Nothing pleased Cobb more, though, than the way he was able to handle the future Hall of Famer Walter Johnson, ace of the Washington Senators, the hardest thrower in the American League. After he noticed how upset the good-hearted Big Train got when he beaned batters, Cobb stood in against him as he did against nobody else, hunching over the plate and sticking his head into the strike zone. He could have gotten killed; instead, very often, he got walked.
But the Peach’s “pay attention” approach worked both ways. As much as he studied you he wanted you to think about him, so he could mess with your composure and your expectations, exploit your laziness or lack of focus, expose your particular and perhaps very personal fears. The hyperbolic sportswriters of the day credited Cobb with bringing psychology to a game previously packed with Bunyanesque bumpkins swinging rough-hewn clubs at saliva-sodden spheres—and hailed what he was doing as “scientific baseball.”
Or at least some of them did, some of the time. Journalistic standards were different then, and wildly inconsistent. Scandalous or embarrassing off-the-field incidents might be overlooked or played down as a favor to one of the participants. That Cobb’s mother had shot and killed his father a few days before Ty’s major league debut, that the minor league player the Tigers wanted over Cobb, Clyde Engle, was hampered by gonorrhea, that Cobb missed time early in the 1906 season because he had what was then called a nervous breakdown—such things were obscured by euphemisms if they were written about at all. In other cases, though, controversies might be concocted or exaggerated to please the sports editor and the reading public. Quotes were frequently manufactured, or so polished you could see the writer’s face in them; throw-pillow-worthy aphorisms and corny jokes, sometimes corny coon jokes, were credited to players who had never said such things, and almost everyone seems to have shrugged this off as just the way things worked.
On a slow news day, some of the same scribes who usually showered Cobb with hosannas might depict him as a maniacal base runner who preyed upon innocent infielders and hapless catchers with his feloniously filed spikes. His own hometown paper, the Detroit Free Press, once said that he was “dangerous to the point of dementia” (which is exactly what he wanted his opponents to think), and at least one editorial page writer opined in all seriousness that by tearing around the base paths in such an aggressive manner he was exacting revenge for General William Tecumseh Sherman’s bloody march through his beloved home state fifty-something years before.
The relationship between Cobb and cleated shoes, is, like most things Cobbian, complicated, and will be explored in greater depth, but let us say for now that Cobb denied the charges and many of his coevals backed him staunchly, saying he was merely playing the game the way it was meant to be played—and, by the way, so were they when they squashed their own spikes into his in-coming shins, ankles, and calves. “Cobb is a game square fellow who never cut a man with his spikes intentionally in his life, and anyone who gets by with his spikes knows it,” said Germany Schaefer, whose testimony must however be weighed against the fact that Cobb once gave him a $1,500 Chalmers sedan just because Schaefer, affecting ignorance of how things worked in the automobile age, asked Cobb if he might have it, since Cobb had two.
But whatever you called Cobb—sadist or scientist, cracker or Peach—he was unquestionably the biggest draw in baseball, the only player worth $100,000 to his team each season at the gate, in the opinion of the esteemed weekly Sporting Life (though he was never paid nearly that much). If one steers wide of the best-known biographies—Charles C. Alexander’s 1984 Ty Cobb and Al Stump’s 1994 Cobb, both of which tend to depict their subject as a crabbed, sad soul—and instead homes in on letters by and to Cobb, the testimony of eyewitnesses, and contemporary newspaper accounts, the reasons for his popularity quickly become obvious. “The greatness of Ty Cobb was something that had to be seen,” said George Sisler, a Hall of Famer who played from 1915 to 1930. “And to see him was to remember him forever.”
Even if we confine ourselves to 1911, a year so productive that you’d think it would contain a minimum of irregularities and distractions, colorful and controversial episodes abound.
Consider an incident that occurred at Detroit’s Bennett Park on May 12 of that year. The Yankees were in town on that unseasonably warm Friday. In the seventh inning, with his team down 5–3, Cobb came to bat with runners on first and second—and hit a line drive off “Slim” Caldwell that smacked against the wall of the left field bleachers for an opposite field double. (Cobb, though naturally right-handed, always batted left.) The man on second, Tex Covington, scored easily, but Donie Bush, the trailing runner, barely slid in safely under catcher Ed Sweeney’s tag. Not surprisingly, given the closeness of the play, Sweeney turned to the umpire and, said the New York Times, “began a protest” while “all the members of the infield flocked to the plate to help.”
In other words, in the heat of the moment the Yankees forgot that Cobb was standing on second.
Under such circumstances it is the custom of the base runner to sit down on the sack and wait for something to turn up [the Times continued]. But Cobb, observing that third base was unguarded, trotted amiably up there. No one saw him. So he tiptoed gingerly along toward the group at the plate. He did not come under the observation of the public until he was about ten feet from the goal all base runners seek, where for a few seconds he stood practically still, peering into the cluster of disputants before him, looking for an opening to slide through. He found one and skated across the plate with the winning run under the noses of almost the entire New York team, Sweeney touching him with the ball when it was too late.
It has been said by many that Cobb lacked a sense of humor, and he himself said, “I have never been able to see the humorous side of baseball,” but on the base paths he showed a brand of physical wit that sometimes made people laugh out loud. His Chaplinesque seventh-inning score that day in Detroit would put the Tigers ahead for good. It was the fourteenth time he had stolen home plate in his still young career, and the second time he’d done it that month. “When I am on the bases,” he said, “I try continually to get as close to the home plate as possible, overlooking no opportunity.” Mere inches meant a lot to him. As he waited on base for a teammate to take his licks, he would constantly kick the loose sacks of those days in the direction in which he was headed, trying to gain every possible advantage. Two months later, on July 12 in Detroit, Cobb would steal second, third, and home on three consecutive pitches by the A’s Harry Krause. “He was like compressed steam,” said his fellow American League star Eddie Collins, later a manager and team executive. “Cobb was always exerting pressure, always searching out a weak spot here and there to display his seemingly inexhaustible and tireless energy.” Casey Stengel said that Cobb was the only player he ever saw who could score from third on a weak infield pop-up—he would tag up, then break for home as soon as the fielder began to lob the ball back to the pitcher. “His constant chiding, deriding, tantalizing demeanor when on a base has done more to upset the morale of the opposing infield than the mere taking of forbidden sacks, costly as those usually prove to be,” wrote Sverre O. Braathen, in his 1928 book, Ty Cobb: The Idol of Baseball Fandom. General admission—50 cents—was still a half day’s pay for many Americans, and yet surely here was a man who was worth four bits to ogle.
• • •
If the first half of Cobb’s life were a novel it would be a ripping page-turner, at times almost too heavy on incident. Not long after the Yankees left town that spring on May 24, he was sitting in someone else’s car in Detroit’s Cadillac Square when he noticed, about 100 yards away, in front of the Pontchartrain Hotel, a man cranking up the black Chalmers 30 sedan that he had won for leading the league with a .383 batting average in 1910. As the thief, a nineteen-year-old named John Miles, hopped in and took off, Cobb pursued him on foot, caught the car, vaulted into the topless tonneau, and, according to the Atlanta Constitution, turned off the engine and “hurled the youth into the s
treet.” The next morning, after hearing out Miles’s sniffling bride of eight months, Cobb told a judge that “things had not been breaking well for the couple” and added, “I would be in favor of letting him go”—but the magistrate gaveled down his mercy plea, and ordered Miles to be arraigned.
Cobb—as surprising as it may sound to those who base their opinion of him on the ever-darkening myths that float through today’s popular culture—was not always the crankiest person in the room. The current-day conventional wisdom about him as encapsulated in the line mouthed by the Shoeless Joe Jackson character in the movie Field of Dreams—“No one liked that son of a bitch”—simply isn’t accurate. Many (including Jackson, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, and other greats of Cobb’s era) liked him, a lot. “He had his enemies, sure,” Lou Brissie, a major league pitcher in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and an acquaintance of Cobb’s, told me over lunch one day at a restaurant in downtown Augusta. “But with a man like Cobb, for most other guys on the team, it’s not a matter of like or dislike. He’s up there on another level, in terms of who he is in the world and how he thinks of himself and how he’s treated, the way Ruth and DiMaggio and Ted Williams later were. You might play ball with those guys every day, you might travel with them all over the country for years, but somehow you don’t think in terms of them being your friend. You didn’t think about how much you liked each other.”
Charles Alexander in his book tells us that Cobb usually got a warm welcome from opposing players, even if they were trying to hide their feelings of intimidation. “When Cobb came on the field,” he writes, “players on the other team would call out ‘Hello, Peach! How are you, Peach!’ and otherwise behave affably.” Cobb sometimes engaged with them, but on other occasions appeared aloof, as part of his nonstop psychological warfare. (“Baseball is 50 percent brain, 25 percent eye and 25 percent arm and leg,” Cobb said in 1912.) As a consequence of such behavior, some of his colleagues considered him a jerk. Heywood Broun, writing in the New York Morning Telegraph, said Cobb was “perhaps . . . the least popular player who ever lived” because “pistareen ball players whom he has shown up dislike him, third basemen with bum arms, second basemen with tender skins, catchers who cannot throw out a talented slider—all despise Cobb. And their attitude has infected the stands.”
And yet to many average fans, who did not feel competitive with him or threatened (or humbled) by his talent, he was simply an idol. They may have booed or feared him for the havoc he could wreak on their team. But they also sent him bushels of letters asking how they or their children might break into the game, or posed questions about hitting, fielding, or base running, And he almost always wrote back (eventually) in his trademark green ink with advice, and sometimes a pamphlet full of pointers he’d worked up for a sporting goods company, and sometimes a picture. Occasionally he would apologize for sending two pictures when the writer had only requested one, and he never failed to mention how flattered he was when someone asked for his autograph. The recipients of these letters would treasure them for the rest of their lives, and pass them along as family heirlooms. Ty Cobb was a deep pool of brackish water. The son of a bitch had many partisans.
• • •
That Cobb fans would come to number in the millions was made certain by an accident of timing. He wasn’t just the most super of the sports superstars; he was also, chronologically, the first. Cobb became the biggest draw in baseball—surpassing Honus Wagner, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajoie, and Christy Mathewson—just as the game was becoming, as Steven A. Riess tells us in his important book Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era, “an integral part of American life and not just a frivolous misuse of valuable time better spent in more gainful pursuits.” According to the myths fashioned by the magnates who owned the teams in the early 1900s, passed along by the journalists eager to justify their existence and slurped up by an increasingly sports-mad public, baseball built character by stressing team play, fast thinking, and acceptance of authority in the form of the fallible but ultimate ump. It also supposedly encouraged civic pride, discouraged juvenile delinquency, and helped the immigrants of the Great Wave to assimilate. In the popular imagination, or at least in the mind of newspaper editorial writers, it functioned, somehow, as a safeguard of democracy. In 1907 the New York Evening World’s Allen Sangree wrote, “As a tonic, an exercise, a safety valve, baseball is second only to death as a leveler. So long as it remains our national game, America will abide no monarchy, and anarchy will be slow.”
To be widely recognized as the greatest living master of this still new, nation-saving art put the young outfielder in a position of power without precedent. No wonder President William Howard Taft went in for the man-hug whenever he shook Cobb’s hand, and tried desperately to bond with the ballplayer over their connection to Augusta, where the bumbling one-term Republican sometimes summered. In the rapidly evolving popular culture, a radical possibility had come to pass: that under certain circumstances, an athlete could eclipse a sitting U.S. president. Indeed, when Cobb started touring with The College Widow some sportswriters speculated that what we were seeing was merely the second chapter in the life of a Renaissance Man, and that Cobb would conquer the stage the way he had conquered baseball and move on from there to God knows what—maybe medicine, the field his father had wanted him to pursue, or driving in auto races, which was something he frequently talked about doing—before finally deciding to settle down and perhaps even be president. Baseball was the bee’s knees, people felt, but baseball couldn’t hold him. It was to check out the rumor that he might soon “desert the dusty diamond to join the high-brow contingent and tread the Thespian boards” that the Atlanta Constitution sent Howell Foreman to interview Cobb backstage on a Saturday night in November of 1911.
Cobb found Foreman sitting in his dressing room when he rushed back during the first act to make a quick costume change—and he was too polite to turn the eager young reporter away. “He greeted me,” Foreman wrote, “with a broad beaming smile showing that he was trying to say ‘Glad to see you.’ ” (Note the “trying.”) When Harry Matthews, the big Albany (Georgia) Baby, appeared moments later, Cobb shook his hand and told him to have a seat, then, Foreman wrote, “he hooked on a ‘ready-made’ white bow, and ran out of the door. He went on stage, had a few dances with ‘the widow’ at the faculty reception, and in five minutes came back in the room.” Surveying the scene warily, Cobb said, “Well, I won’t have anything to do for a while yet . . .” and indicated he could chat some. But when the second act started and his visitors stayed put, he was forced to change costumes in tight quarters and endure Foreman’s Chinese water drip of questions while keeping an ear cocked for his cues.
“How do you like this acting business, Mr. Cobb?”
“Oh, it’s very good. I just started this show in September, you see, so I haven’t had so much experience. [But] I never get nervous on stage; I didn’t even have the stage fright the first night. Of course, I felt a little funny when the time came for to hug the widow and me, a married man, but I got away with it. I like the soft stuff, the loving business, better than the rough stuff. I’ve had more experience, you know.”
Missing Cobb’s amusing self-reference, Foreman plunged ahead: “Mr. Cobb, do you ever get this horsehide-pigskin-buckskin business mixed up?”
“Nope. I manage to get along all right, I think; but of course, that’s for you fellows in the audience to judge. I can’t tell whether I’m getting ’em mixed up or not.”
“How does Mrs. T. R. Cobb like this love-making part of the play?”
“Oh, she doesn’t like this acting business much anyway. I don’t guess she likes me making love to others even on the stage.”
Once or twice, no doubt because of the conditions in his dressing room, Cobb missed a cue, Foreman wrote, and “the hoarse voice of the stage manager bellowed forth from behind the scenes.” Then Cobb, with a whispered “Excuse me,” would dash out to dance with a roomful
of adoring coeds, or converse with his stern stage dad, or perform a love scene with the woman who played the temptress. At one point in the third act, after again begging his guests’ indulgence, Cobb left to jog in the corridor, so as to appear breathless from making his crucial touchdown. When he returned, Foreman was finally ready to broach the subject of whether Cobb was going to quit the green pastures of baseball for—one can imagine him making a sweeping gesture to indicate the smoky, windowless room full of mirrors and face paint and tedious visitors—“all this.”
Cobb shook his head. “Give me baseball every time,” he said. “This acting stuff is just the same thing over and over again. There’s no excitement to it. But in baseball, ah! That’s different. Baseball always excites me. Every day there’s something new to learn, something else to see. You never can tell just what’s going to happen. I can’t to save my neck sit still in a ball game. Give me baseball every time.”
• • •
Two decades later, retired and with no formal connections to the game, he had changed his mind. In a radio interview with an old friend, the sportswriter Grantland Rice, that was recorded in the early 1930s, he spoke of being thoroughly tired of baseball. “It’s a great game,” he said, “but I feel like a prisoner who’s been set free.”
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