Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the Inside

by Christy Mathewson

Each pitcher has to find out for himself what a man is going to hit. It’s all right to take advice at first, but, if this does not prove to be the proper prescription, it’s up to him to experiment and not continue to feed him the sort of balls that he is hitting.

Reputations count for a great deal in the Big Leagues. Cobb has a record as being a great base runner, and I believe that he steals ten bases a season on this reputation. The catcher knows he is on the bag, realizes that he is going to steal, fears him, hurries his throw, and, in his anxiety, it goes bad. Cobb is safe, whereas, if he had been an ordinary runner with no reputation, he would probably have been thrown out. Pitchers who have made names for themselves in the Big Leagues, have a much easier time winning as a consequence.

“All he’s got to do is to throw his glove into the box to beat that club,” is an old expression in baseball, which means that the opposing batters fear the pitcher and that his reputation will carry him through if he has nothing whatever on the ball.

Newspapers work on the mental attitude of Big League players. This has been most marked in Cincinnati, and I believe that the local newspapers have done as much as anything to keep a pennant away from that town. When the team went south for the spring practice, the newspapers printed glowing reports of the possibilities of the club winning the pennant, but, when the club started to fall down in the race, they would knock the men, and it would take the heart out of the players. Almost enough good players have been let go by the Cincinnati team to make a world’s championship club. There are Donlin, Seymour, Steinfeldt, Lobert and many more. Ball players inhale the accounts printed in the newspapers, and a correspondent with a grouch has ruined the prospects of many a good player and club. The New York newspapers, first by the great amount of publicity given to his old record, and then by criticising him for not making a better showing, had a great deal to do with Marquard failing to make good the first two years he was in New York, as I have shown.

A smart manager in the Big League is always working to keep his valuable stars in the right frame of mind. On the last western trip the Giants made in the season of 1911, when they won the pennant by taking eighteen games out of twenty-two games, McGraw refused to permit any of the men to play cards. He realized that often the stakes ran high and that the losers brooded over the money which they lost and were thinking of this rather than the game when on the ball field. It hurt their playing, so there were no cards. He also carried “Charley” Faust, the Kansas Jinx killer, along to keep the players amused and because it was thought that he was good luck. It helped their mental attitude.

The treatment of a new player when he first arrives is different now from what it was in the old days. Once there was a time when the veteran looked upon the recruit with suspicion and the feeling that he had come to take his job and his bread and butter from him. If a young pitcher was put into the box, the old catcher would do all that he could to irritate him, and many times he would inform the batters of the other side what he was going to throw.

“He’s tryin’ to horn my friend Bill out of a job,” I have heard catchers charge against a youngster.

This attitude drove many a star ball player back to the minors because he couldn’t make good under the adverse circumstances, but nothing of the sort exists now. Each veteran does all that he can to help the youngster, realizing that on the younger generation depends the success of the club, and that no one makes any money by being on a loser. Travelling with a tail-end ball club is the poorest pastime in the world. I would rather ride in the first coach of a funeral procession.

The youngster is treated more courteously now when he first arrives. In the old days, the veterans of the club sized up the recruit and treated him like a stranger for days, which made him feel as if he were among enemies instead of friends, and, as a result, it was much harder for him to make good. Now all hands make him a companion from the start, unless he shows signs of being unusually fresh.

There is a lot to baseball in the Big Leagues besides playing the game. No man can have a “yellow streak” and last. He must not pay much attention to his nerves or temperament. He must hide every flaw. It’s all part of the psychology of baseball. But the saddest words of all to a pitcher are three—“Take Him Out.”