He was 25–6 with a 1.14 ERA in 1909, then 27–9 and 1.89 in 1910. He kept winning at least twenty games a season thirteen years in a row, right on through 1914, when he was thirty-three, and then, just like that, his arm seemed to wear out overnight. But for all Matty’s personal success, he in particular and McGraw and the Giants continued to be dogged by the most incredible bad luck. Starting with Merkle’s lapse, fate seemed almost whimsical for the team. The Giants, though, in good times and the few bad times, remained the crown jewel of baseball—“the most spectacular team,” the Tribune rhapsodized, “whose fame has been sung in every household from Father Fan to Jimmy and Johnny and the rest of the male brood, as they lugged to their breasts their first baseball bats.” In another vein, Harry Golden, famous for his Only in America, would reminisce: “The Giants represented the New York of the brass cuspidor—that old New York which was still a man’s world before the advent of the League of Women Voters; the days of swinging doors, of sawdust on the barroom floor and of rushing the growler.”
