I deliberately passed Hoblitzell without even giving him a chance to hit at a single ball. It wasn't to make a grand stand play I did this, but because it was baseball. One run would win the game anyway, and, with more men on the bases, there were more plays possible. Besides Hoblitzell is a nasty hitter, and I thought that I had a better chance of making Mitchell hit the ball on the ground, a desirable thing under the conditions. "Now, Mike," urged Griffith, as Mitchell stepped up to the plate, "go as far as you like. Blot up the bases, old boy. This blond is gone." That sort of talk never bothers me. I had better luck with Mitchell than I had hoped. He struck out. The next batter was easy, and the Giants won the game in the tenth inning. According to the newspaper reports, I won twenty-one or twenty-two games before Cincinnati beat me again, so it can be seen that joshing in pinches is not effective against all pitchers. A manager must judge the temperament of his victim. But Griffith has never stopped trying to rag me. In 1911, when the Giants were west on their final trip, I was warming up in Cincinnati before a game, and he was batting out flies near me. He would talk to me between each ball he hit to the outfield. "Got anything to-day, Matty?" he asked. "Guess there ain't many games left in you. You're getting old." When I broke into the National League, the Brooklyn club had as bad a bunch of men to bother a pitcher as I ever faced. The team had won the championship in 1900, and naturally they were all pretty chesty. When I first began to play in 1901, this crowd--Kelly, Jennings, Keeler and Hanlon--got after me pretty strong. But I seemed to get pitching nourishment out of their line of conversation and won a lot of games. At last, so I have been told, Hanlon, who was the manager, said to his conversational ball players: "Lay off that Mathewson kid. Leave him alone. He likes the chatter you fellows spill out there." They did not bother me after that, but this bunch spoiled many a promising young pitcher. Speaking of sizing up the temperament of batters and pitchers in a pinch, few persons realize that it was a little bit of carelessly placed conversation belonging to "Chief" Bender, the Indian pitcher on the Athletics, that did as much as anything to give the Giants the first game in the 1911 world's series. "Josh" Devore, the left-fielder on the New York team, is an in-and-out batter, but he is a bulldog in a pinch and is more apt to make a hit in a tight place than when the bases are empty. And he is quite as likely to strike out. He is the type of ball player who cannot be rattled. With "Chief" Myers on second base, the score tied, and two out, Devore came to the bat in the seventh inning of the first game. "Look at little 'Josh,'" said Bender, who had been talking to batters all through the game.