First Base Faulkner

by Christy Mathewson

Excerpt from First Base Faulkner

Gus, a small, crabbed-looking negro, was load ing a huge sample-trunk into a ramshackle dray when discovered.

344 pages, Paperback

Published August 24, 2018

About the author

Christy Mathewson played for the New York Giants from 1900 to 1916. He was one of the most dominant baseball pitchers of all time, ranking in the all-time top ten in several different categories including wins, shutouts, and ERA.

In 1918 he joined the army to serve in World War I but was accidentally gassed during a training exercise and developed tuberculosis. Mathewson never fully recovered his health and died in 1925 at the age of forty-five.

In 1936 he was named as one of the first five players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, alongside Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth.

Reviews

[J. Boo · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the death of his father, a man of more limited income and larger debts than his wife believed, Faulkner is sent to live with his mother's spinster sister, Aunt Sarah, to finish up high school, while his mom works as a cleaning lady in a hotel. He befriends the local athletes, founds a business with a friend, joins the baseball team, and has himself a pretty good chase sequence. Reasonable fare for a boy's sports book.

But this is an unusually good one. The writing is very solid, the characters are not cardboard cutouts, and Our Hero doesn't wow the universe with his multisport talent. He's a decent baseball player - not, by any means, the star of the team - and spends a fair amount of time on the bench. Moreover, his rival - in lesser hands than Matthewson's, the expected ascot-twirling villain of the piece - has his own good qualities..

I looked up the author, and was surprised to learn that Christy Mathewson was an exceptional baseball player, one of the first five admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and regarded by all and sundry as a fine Christian gentleman. Mathewson wrote a newspaper column, and seems to have authored his books himself. And this feels, in fact, like the kind of book that a really nice guy, gifted at both baseball and story-telling, would have written.

Available on Gutenberg, as are a few more of Mathewson's books. Even though I'm no fan of baseball, I'll be reading him again.

[Steve Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘FirstBase Faulkner’ is a simple tale of a 16 year old boy who is uprooted from his home and goes to live with his aunt. In his new town, he makes new friends, starts his own business, and joins the high school baseball team. A myriad of adventures, mishaps, and triumphs ensue. This is one of a series of books supposedly written by the great Hall of Fame pitcher, Christy Mathewson. However, his books were most assuredly ghostwritten, this one by John Wheeler. Copyrighted in 1916, the appeal for the modern reader is that it transports you back in time. Meant for young readers in its day, the language, the settings, and the characters all combine to make this a pleasurable read for anyone. This edition has 328 pages of story text.