcher of his time and someone respected in all walks of life — something you couldn’t say about most major league baseball players in the early 1900’s. He was also perhaps the biggest find in my new baseball book, “Diamond Duels.” Read on and see if you agree.

Mathewson was so well-respected that the New York Times hired him to cover baseball’s signal event - The World Series. It just so happened that the Series he ended up covering was the 1919 World Series between the Chicago “Black Sox” and the Cincinnati Reds. There was a good reason the Chicago team was dubbed the “Black Sox.” They fixed that Series and tried to lose on purpose. And ultimately did.

Yet in his dispatches to the Times, while they did address persistent talk of a fix, tossed off those rumors as if they were generated by a bunch of old ladies. From what Mathewson wrote, he didn’t take it seriously. He knew better.

“The rumors and mutterings about the honesty of the series are ridiculous to me,” he wrote. “It seems that there are some irrefutable arguments against the possibility of any arrangement being made which would conflict with the natural outcome.”

Which is fine and dandy. Baseball was his life, his profession, he’d earned an extraordinary reputation in the game and out of it, what would he be risking if he told the truth? What WAS the truth? Mathewson not only sat in the press box for every Series game right next to journalist Hugh Fullerton, the sportswriter who broke the story of the fixed World Series the following summer, he roomed with him. That wasn’t all.

Mathewson also KEPT A SCORECARD to mark down questionable plays, then the two men would compare scorecards after the game. That was never mentioned in his New York Times reports. In the film “Eight Men Out,” filmmaker John Sayles played that role as the writer Ring Lardner while journalist Studs Turkel played the part of Fullerton. But in real life, it was Christy Mathewson who was Fullerton’s expert witness.

There’s more. While I knew of Mathewson’s “journalism” beforehand, in re-reading some of his pieces, he, at times, hinted that something wasn’t right, but a fix? Never.

“There was too much betting on this series for the good of baseball, and disgruntled gamblers can start disagreeable rumors, “ he wrote in the Times. “The odds in this past series would have reflected it if there had been any truth in the reports...Baseball is honest and will stay honest in spite of the abuse it has taken from time to time.”

“In the first place,” Mathewson continued, “there is the future of a player in a series of this sort to figure on, and there would be too many men to fix to do it successfully. There is no one man on a team, no matter who he is, who can throw a game...

“No pitcher could guarantee to toss a game. As soon as he started to go bad, he would be ousted to the shower. Even the fans know enough about baseball to holler “Take him out!” as soon as a twirler begins to display signs of weakness…

“In the first place,” he added, “it would cost too much. The difference between winning and losing in the last series meant a difference of approximately $2,000 per man. In addition to this any one of them would be risking his whole future in baseball. Once found out, no player could work in the big league again….”

He was right on the last part. The eight players implicated in the Series fix — the Eight Men Out — were indeed banned for life by Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, even though a Chicago jury declared them “not guilty.”

There was one more sticking point. A major one. One I’d never read anywhere else. In researching “Diamond Duels,” I happened on a YouTube program (excerpted below) on the wonderful baseball book by Lawrence Ritter called “The Glory Of Their Times,” where Ritter tracked down all these nearly forgotten ballplayers from the game’s nascent days. Apparently, filmmakers got ahold of Ritter’s actual audiotapes and the first one, an interview with Mathewson’s long-time roommate Richard “Rube” Marquard, about knocked me over. Listen…

“He was a wonderful fella, wonderful, wonderful,” you hear Marquard say. “And he loved to gamble. If you had a dollar in your pocket, he never would be satisfied until he got that dollar from you. He always carried a thousand dollars with him because he played craps, poker, anything at all. You could win that thousand dollars if you were lucky with that one dollar. He would stand downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, wait for the ballplayers after they got through breakfast before they had to go out to the ballpark and he’d have a pair of dice in one hand and a deck of cards in his pocket. He’d say “Let’s go for a little while.” I’d seen him lose seven, eight hundred in one night.”

We’re talking Turn of The Century here, 1901 to 1914 where $8,000 translates to roughly $29,000 in today’s money. That’s in one night. It’s a 154-game season. Understanding that, doesn’t it make you look at that World Series coverage differently? Remember that Mathewson was sharing a hotel room with Fullerton at the Cincinnati hotel for the Series opener and knew that Fullerton put out a telegram before the Series began that read: “ADVISE ALL NOT TO BET ON THIS SERIES. UGLY RUMORS AFLOAT…”

So Mathewson KNEW something was going on. Why he chose not to share all he knew with the New York Times’ readers, we’ll never know. But it’s a sure bet that Christy Mathewson knew a lot more than he let on.

(You can read the whole story in a detailed chapter in “Diamond Duels.”)

Author John Nogowski will be at Books A Million tomorrow afternoon, 2 p.m. to 4 signing copies of “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out.” Come on by and say hello!

Here’s the full YouTube program on “The Glory Of Their Times”