Matty’s Gas Training: Two Certified Schedules From Christy Mathewson’s Own Collection

Christy Mathewson won 373 games and became one of the first great stars of baseball. Then he left the Reds late in the 1918 season to enlist, and he served in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, the unit nicknamed the Gas and Flame Division. These two original, certified schedules come from his personal collection and document that training in detail: respirator drills, gas chamber exercises, and shell identification. They show that Mathewson earned his gas mask certification on November 3, 1918, one day before a week-long defense course began, just days before the Armistice on November 11 ended the fighting.

The story most people know is that Mathewson was accidentally exposed to poison gas during training, that the exposure weakened his respiratory system, and that he contracted the tuberculosis that killed him at 45 in Saranac Lake in 1925. The truth is more complicated, and the schedules don’t settle it. Mathewson himself said in 1923 that he got only a few sniffs of gas in France, and Army doctors at the time thought his tuberculosis came from influenza. A 1920 affidavit also claims he was frequently exposed while demonstrating gases at instruction schools, and that he was gassed during a later assignment with the 28th Division. That makes these papers valuable. They aren’t proof of how Mathewson got sick, but they put you in the room with him in the final days of the war, doing the training that sits at the center of one of the most talked-about questions in baseball history.