Frierson keeping Christy Mathewson's story alive

Aug. 6—In late May, Eddie Frierson got the invitation for which all stage actors pine.

The road called. The venue booked. And for a few hours a night during a three-show run, he got to tell an idol's story again.

Frierson got to be Christy Mathewson.

He took the stage at the Cambria Center for the Arts bringing the award-winning one-man show — "Matty: An Evening With Christy Mathewson" — and the life story of the Factoryville legend to an oceanside California village known best as the home of the lavish Hearst Castle. Before he did so, though, the show's longtime director, Kerrigan Mahan, urged him to "revisit the script."

"I'm like, 'Really?'" Frierson laughed during a telephone interview last week. "I've been doing this the same way for 27 years."

Things change in show business, of course.

They don't with Mathewson, the beloved right-hander who won 373 major league games between 1900 and 1916 and remains — for good reason — one of baseball's most revered legends.

Frierson returns to the area for the first time in five years to perform as Mathewson in "Matty" at 7 p.m. on Friday night at the Theater in Brooks at Keystone College. Donations will be accepted, but admission is free. While the show will offer a bit of a new look to those Mathewson fanatics who frequented his more regular past performances in the area, Frierson stressed that one thing remains vital.

This is still the same story of a man who lived an impactful, if all-too-short, life. And, now more than ever, it's important to remember the quality of the man that lived it.

Frierson's name is established in show business. His voice can be heard in films like "Wreck-It Ralph," "Hotel Transylvania" and even "Moneyball." He is a television veteran, too, securing a recent role as a play-by-play announcer on the newly released "A League of Their Own" series, 35 years after he played a bar patron that swindled several free birthday beers from bumpkin bartender Woody Boyd on an episode of Cheers.

Mathewson's story always stood as his passion project.

Entranced by the contents of a Mathewson-penned baseball tutorial book, "Pitching In a Pinch," Frierson received from his father, he embarked on a road trip of the east coast that started in 1984 and took him from his native Nashville through the southwestern Pennsylvania backroads to places like Mathewson's college campus at Bucknell and Factoryville, meeting Mathewson family members along the way.

Transfixed enough with the story to pen the one-man show, "Matty" had long runs in Los Angeles and off-Broadway in New York City. National Public Radio labeled it one of the 10 best shows of the New York theater season when it debuted in 1996.

"For me, this has always been about Christy," Frierson said. "This can be a difficult sell for people, right? You can say it's a one-person show. But then... 'Well, who is it?' Eddie Frierson. 'OK, who's he, and who's he portraying?' Christy Mathewson. 'So, who's she?' There's always a lot of questions people ask instead of, 'Is it good?'

"But the thing that ends up happening, when you're in New York or when you run for nine months in L.A., word of mouth gets out there and people who don't usually go to the theater come out to see the show. ... It is good theater. It is guaranteed great fun and entertainment. When you say it's free admission, sometimes people see that and think there's no value in that. But there's tremendous value here. This is a gift from the people of Factoryville to everyone in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area."

Event organizers booked Frierson to perform the play as the highlight to Factoryville's Christy Mathewson Days celebration last year. But an illness prevented him from making the cross-country trip.

That disappointed plenty in the Factoryville community who made a somewhat yearly viewing of Frierson's performance a tradition.

To them, it's now more about keeping Mathewson's story alive.

"I always thought it would be nice if we could get some people here who have not seen it before," said Factoryville's Dave Gower, one of the event's promoters who has seen the show often. "It's like being transmitted back in time to the early 1900s. It's taking you through a history lesson. It will make you more aware of Christy Mathewson, who he is, how great he was as a baseball player, and also who he was as a person, which is really an amazing thing once you start studying him."

The slightly reworked "Matty" script might be in line for a pretty good run from here. Frierson said there has been discussion about a return to Cooperstown for another retelling of the show that be performed several times at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. There's even a chance it could wind up securing another New York City run, he added.

Still, Factoryville ranks among his top destinations for a reason.

Everywhere else, he wants Christy Mathewson to mean more. Here, he already does, to baseball fans in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton to Honesdale, where he learned his famous fadeaway pitch while playing ball on the silk mill flats.

"The show is all about connecting communities," Frierson said. "And that's still what Christy Mathewson does, 100 years later."

DONNIE COLLINS is a sports columnist for The Times-Tribune. Contact him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com and follow him on Twitter @DonnieCollinsTT.