Christopher Mathewson (August 12, 1880 – October 7, 1925), nicknamed "Big Six," "the Christian Gentleman," "Matty," and "the Gentleman's Hurler," was an American professional baseball pitcher who played 17 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the New York Giants. He stood 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) tall and weighed 195 pounds (88 kg). He was among the most dominant pitchers in baseball history, and ranks in the all-time top 10 in several key pitching categories, including wins, shutouts, and earned run average. In 1936, Mathewson was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of its first five members.
Mathewson grew up in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, and began playing semiprofessional baseball when he was 14 years old. He played in the minor leagues in 1899, recording a record of 21 wins and two losses. He pitched for the Giants the next season, but was sent back to the minors. He eventually returned to the Giants and went on to win a National League record 373 career games, tying Grover Cleveland Alexander for the third-most career wins of all time. He led the Giants to the franchise's first World Series championship in 1905 by pitching a single World Series record three shutouts. He also holds the record for career shutouts in the World Series, with four. Mathewson never pitched on Sundays, owing to his devout Christian beliefs. Mathewson served in the United States Army's Chemical Warfare Service in World War I, and was accidentally exposed to chemical weapons during training. His respiratory system was weakened from the exposure, causing him to contract tuberculosis, from which he died in Saranac Lake, New York in 1925.
Contents
Early life
Christopher Mathewson was born on August 12, 1880, in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, and he attended high school at Keystone Academy.
College career
He attended college at Bucknell University, where he served as class president and played on the school's football, basketball, and baseball teams. Mathewson was also a member of the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. His first experience of semi-professional baseball came in 1895, when he was 14 years old. The manager of the Factoryville ball club asked Mathewson to pitch in a game with a rival team in Mill City, Pennsylvania. Mathewson helped his hometown team to a 19–17 victory, but with his batting rather than his pitching. He continued to play baseball during his years at Bucknell, pitching for minor league teams in Honesdale and Meridian, Pennsylvania. Mathewson was selected to the Walter Camp All-American football team in 1900. He was a drop-kicker.
Professional football career
Mathewson played football at Keystone Academy from 1895 to 1897. He turned pro in 1898, appearing as a fullback with the Greensburg Athletic Association. While a member of the New York Giants, Mathewson played fullback for the Pittsburgh Stars of the first National Football League. However, Mathewson disappeared from the team in the middle of the team's 1902 season. Some historians speculate that the Giants got word that their star pitcher was risking his baseball career for the Stars and ordered him to stop, while others feel that the Stars' coach, Willis Richardson, got rid of Mathewson because he felt that, since the fullback's punting skills were hardly used, he could replace him with a local player, Shirley Ellis.
Professional baseball career
Minor leagues
In 1899, Mathewson signed to play professional baseball with Taunton Herrings of the New England League, where he finished with a record of 2–13. The next season, he moved on to play on the Norfolk Phenoms of the Virginia League. He finished that season with a 20–2 record. He continued to attend Bucknell during that time.
New York Giants (1900–1916)
In July 1900, the New York Giants purchased his contract from Norfolk for $1,500 (equivalent to $58,000 in 2025). Between July and September 1900, Mathewson appeared in six games for the Giants. He started one of those games and compiled a 0–3 record. Displeased with his performance, the Giants returned him to Norfolk and demanded their money back. Later that month, the Cincinnati Reds picked up Mathewson off the Norfolk roster. On December 15, 1900, the Reds quickly traded Mathewson back to the Giants for Amos Rusie.
During his 17-year career, Mathewson won 373 games and lost 188 for a .665 winning percentage. His career earned run average of 2.13 and 79 career shutouts are among the best all time for pitchers, and his 373 wins are still number one in the National League, tied with Grover Cleveland Alexander. He employed a good fastball, outstanding control, and, especially a new pitch he termed the "fadeaway" (later known in baseball as the "screwball"), which he learned from teammate Dave Williams in 1898.
This reference is challenged by Ken Burns documentary Baseball in which it is stated that Mathewson learned his "fadeaway" from Rube Foster when New York Giants manager John McGraw quietly hired Rube to show the Giants bullpen what he knew. Many baseball historians consider this story apocryphal.
Mathewson recorded 2,507 career strikeouts against only 848 walks. He is famous for his 25 pitching duels with Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, who won 13 of the duels against Mathewson's 11, with one no-decision.
Mathewson was a very good-hitting pitcher in his major league career, posting a .215 batting average with 151 runs, seven home runs, and 167 runs batted in. In 10 of his 17 years in the majors, he had at least 10 runs batted in, with a season-high of 20 in 1903. He batted .281 (9-for-32) in 11 World Series games.
By 1903, Mathewson's stature was such that when he briefly signed a contract with the St. Louis Browns of the American League, he was thought to be the spark the Browns needed to win the pennant. The Browns had finished a strong second in 1902, five games behind the Philadelphia Athletics. They offered him four times what he was making with the Giants. However, as part of the settlement that ended the two-year war between the American and National Leagues, Mathewson and Browns owner Robert Lee Hedges tore up the contract. Hedges later said that ensuring the return of peace to the game was more important, even if it meant effectively giving up a pennant.
Managerial career
Cincinnati Reds (1916–1918)
On July 20, 1916, Mathewson's career came full circle when he was traded to the Cincinnati Reds along with Edd Roush. He was immediately named as the Reds' player-manager. However, for all intents and purposes, his playing career was over. He appeared in only one game as a pitcher for the Reds, on September 4, 1916. He faced Brown in the second half of a doubleheader, which was billed as the final meeting between the two old baseball warriors. The high-scoring game was a win for Mathewson's Reds over Brown's Cubs, 10–8.
Mathewson retired as a player after the season and managed the Reds for the entire 1917 season and the first 118 games of 1918, compiling a total record of 164–176 as a manager.
Personal life and literary career
Mathewson married Jane Stoughton (1880–1967) in 1903. Their only child, Christopher Jr., was born shortly after. Christy Mathewson Jr. served in World War II, and died in an explosion at his home in Texas on August 16, 1950. During Mathewson's playing years, the family lived in a duplex on the Upper West Side, at Columbus and 85th, alongside Mathewson's manager John McGraw and his wife Blanche. Mathewson and McGraw remained friends for the rest of their lives. In the 1909 offseason, Christy Mathewson's younger brother Nicholas Mathewson died by suicide in a neighbor's barn. Another brother, Henry Mathewson, pitched briefly for the Giants before dying of tuberculosis in 1917.
Mathewson was highly regarded in the baseball world during his lifetime. As he was a clean-cut, intellectual collegiate, his rise to fame brought a better name to the typical ballplayer, who usually spent his time gambling, boozing, or womanizing. As noted in The National League Story (1961) by Lee Allen, Mathewson was a devout Christian and never pitched on Sunday, a promise he made to his mother that brought him popularity among the more religious New York fans and earned him the nickname "The Christian Gentleman". However, the impact of this practice on the Giants was minimized, since, in the eight-team National League, only the Chicago Cubs (Illinois), Cincinnati Reds (Ohio), and St. Louis Cardinals (Missouri) played home games in states that allowed professional sports on Sunday.
In his free time, Mathewson enjoyed nature walks, reading, golf, and checkers, of which he was a renowned champion player. The combination of athletic skill and intellectual hobbies made him a favorite for many fans, even those opposed to the Giants. Sportswriters praised him, and in his prime every game he started began with deafening cheers. Sometimes, the distraction prompted him to walk out 10 minutes after his fielders took the field. Mathewson soon became the unspoken captain of the Giants.
He was the only player to whom John McGraw ever gave full discretion. McGraw told many younger players to watch and listen to his wisdom.
Mathewson garnered respect throughout the baseball world as a pitcher of great sportsmanship. He was often asked to write columns concerning upcoming games. In 1912, with the editing and ghostwriting aid of sportswriter John Wheeler, Mathewson published his classic memoir Pitching in a Pinch, or Pitching from the Inside, which was admired by poet Marianne Moore and is still in print. In 1913, Mathewson and playwright Rida Johnson Young co-wrote a mildly successful play called The Girl and The Pennant, which was inspired by Helene Hathaway Britton's ownership of the St. Louis Cardinals. The play ran for 20 performances at Broadway's Lyric Theatre during October-November 1913. Mathewson also co-wrote (again, with the assistance of ghostwriter Wheeler) a series of children's baseball novels (the "Matty Books"): Won in the Ninth (1910), Pitcher Pollock (1914), Catcher Craig (1915), First Base Faulkner (1916), and Second Base Sloan (1917).
World War I and afterward
Late in the 1918 season, Mathewson enlisted in the United States Army during World War I. His wife Jane was very much opposed to the decision, but Mathewson insisted on going. He served overseas as a captain in the newly formed Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) along with Ty Cobb. Mathewson served with the American Expeditionary Forces until February 1919 and was discharged later that month.
Mathewson developed tuberculosis shortly after his military service. It was widely assumed his disease was caused by his work with chemical weapons, largely due to the conventional wisdom that tuberculosis more easily infects lungs that have been damaged by these gases. This narrative was given further credence from a passage in Al Stump's 1961 biography of Ty Cobb, which says that Cobb and Mathewson were both accidentally gassed during a chemical training exercise in Choignes, France where eight men died; Mathewson purportedly told Cobb afterwards that he had 'got a good dose of that stuff. I feel terrible.' This account has widely been accepted as true, although it is not without its detractors: Branch Rickey, who also served in the CWS alongside Mathewson, flatly denied the incident; other historians have noted that Stump's book, published after Cobb's death, is sensationalized and generally unreliable. Further, some historians question whether the incident ever occurred. Mathewson himself never mentioned a training accident during his lifetime, but acknowledged that he had been exposed to potentially lethal gases on various occasions while demonstrating gas shells to students: "We were careful, but there is no doubt the accumulated gases affected my lungs," he later said.
Although he returned to serve as a coach for the Giants from 1919 to 1921, he spent a good portion of that time in Saranac Lake fighting the tuberculosis, initially at the Trudeau Sanitorium, and later in a house that he had built. In 1923, Mathewson returned to professional baseball when Giants attorney Emil Fuchs and he put together a syndicate that bought the Boston Braves. Although initial plans called for Mathewson to be principal owner and team president, his health had deteriorated so much that he could perform only nominal duties. He turned over the presidency to Fuchs after the season.
Death and legacy
After contracting tuberculosis, Mathewson moved to the frigid climate of Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where he sought treatment from Edward Livingston Trudeau at his renowned Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium. He died in Saranac Lake of tuberculosis on October 7, 1925. Mathewson is buried at Lewisburg Cemetery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, adjacent to Bucknell University. Members of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Washington Senators wore black armbands during the 1925 World Series. Mathewson had died on the day the series began, October 7. According to Baseball, some of Mathewson's last words were to his wife: "Now Jane, I want you to go outside and have yourself a good cry. Don't make it a long one; this can't be helped."
Christy Mathewson Day is celebrated as a holiday in his hometown of Factoryville, Pennsylvania, on the Saturday closest to his birthday.
Christy Mathewson Day and Factoryville, Pennsylvania, are the subjects of the documentary, Christy Mathewson Day.
Bucknell's football stadium is named "Christy Mathewson–Memorial Stadium".
The baseball field at Keystone College is named "Christy Mathewson Field".
Christy Mathewson Park in Factoryville is home to the community's Little League field, as well as basketball courts and other athletic facilities, public gardens, walking trails, and a picnic pavilion.
The former Whittenton Ballfield in Taunton, Massachusetts, is named in memory of Christy Mathewson, who played for the Taunton team in the New England Baseball League before he joined the New York Giants.
Mathewson is mentioned in the poem "Line-Up for Yesterday" by Ogden Nash. It says of Christy “M is for Matty, Who carried a charm In the form of an extra brain in his arm”
F. Scott Fitzgerald refers to Christy Mathewson in his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920).
Baseball honors
In 1936, Mathewson was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of its first five inductees, along with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Honus Wagner. He was the only one of the five to be inducted posthumously.
His jersey, denoted as "NY", was retired by the Giants in 1986 and hangs in the left-field corner of Oracle Park. Uniform numbers were not used during the time when Mathewson played for the Giants.
In 1999, he ranked number seven on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, the highest-ranking National League pitcher.
ESPN selected his pitching performance in the 1905 World Series as the greatest playoff performance of all time.
During World War II, a 422-foot (129 m) Liberty ship named in his honor, USS Christy Mathewson, was built in Richmond, California, in 1943.
His plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame says: "Greatest of all of the great pitchers in the 20th century's first quarter" and ends with the statement: "Matty was master of them all"
Filmography
(compiled per IMDb)
Christy Mathewson and the New York National League Team (1907)
Athletics vs. Giants in the World's Championship Baseball Series of 1911 (1911)
Breaking into the Big League (1913)
The Giants-White Sox Tour (1914)
The Universal Boy (1914)
Love and Baseball (1914)
Matty's Decision (1915)
Animated Weekly, No.16 (1916)
Animated Weekly, No.31 (1916)
The Baseball Revue of 1917 (1917)
Works
Won in the Ninth (1910)
Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the Inside (1912)
Pitcher Pollock (1914)
Catcher Craig (1915)
First Base Faulkner (1916)
Second Base Sloan (1917)
"'Outguessing' the Batter". Pearson's Magazine. Vol. 25, no. 5. May 1911. pp. 568–575. Retrieved November 5, 2024.