Baseball's First Superstar: The Lost Life Story of Christy Mathewson - Hardcover

Gaff, Alan D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1496243277 ISBN 13: 9781496243270

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2025

Synopsis

If there was a first face of baseball, it was arguably Christopher “Christy” Mathewson. At the opening of the twentieth century, baseball was considered an undignified game played by ruffians for gamblers’ benefit. Mathewson changed all that. When he signed with the Giants in 1900, his contract stated he wouldn’t pitch on Sundays, and he was known for his honesty, integrity, and good looks.

In his first fourteen seasons, as a pitcher for the Giants, Mathewson never won fewer than twenty games in a season, and he almost single-handedly won the 1905 World Series. In 1918, though age thirty-eight and exempt from military service, he enlisted for World War I, where he exposed himself to nearly lethal amounts of mustard gas as he taught soldiers how to put on gas masks. When he returned home, he was diagnosed with lung problems and tuberculosis, which led to his untimely death at the age of forty-five.

After Mathewson’s death, his eulogies were many, but it was impossible to catch the essence of his life in a single newspaper column. Jane Mathewson, his widow, was determined to provide the reading public with a more intimate portrait of her husband and approached prominent sportswriter Bozeman Bulger, who had known Mathewson for twenty years. Bulger wrote a series of articles titled “The Life Story of Christy Mathewson.” His portraits about the player were amplified by original accounts from Jane, and several unpublished chapters from Mathewson himself, which had been discovered among his papers. These combined accounts allow readers to hear from Mathewson and those who knew him best.

A superstar long before that term was coined, Mathewson became an icon of sportsmanship. He was posthumously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame at its first induction ceremony in 1936. In Baseball’s First Superstar Alan D. Gaff brings Mathewson to life through Mathewson’s own writings and those of others, largely lost to history until now.
 

About this title

About the Author

Alan D. Gaff is an independent scholar and the author of many books, including Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir, Bayonets in the Wilderness, Blood in the Argonne, and On Many a Bloody Field. He lives in Indiana.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Newspapers Created the
First Baseball Superstar

Newspapers spurred the growth of America. They began as small
operations, usually an editor with a few typesetters, that reported on
current events and local political affairs, with most income generated by
advertising rather than subscriptions. As the country began to expand,
editors started to fill pages from exchanges, simply arrangements for
different newspapers to share information. This allowed editors to
include more regional and national coverage for their readers. Another
step forward came during the Mexican War when correspondents
went out to gather news rather than wait for information to trickle
back home. This use of paid correspondents would cover such topics
as the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, Reconstruction, westward
expansion, immigration, and the Spanish-American War. By the dawn
of the twentieth century, newspapers were poised to report on another
major topic that would profoundly affect American life—the rise of
professional baseball.

Journalism in New York City was a cutthroat business. Joseph
Pulitzer purchased the New York World in 1883 and, capitalizing on
his business acumen gained with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
within four years it became the most successful newspaper in the city. Pulitzer’s
success hinged on his emphasis of reporting sensational stories
about lurid criminal acts, disasters of all sorts, and scandals involving
prominent politicians and society’s elite. The World’s most aggressive
competitor was another morning paper, the New York Sun, owned by
Charles A. Dana, a former assistant secretary of war.

Competition between Pulitzer and Dana increased in 1887 when
the latter began to publish the Evening Sun, a move countered by
the former launching the Evening World. Employees of the original
World derisively referred to this new upstart as World Junior. As if to
emphasize his importance in journalism, Pulitzer built the New York
World Building, then the tallest structure in the metropolis, which
stood across from City Hall on Park Avenue and stretched from Frankfort
Street to the Brooklyn Bridge. Dana’s Evening Sun soon began to
lose traction and William Randolph Hearst brought forward a new
competitor in 1896, the Evening Journal. This new rivalry became
even more intense than the previous Pulitzer-Dana clash. Rather than
presenting a background on New York City newspapers in general,
this narrative will focus on how the Evening World organized its staff
to cover its two Major League baseball teams.

To counter the popularity of Hearst’s paper, Joseph Pulitzer hired
Foster Coates as managing editor of the Evening World. Coates set out
to immediately increase circulation by using shocking headlines and
huge typefaces to attract readers. He compared his front page to the
window of a department store: “One must display his wares attractively,”
he argued, “or the other fellow would reap the largest sales.”1
When exceptional news stories came, there was no way to promote
them beyond a typical front page other than to resort to red ink to catch
attention. This step soon failed when women complained that red ink
ruined their white gloves. Women were critical to any newspaper since
they read the advertisements that brought in the bulk of its profits. For
example, the Evening World for years sold at just one penny an issue.

Hearst stole Foster Coates in 1900, but his front-page layout
remained. In the very middle were baseball scores for the New York
Giants and Brooklyn Superbas. Coates had discovered that baseball
scores were just as important to circulation as horrific murders and
natural disasters. But he had a target audience in mind. Wall Street
shut down at three in the afternoon, so the Giants and Superbas accom-
modated this elite crowd by throwing out the first ball at four, giving
these well-dressed sports fans time to get to the stadiums. Editions of
the Evening World were printed early, then held for baseball scores to
be inserted as games concluded. Extra-inning games played hell with
distribution as newsboys had to wait for late deliveries. Interestingly,
these ball scores appeared in a fainter type than all other stories on
the front page.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496243277
• ISBN 13: 9781496243270
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248