Christy Mathewson — A Gentleman Among Giants

Christy Mathewson was born in Factoryville in eighteen eighty and grew up to become one of the most celebrated pitchers in the history of baseball. He attended Keystone Academy here and then Bucknell University, pitching his way onto the New York Giants by nineteen hundred.

Over his career he won three hundred seventy-three games, a National League record that still stands among the all-time greats. He was known not only for his fastball and famed fadeaway pitch but for his conduct: in the rough-and-tumble early decades of professional baseball, Mathewson was considered a gentleman, and that reputation mattered enormously to the sport's public image. He served overseas in World War One, where exposure to chemical weapons left lasting damage to his health. He died in nineteen twenty-five. In nineteen thirty-six, he was enshrined as one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.