The Chicago Cubs: Our Team, Our Dream: A Cubs Fan's Journey Into Baseball's Greatest Romance Book

It's worth a read if only because Mathewson was one of the five original inductees into the Hall of Fame. Seib makes the case that Mathewson and baseball paralleled, and slightly led, the American character's development in the first twenty years of the 20th century, and he makes it well.

I just wish there had been more to the book - a more thorough picture of Mathewson's life. Starting with a scant 170 pages, he devotes as much time to the atmosphere around Mathewson as to the man himself, including short excursions into the life of hockey player Hobey Baker and the writing of Edith Wharton, as two for-examples. So we're left very few in-the-game stories, and the 1905 World Series, in which Mathewson won three games, is a page or two. Their three successive World Series losses in 1910-1912 are treated as one event mentioned in little more than passing.

Part of Seib's challenge may have been that Mathewson led a pretty clean life, and there are no stories about what a character he was. Still, he was involved in many close games and many feats of renown that deserved more examination. And after all, the reader of this book is going to be a baseball fan. They're going to want lots of minutiae.