The two pitchers were old by baseball standards. They were yesterday’s heroes. Christy Mathewson was 36 and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown was a month shy of 40. Mathewson had been a star with the New York Giants and Brown with the Cubs and they had faced each other two dozen times over the years. Mathewson won 13 and Brown 11 of those games, and in one 1905 game, Mathewson threw a no-hitter and Brown allowed only one hit on his side, but it scored the run that beat him.

One hundred years ago today, the two legendary pitchers faced each other one final time. It was each man’s last game in Major League Baseball. Brown had announced his retirement (he continued pitching in the minor leagues into his 40s, though) and Mathewson had taken a new job: after 15-plus seasons pitching for the New York Giants, the Giants manager John McGraw allowed him to sign with the Cincinnati Reds as that team’s manager. Mathewson postponed his retirement from pitching for one last game and as manager assigned himself the start of the second game of a double-header against his old rival, Brown.

The game was played in Chicago, at Weeghman Park, which is now known as Wrigley Field. The newspaper ads were large (above) even though they were for a late-season game between two teams with losing records, but this was because history was going to be glimpsed one last time. (The ad also explains Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown’s famous nickname. He had lost his right index finger in a farming accident when he was a child. That half-finger gave him a wicked curve ball.)
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The Most Serene Republic of San Marino, a nation of about 30,000 people surrounded by Italy, celebrates its founding today. A constitutional republic since 1600, which is a fact that would mark it as one of the oldest nations in the world were it not for this: it dates its founding as a sovereign nation to September 3, 301 A.D., when it separated itself from the Roman Empire. It has been a nation for 1715 years since.

It is one of the most picturesque nations on our planet, as its 24 square miles sits in the Apennine Mountains with a view of the surrounding countryside. San Marino is the only nation with more cars than people.
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With an elusive specificity, Theodore Roosevelt always attributed his most famous statement to “Africa”—sometimes he introduced it with the statement that it was “a proverb you are all familiar with from West Africa” and sometimes he said it was a saying from South Africa.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far,” was the saying that he credited to ancients from a land far away. He started to use the phrase in correspondence as early as 1900, when he was governor, but on this date in 1901, Vice President Roosevelt used the phrase in a speech at the Minnesota State Fair entitled National Duties. President William McKinley was gunned down four days later and died eight days after that, so this speech was visited and re-visited by the media as the only exposition the public had of the new young president’s worldview.
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