The Old Ball Game by Frank Deford

another mouth to nurse and feed. Ellen gave birth most years, the eighth arriving when Johnny was himself yet only eleven, in January of ’85. Shortly after this last child was born, though, Ellen took deathly ill. It was very fast: diphtheria—or “black diphtheria” as it wasoften called then, when it was a scourge. Terribly infectious, highly contagious, a disease affecting the upper respiratory tract, diphtheria was all the more devastating in that it especially took down children. Ellen died in two days. Then Anna, the oldest, her stepchild. Three more of the McGraw babies fell after that.
    Johnny was the oldest now in a motherless family. Three other small children and a newborn baby were left for the father to somehow tend to. In the world we like to imagine, the ghastly tragedy would have drawn the father and his eldest son together. It didn’t. Ellen had been the connecting tissue. Now she was gone, the house was gripped in despair and malnourishment, and so, come the spring, Johnny’s baseball became even more a bone of contention. Most everyone in Truxton would hear it: the incessant thudding of a Spalding pounding against the wall of a shed—Johnny McGraw, pitching, day after day. Later that year the boy broke another window, and his father could stand it no more. Erupting in a fury, he grabbed his son and, as the other children looked on in horror, it seemed as if he would beat him to death.
    Somehow Johnny wrestled free from his father’s grasp and departed the house, gone for good. He found refuge at the town’s small hotel, where the proprietress took him in, giving him his keep in return for the chores she assigned him. He did remain in school, but like so many disadvantaged but athletic American teenagers who would follow his example ever since, he tended to his sport more than to his books. A dirt-poor, uneducated Irish kid living in the sticks—early on Muggsy must have seen his main chance.
    How a boy with short arms who weighed barely a hundred pounds could pitch with any authority—how he could throw a curveball! — we don’t know. But Johnny McGraw could. He taught himself that. In those days, almost every town in America had its own team and, it seems, residency was often winked atas a requirement of participation. Certainly it was by the summer of ’89 when the hamlet of East Homer, nearby to Truxton, needed a pitcher. Johnny was approached. He drove a hard bargain: five bucks and round-trip transportation. So he was taken over from Truxton in a carriage, and he won the game, departing a hero from East Homer. After that, there was never any doubt what career path McGraw would follow, and the next spring, when he heard about a new minor league, the New York–Pennsylvania, he talked his way onto the team at Olean for forty dollars a month.
    He was just turned seventeen years old when he left school, packed his valise, and took off on the journey down to Olean. He would find his way back to education, but never again did he return to stay in the only hometown he had ever known. Only he would never let himself forget the ghastly way he fought and lived as a child. He would not let those hard memories die. When he became successful, Muggsy always had a dog in his childless home, and every dog he owned—most of them Boston bull terriers—he would name “Truxton.” And every morning, he would sit down with his dog and partake of the same breakfast: orange juice, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. He would feed his dog a little bit of bacon, and then this is the refrain John J. McGraw would scream out: “It’s Truxton against the world!”
    The Mathewsons were of Scottish descent—Mattesons, originally—arriving in Rhode Island way back in the seventeenth century. Matty’s grandfather moved the family to Factoryville, Pennsylvania, in 1847, where he constructed a log cabin for his family. Factoryville,