Customer Reviews

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

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John McGraw and Christy Mathewson became two of baseball's most recognizable personalities with the arrival of the 20th century. McGraw made his name initially as a third baseman with the scrappy Baltimore Orioles in the 1890's. Mathewson was one of a very few college players, and found himself being tried as a first baseman along with pitching for the Giants when McGraw was brought to New York to lead the Giants for the next thirty years. Author Frank Deford manages to weave together these two diverse personalities as each left their imprint on the game during their short lives. McGraw died at the relatively young age of 60, although his bouts with the bottle made him appear much older than he was. Matty died at the youthful age of 45 due to tuberculosis, probably the result of breathing poisonous gas during a drill among soldiers while in France during World War I. The information provided on the old Baltimore Orioles can be found in numerous other books, most notably for me, Fred Lieb's history on the Baltimore Orioles as well as the information on Mathewson in other books. However, I feel Frank Deford does a good job in tying together the lives of these two giants of the game who became great friends as well. For all his crustiness, combativeness, and profane mouth, McGraw, who experienced tragedy as a young boy by seeing his mother and several siblings die of diptheria, had a sentimental side to him. He hung three pictures in his office of his favorite players (Christy Mathewson, Ross Youngs, and Mel Ott). The last sentence is not included in the book. Following his playing career Mathewson became manager of the Cincinnati Reds. He suspended one of his players, Hal Chase, because he believed him to be involved in fixing ball games. When Matty returned from France McGraw offered him a job as a coach on the Giants, only to find Hal Chase now a member of the team. McGraw had difficulty adjusting to the times as he bemoaned the modern (at that time) player, while the stature of his old Oriole teammates grew with the advancing years. You can find a lot of the information on these two baseball legends in other individual biographies, but this book will bring these two giants and close friends together in one well done (if you will) dual biography.

`The Old Ball Game' serves as a fine introduction to its subject, which is John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, the New York Giants, and to a much lesser extent their whole era of baseball. There is no new or groundbreaking material here for the fan that is already familiar with the subject, but for them it can still serve as a baseball valentine celebrating these heroes and their times. While the book stops far short of its sub title's claim - that McGraw, Mathewson, and the Giants created modern baseball, it does nicely illustrate their importance in the continuing evolution of the game.
A note on Deford's writing style is necessary. I heard him speaking about this book on NPR, and his oratory was beautifully captivating. He writes in much the same way that he speaks, but what works for him in his spoken word stories is not as effective in print - sometime his language gets in the way of the story rather than moving it along. It was enough of a problem for me to dock a star from my review rating, but I still found the book enjoyable.
If you are already knowledgeable on the subject of McGraw, his star pitcher, and his amazing team, you can take or leave this book depending on how you feel about baseball "valentines". If you are new to the subject, however, this is a fine place to start to whet your imagination and encourage you to learn more about these great stars and this fascinating era of baseball's history.

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I don't want to slam Mr. DeFord. He's obviously a very gifted writer and has made his career. But I was very disappointed in this book. I can only say that I feel a deep connection with both Mathewson and McGraw that this book did not satisfy. It basically reads like what it is - an expanded magazine article with lots of useless color thrown in and nothing substantive about Christy Mathewson or John McGraw that I haven't read any other place. I was hoping for some flesh and blood instead of a bunch of second or third-hand recollections. These men led hard lives with dignity and rage, honor and humiliation, and those vivid tones are only hinted at here. And DeFord's style is too-clever-by-half, enamored with his word play and forgetting to give me the meat. A lesser writer could have done this without injecting so much of his precious infatuation with the quaint language of turn of the century America. As I said, nothing against Mr. DeFord. I guess I was hoping for a deeper, different book.

I bought this book because I enjoy reading Frank Deford. This book captures the mood and scope of the nations sports landscape at the turn of the century and how it's subjects grew to become the most recognizable sports figures in the land.
Both McGraw and Mathewson were fascinating individuals who never would have crossed paths in the real world had it not been for baseball. The story of their successful professional and loving and enduring personal realtionship is told beautifully by Deford with insight, humor and an obvious care for his subjects and its time.

Christy Mathewson was one of the 5 inductees in the first class of the baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. John McGraw was inducted a year later in 1937. It can be argued that both were the greatest in their respective positions on the field - Mathewson as a pitcher and McGraw as a manager. It's interesting to note that Mathewson and Walter Johnson were voted into the Hall of Fame one year before Cy Young even though Young retired before either of those pitchers, so why is the best pitcher award named the Cy Young Award and not the Christy Mathewson Award?

Frank DeFord does a fantastic job in describing the lives (personal and baseball) of these two greats of the game, as well as the era they lived in. One of the topics I found interesting was the involvement of gambling in baseball at the time. Gambling was already a problem in the 1900s and early 1910s, and perhaps it led to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Deford writes "the fixed World Series of 1919 was a climax rather than an oddity." (p.116). Deford doesn't cover this topic in great detail but he touches on it throughout the book just enough to give the reader a feel for the gambling atmosphere in the game. Pete Rose's actions would not have raised an eyebrow in that era.

I enjoyed this book tremendously. Frank DeFord has an easy-to-read writing style. I did not know much about Mathewson or McGraw before reading this book, so I feel I learned a lot about these greats of the game. I definitely recommend it for anyone interested in baseball.

Deford's book touches mostly on the personal lives of and relationship betweeen Mathewson and McGraw. If that's your principal interest, then it's a fine book. But the author says little of substance about the transition from the Deadball Era to the modern game. If that's your principal interest, then look elsewhere.

When I was six years old my father took me to the Polo Grounds for my first baseball game. We saw the New York Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-1. And as Annie Savoy said in the classic movie "Bull Durham" the stadium was to me like a cathedral - the cathedral of baseball. The grass was greener than any I had seen and the confluence of scents of beer and hot dogs and tobacco was unlike anything I have ever experienced.
I think about that first game often as I peer from my upper deck seats from behind home plate watching my Arizona Diamondbacks (baseball teams are always referred to in singular possessive). But it really jumped back at me through the reflections of Frank Deford's, "The Old Ball Game". I actually shared a space in the same stadium in which two immortals once pitched, and played, and managed. And the story of the immortal pitcher Christopher "Christy" "Big Six" "Matty" Mathewson and most innovative energetic manager John "Muggsy" McGraw leaves that kind of a lasting impression.
Time tends to romanticize sports events and the heroes who populated them. McGraw and Mathewson are no exception. McGraw was the hard scrabble manager who was yet an old softy in many ways to his friends and his players.. Here was a guy who would loan money to members of the team but never really expected to be paid back. Deford writes that these loans were in the tens of thousands of dollars. Yet McGraw would harass umpires with vile and vulgar tirades and established himself every bit as the little Napleon he resembled in his loud dictatorial on the field style.
And yes, Mathewson was indeed the tall, handsome, college educated perfectionist. He was generally quiet and always polite. Matty worked hard at his craft and became the pre-eminent player of his time at any position. Frankly, as Deford notes, the award for the best pitcher in the game each year shouldn't be named after Cy Young who played most of his ball in the 19th century, it should be named after Christy.
The fact that he played in New York obviously didn't hurt. But it was a time devoid of mass media so newspapers and other print periodicals and word of mouth was all a man had to promote his ability. Christy made the best of it.
They are both, in many ways, however, tragic figures. Both were destined to die much too young the latter painfully so. Mathewson watched all of his siblings die before him - one from suicide - and McGraw lost his first wife to illness. McGraw himself suffered from severe sinusitis the result of a being hit with a bat on the ball field. And, of course, Mathewson's brief stint in Europe during World War I exposed him to the poison gases of warfare that ultimately led too tuberculosis and his death.
Mathewson didn't have the intial support of his family to be a ball player - it wasn't a very respectable profession for a good Christian boy in those days. She had always dreamed of his becoming a minister but baseball won out. In later years when Mathewson became larger than life, so admired for not just his athletic ability but his idyllic life style his mother relented her approval. At least he was setting a good example of how a good Christian man should live his life.
But through these slightly romantic rose colored glasses "The Old Ball Game" approaches our heroes with honesty, clarity and enjoyment. The descriptive visuals of the games themselves put you in the stadiums. You can feel the stares and see the plays. And the game really mattered in those days. No television meant that thousands of fans would have to gather to see the status of important games relayed by telegraph posted on large boards at various locations. The game of baseball was important - there was nothing in all of sport at the time like it in comparison. Perhaps an occasional horse race would incite great spectator interest. And horse racing had a powerful following amoung the gambling set. Occaionaly a champiosnhip prize fight would temporarily divert the attention of fans. But baseball was what captured sporting minds and their imagination.
Yes, it was a time before steroids and amphetamines but their era was not devoid of its own problems. Gambling was rampant. Hal Chase openly courted his teammates to throw games for betting purposes. Ballparks were made of not much more than kindling wood which led them to burn down with regularity. But it was also a time of transition in the world and the game of baseball and its stadiums were no exception.
The Polo Grounds was the first permanent steel structure built to house the hallowed game - built to house the swelling crowds who were coming to see McGraw and his charges play and to see Matty pitch. Baseball was growing from a sport that drew a few thousand on average per game to attract tens of thousands in the right park for the right game. And oh how those Giants dominated New York until the Yankees built their own collossal park in 1923 and replaced men like Mathewson and McGraw with a guy named "the Babe".
The Old Ball Game is in fact, a book born out of a magazine article. Deford wrote a piece about these two icons and the odd but unique relationship that helped them and their team captivate not just New York but all of baseball during the first two decades of the 20th century. But one magazine article hardly could do this duo justice. So Deford was convinced to expand the project.
Baseball fans will be very happy that he did. For us it will bring back the magic of that first time there - of the first visit - when, as Deford concludes, ". . . all the innings were in the sun"!
991words
Barry M. Aarons is a senior research fellow for the Lewisville, Texas based Institute for Policy Innovation. He owns The Aarons Company, a Public Policy Consulting firm in Phoenix.

Almost everything I have ever read about John McGraw and Christy Mathewson has been very interesting....and this is no exception.

McGraw, tough, raw and profane, managed the New York Giants for years and Matthewson, the All-American boy, was his star pitcher. Both men are in the Hall of Fame are considered, to this day, to be near the top of their professions all-time.

Yeah, Deford obviously has great admiration for both men, but so what? Who doesn't admire "Matty", as a man and a player, and who isn't impressed at "Muggsy's" baseball record? It's simply a character study of one of the most famous "odd couples" in baseball history.

This is not a long, profound study of these men, or baseball or American history, but it's an entertaining book with Deford's unique style of describing things. And you do get a little of all the above, meaning a good flavor of the period. If you're a fan of baseball history, particularly the Deadball Era, this is a good read.

Frank Deford takes you there. This book is definitely about baseball and it's evolution around the turn of the century, but it also sits you down in the early 1900's. Historical descriptions of the Manhattan of the day are fascinating. You feel as though you're reading the headlines of the day one minute and sidled up next to the personalities of a very tough time in American history the next minute. If you're interested in baseball this book takes you there. It's so well written you can almost taste the dust in the air sometimes. However, don't be afraid to give it a read for it's historical presentations of New York and Baltimore in the early 1900's.

This was a well written history of New York Giants at the beginning of the 1900's. However, I didn't feel it told me much more that I've read over 50 years of reading baseball history.