This year marks the 100th anniversary of Christy Mathewson’s death. The legendary pitcher, who was part of the first class of inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, has in a sense been resurrected. Historian and baseball savant, Alan D. Gaff, has again unearthed material from one of the game’s greats. Just as he did with his 2020 book, “Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir,” the author has gifted baseball fans with a piece of America’s pastime that might well have been lost to history.
In his new work, “Baseball’s First Superstar: The Lost Life Story of Christy Mathewson,” Gaff takes the reader through the early 20th century era of baseball when the sportswriters of newspapers and magazines gave the game its mythic status. The folklore of the game had become pronounced by the middle of the century, as Gaff quotes a 1945 article from sportswriter Whitney Martin, stating that sportswriters “glamorized the game, surrounded it with an aura of romance, personalized and humanized the players, built reputations.” Gaff, by some kind fate, discovered lost material that indeed “personalized and humanized” Mathewson.
