Baseball Joe Matson: The Greatest Player Who Never Was

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).

 

Let others praise the literary giants who have brought their skills to baseball fiction. Wolfe, Farrell, Malamud, Harris, Coover, Kennedy deserve kudos. But I toss my cap in the air and shout, “huzzah!” for Lester Chadwick, the author who invented the exploits of the Baseball Joe series. 

The canon covering Baseball Joe’s career is contained in 14 novels, published by Cupples & Leon, from 1912 to 1928. These differ from other juvenile books about baseball as they trace the personal and professional history of the principal character from his early teens in Baseball Joe of Silver Stars, to his ultimate major league achievement in Baseball Joe, Pitching Wizard. 

Joe Matson is 15 years old in the first book and 34 when the series ends. He moves from town team to prep school and into Yale. Unlike Frank Merriwell who remained an undergraduate at Old Eli for dozens of dime novels, Joe Matson left after a single season of varsity pitching to enter professional baseball. 

A season in the Central League and he is drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals. His potential as a rookie catches the eye of the New York Giants management and a trade is arranged which brings Baseball Joe to the team of his role model, Christy Mathewson. 

Chadwick drew extensively on the actual events of baseball to provide Baseball Joe the circumstances of the books. The series runs approximately parallel to a passing scene which saw the transition from the dead ball era to the lively ball and the advent of the home run. In the course of the 14 novels we find Joe Matson touring the world as a member of the world champion Giants, resisting the temptations of the Federal League, being shamed by the Black Sox and adapting to the lively ball. 

Although the backgrounds and circumstances changed with the times, the plots did not. The books are formula — written with a villain for each, either with a conspiracy to frame Joe for a crime or to kidnap him so he will miss “the big game.” Joe never failed to show up for any crucial game, often dragging a covey of villains behind him.

If you are looking for unique plotting, you’ll not find it in these books. If complex personalities intrigue you, you’ll be disappointed to know Baseball Joe Matson is a one-dimensional demi-god. 

However, the Baseball Joe series was only intended to serve boys coming to maturity from 1912 until the eve of World War II. As the books were passed down from older brother to younger, they imparted tidbits of the actual history of the game, playing tips, strategy insights and an understanding of the framework of organized baseball. These are peripheral values to hero-worshipping young readers. Foremost, Baseball Joe is the best of pitchers, steals bases when he wishes, and develops into a batter with the “hit ’em where they ain’t” adroitness of Willie Keeler and the power to drive the ball a tad farther than Babe Ruth. 

Joe combines the skills of Cobb, Speaker, Lajoie and Wagner. About the only thing he didn’t do was go behind the plate. The author was probably stumped on how to have Joe pitch to himself. 

The Baseball Joe books were among the first juvenile novels we ever read, taking them in random order in the early 1930s. I doubt if all 14 trickled down from older family members whose hand-me-downs in juvenile literature kept me enthralled during my pre-teen years. 

However, I recently borrowed the entire series from a friend who has collected them all. I was able to read my way from the time when young Joe Matson and his family move to Riverside, a town on a river coursing somewhere through New England, until the last book, published 16 years later. Read in maturity, these books are amusingly arcane. However, they also are tinged with a personal nostalgia for a time which was disappearing as my own adolescence began. 

I am sure my own interest in baseball’s past was first awakened by these books. Chadwick, a pen name borrowed knowingly from The Father of baseball writers, Henry Chadwick, injects considerable historical information into his stories. For example, while Joe is traveling by train to spring training, he meets an old man who says he played right field for the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869. The old-time ballplayer tells Joe about the early years of the game, adding he was in the lineup the day Paul Hines made the first unassisted triple play.

Contemporary historians are quick to deny this and can show box. scores to back up their debunking of the accomplishment. However, Lester Chadwick was quoting the beliefs of his time and, as the books are works of fiction, the Hines unassisted triple play makes a better story. 

Throughout the novels, Joe Matson experiences events which served to teach the juvenile reader the realities of life in professional baseball. 

Joe resents the fact that his contract can be sold without his consent, but accepts this as necessary “for the good of the game.” Joe can always see the other fellow’s viewpoint, but stands with the establishment whenever a crisis occurs. A boy reading the books for excitement, for accounts of games played, for the suspense as Joe escapes one dastardly plot after another, unconsciously absorbs a great deal of baseball background. 

Chadwick blended fact and fiction. He barely hid the actual identity of real life players: Hornsby was Mormsby; Ruth was Roth (“look out for his beanball”) as a pitcher and Kid Rose, later, as a slugger. Joe’s idol and mentor on the Giants was Hughson, famous for his fadeaway. McRae is the bellicose Giants manager. Baseball Joe Matson began playing in New England, as a boy, on a town team, after his family had moved to Riverside. The Matson family consisted of the father, an inventor and early century wimp. He is constantly being swindled by evil partners whose ill intent is always apparent to his son. Mother Matson, who hopes young Joe will enter the ministry, flutters from crisis to crisis, and presumably found Joe, and his sister, Clara, a year younger, under a leaf in the cabbage patch. 

The family is 110% four square in every virtue but Joe is the first to recognize he has been living in the 20th century for a decade. Even so, Joe’s boyhood transportation is by bike, with an oil lamp on the handlebars, or by hiring a livery rig from the town stable to chase fleeing villains. 

Joe’s athletic skills are utilized from time to time by the author to resolve a crisis. Joe enables a man to escape a burning building by hurling up a ball of yam and attaching a stout rope to it so the man can slide down to safety. 

In another situation, Joe first meets Mabel Varley, the romance of his life, when she caroms past him, helpless in a carriage lurching behind a runaway horse. Joe stops the animal in its tracks by throwing a stone and hitting the horse in the head, knocking it unconscious. 

This first meeting with Mabel begins a succession of appearances in subsequent books which even the most juvenile of readers realized must someday lead Baseball Joe to the altar. Actually, Joe’s courtship of Mabel extends from Baseball Joe in The Central League, through four intervening books, until Joe and Mabel finally tied the knot in Baseball Joe, Home Run King. 

There was a break in the series after 1918, due, most likely, to the First World War and the scarcity of paper for juvenile books. Although the books parallel the real events in baseball, the author seems to have overlooked World War I. Unlike Matty, the obvious counterpart for the fictionalized Matson, Baseball Joe not only doesn’t go to war, he is oblivious of it. 

It is quite likely that the Edward Stratemeyer “fiction mill” changed horses behind the pseudonym, Lester Chadwick, at this point. To give this project a literary mystique it doesn’t deserve — after all, we’re not going to divide into camps over authorship (no Baconians need apply) — it can be observed that the books from 1912 to 1918 contain vastly more baseball historical references. Also, the dialogue is characteristically dotted with what I will suggest is “the Stratemeyer stammer.” 

This is a dialogue device, in which the personal pronoun is repeated, to connote stress and determination: “I – I’d rather fight than give in.” 

But more significant in the books from L922 on, is that Joe’s upward mobility, having been attained on the Giants, no longer serves as the book’s achievement pinnacle. Where Joe had been able to end each book looking forward to a coming season played at a higher level-sandlot, to prep, to college, to minors, to majors, to the Giants—-once with New York, each successive season had to top the last. This was to lead to problems for the author, whoever wielded the pen behind the pen name. 

Eventually, Baseball Joe had done it all. He rarely won a crucial game without pitching a no-hitter. When a base hit would do, he customarily belted the ball out of sight. He had been carried off the field in triumph by his teammates so often they were becoming stoop-shouldered by the task. 

Whether it was ordained that Baseball Joe, Pitching Wizard was to be Joe Matson’s swan song, instead of another of a continuing series of extraordinary accomplishments, is left to conjecture by those familiar with the publishing world. I think it was. There had been a lapse of three years since Baseball Joe had left his readers agape in wonderment. In 1925’s Baseball Joe, Champion of the League, the Giants win more games than any team ever had. Joe, of course, pitches the final victory and, for a variation on the theme of personal contribution, doesn’t hit a home run. Instead, he scores from first base on a single. 

This caps a season in which Joe Matson leads the league in niceness, decency, and celibacy; and, incidentally, batting average, home runs, stolen bases and, when pitching, strikeouts and earned run average. It didn’t seem possible for Joe to exceed the excess of success in the future. 

Sensibly, the author behind the series-let’s credit Edward Stratemeyer with blocking out these books, if not providing the final manuscript-tried to phase Joe out. Missing from the list of Baseball Joe books in the Grobani bibliography is the 1926 Baseball Joe, Club Owner. 

Joe leaves the major leagues with a sore arm, the consequence of evil doings by the villains in the prior volume. This plot seems to be an effort to close the circle of novels at twelve. When the publisher agreed to permit Joe to leave the big leagues, there was a tacit awareness this would deprive the books of the most attractive elements for juvenile readers. We — for I was among them—wanted Joe to conquer more baseball worlds, not settle down in a front office job in a minor league city. 

Joe is back in his boyhood hometown, Riverside, now strangely relocated in the Midwest. It might be that a new hand has taken up the pen behind the pseudonym and didn’t remember Riverside was in New England, or the marketing people at Cupples & Leon may have thought it better for circulation to locate in mid-America. 

Joe buys the franchise and finds three of his old Silver Star teammates still in the lineup. He encounters a new set of blackguards and reveals himself as a closet bigot. At one point he explains, about Moe Russnak, the book’s bad guy, “He’s a Jew that lives in Pentolia (rival city). Not that I have anything against him because of his race. Our shortstop, Levy, is a Jew and he’s as fine a fellow as there is on the team.” 

Having delivered himself of the classic brotherhood bromide, but not introduced Levy to his sister, Clara, who will wed Joe’s best friend, another WASP, Joe manages the team, in a non playing role, to the pennant. He then gives the franchise to his dependent father, whose patents have been stolen again and again during the series, and his brother-in law, Mabel’s brother, Reggie Varley. 

The series might have ended at that point, but someone decided, in 1928, to bring Joe back to the major leagues, his arm restored. One can sense Lester Chadwick chafing at having to find more world and World Series-for his protagonist to conquer. Possibly it crossed the author’s mind to have Baseball Joe tumble off Coogan’s Bluff, locked in combat with the book’s villain, as Conan Doyle, bored by the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, had se

In the end, Chadwick used a more appropriate means and more diabolical. He gave the plot a final twist by writing finis to a series with a climax that could never be exceeded in a subsequent book. 

Joe had purged baseball of two teammates who had accepted bribes from gamblers. Despite having to replace them with two untested rookies, the Giants win yet another pennant and provide Joe with an obligatory encore in the subsequent World Series. Baseball Joe’s readers know their hero will win; we read only to learn how he will do it this time. 

Joe is concerned about the two rookies who have replaced the crooked veterans. He worries how they will stand up to the pressure of championship games and fears they will embarrass themselves by making crucial errors on balls hit to them. Joe has the solution. He avoids the risk of shaky-handed fielders by not allowing the ball to be batted to them. His solution? He methodically strikes out all 27 batters as they come to the plate. 

If there’s to be a plaque honoring Baseball Joe Matson erected in the Baseball Hall of Fiction Fame, let it be noted that Joseph Matson, born in 1894, died of over-achievement in 1928. The series ended at that point. The books remained in circulation for a decade or more longer and still appear in secondhand bookstores. They are fun to read, loaded with historic detail and, if they were part of your own boyhood, leave you awash in nostalgia.