Town ball, which descended from another English game called rounders, and tended to look more like baseball, was flexible enough to accommodate as few as four and as many as twenty players per side, and allow between one and nine outs per half inning. It borrowed from cat the concept of soaking the (of course, helmetless) runner, as opposed to throwing to a baseman who would execute a force-out or tag. Said Cobb: “I became very proficient at dodging [and] I laid a foundation for my Major League career.” He would also note that Southern boys, who played a lot of cat and town ball, showed extraordinary “pepper” as big leaguers, simply because sampling the full spectrum of ball-and-stick games, and not worrying about being baseball purists, meant you “got on the field every day and got more exercise.”
Cobb got so much exercise as a kid that he looks, in team pictures from that era, as gaunt as an urchin out of Dickens. “I used to grind away at it from the time I got up in the morning until darkness put a stop to it, using every spare moment I could get when out of school,” he said. “I would play catch with every player who would condescend to notice me,” and when there was no one else around he would throw the ball against the brick wall of a building that housed a grocery store “with all the strength at my command, and catch it on the rebound.” Besides being skinny he was also strikingly short, especially for someone who would blossom into a six-footer; some people in Royston referred to him as “the midget.” At the age of eleven, when he held a marginal spot on the Rompers, a kind of junior varsity that served as a feeder for the “official” town team, the Royston Reds, he could barely lift the bats that Joe Cunningham’s father, William, the local coffin maker and the Cobbs’ next-door neighbor, fashioned for him and his own son from scrap wood—though Ty cherished those big black bolts of mountain ash nevertheless.
Marching down Main Street with his casket-shard propped against his shoulder and his fancy, store-bought mitt dangling from the knob, Cobb was a relatively carefree child. He always was, he said, notably “timid around adults,” to the point where some people thought they detected a slight stammer in his speech, and he could be cocky with his peers in a way that led to frequent combat, yet on the whole Ty seem to have been well adjusted and popular, perhaps because he was, even then, so darn entertaining.
In his highly fictionalized 1994 biography of Cobb—which is not to be confused with the highly fictionalized autobiography he wrote in partnership with the dying Cobb in 1961—the sportswriter Al Stump says that the thirteen-year-old Tyrus once walked across a high wire strung twenty feet above Royston’s Main Street by a traveling circus. That may not be true—Stump sources the story to a newspaper that did not exist at the time, and it appears nowhere else in the Cobb literature—but it was indeed the kind of thing the young Cobb might do to amuse himself and onlookers. He was a fun-loving kid who liked an audience to amaze with physical feats. In Royston, playing baseball was a good way to get one. One day in the spring of 1894 or so, Amanda Cobb looked out her kitchen window and saw Tyrus and a bunch of Negro boys merrily hauling a cart laden with scrap metal, broken furniture, and other things they’d found in backyards and vacant lots around town. They were headed toward the junkyard to try to make a few dollars, and Mrs. Cobb knew for what. “He was always thinking up ways of earning money to buy baseball supplies,” she would tell a writer for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Sunday Union and Republican in 1928. “He was always playing when he was a child. In fact, we had a hard time getting him to go to school. I remember that the first money he earned he spent for a mitt. He couldn’t have been more than six years old when a neighbor asked him to take his cow to the pasture and gave Ty some change for doing it. Ty didn’t buy candy or ice cream. He knew what he wanted, and he got it—a baseball glove.
“He must have been thinking baseball all the time,” she went on, “because when he wasn’t actually playing, he was swinging his arms about as he threw or caught an imaginary baseball. I can remember seeing him on the way home from school, fanning the air the whole way. He played on all the school teams, whether he was asked to or not.”
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In later years—probably to burnish his image as a hero and a spokesman for his sport—he and his boosters went out of their way to note that his early encounters with the Negro race were either inconsequential or benign. A 1909 editorial in the Charlotte Observer said, “Cobb, born with the prominence that is universal among white persons in Georgia, sought no further prominence by buckshotting his compatriots. So far as is known, he never attended a lynching.” Faint praise indeed, but baseball was just as racist as the rest of the society. Just a few years earlier, in 1904, the supposedly saintly Christy Mathewson and his fellow New York Giants had taken a break from spring training in Birmingham, Alabama, to witness “the hanging of a negro murderer named Stone” at the invitation of the local sheriff, according to Sporting Life. Cobb’s own statements about black people can by today’s standards sound cliché or politically incorrect. In the 1952 newspaper interview in which he applauded the belated breaking of the color barrier in the Texas minor leagues, Cobb said, when asked about his own history with Negroes, “I like them. When I was little I had a colored mammy. I played with colored children.” On and off during his youth, Cobb worked alongside black men on the family farm, not as the owner’s son, he swore, but as just another laborer under the supervision of an elderly black man he called Uncle Ezra, a longtime Cobb family employee. In 1924, he told H. G. Salsinger, the sports editor of the Detroit News, that a black man (presumably not Ezra) had taught him to swim. Seeing that Ty was “timid of the water,” Salsinger wrote, the Negro told Cobb to climb on his back and brought him out to the middle of the swimming hole. “The negro swam about with Cobb’s arms around his neck, his legs pinned to his sides. He repeated this the next day, and the next. Then one day he carried Cobb to midstream on his back. There he made him release his hold. Cobb, forced to swim or sink, discovered he could swim.”
As idyllic as his days in Royston seemed to be, Ty was always delighted to visit Grandpa Johnnie, the antislavery Reb, in rural Murphy, North Carolina. For a while Tyrus went there each summer and on every winter school vacation, smuggling his dog, Bob, on the short train trip, though the conductors probably knew what was chuffing beneath the newspapers tented at Ty’s feet. Referring to the wintry landscape he had tramped in his own youth, W. H. Cobb wrote to his sorely missed son in January of 1902, “I am glad you have been receptive of its austere beauty and solemn grandeur. . . . That is a picturesque and romantic country with solitude enough to give nature a chance to be heard in the soul.” Perhaps, but what Ty liked best about Murphy was the action and the camaraderie. Grandpa Johnnie took him on hunting trips for small game like possum and at night told him tales of big game, like “slavering” bears who stood twelve feet tall on their hind feet and showed their “corncob size” teeth. (“If I’d missed him, Tyrus, you wouldn’t be here today!”) Ty often came back with stories of his own. At his grandfather’s urging he wrote up “Possums and Myself,” a true tale of treeing, shooting, and skinning an animal to make a “fine hat”; W.H. proudly ran it under Ty’s byline in the Royston Record.
Ty had some indoor adventures in North Carolina as well. Once, when he was about eleven, he accompanied Johnnie Cobb to Asheville, where the “squire” was serving as the foreman of the county grand jury in a civil matter, probably a dispute over land. When the verdict was announced by his grandfather, the loser in the case ran up and grabbed Johnnie by the shirt, an act that caused Ty to also come charging out of the audience and attempt to boot the man in the shins. The angry litigant, unaware of what a pair of Cobb-kicked pants might bring one day on the memorabilia market, swatted him away, but when he turned back to Johnnie Cobb the squire had drawn his pistol. “Be on your way,” Ty’s grandpa said, and the man left peaceably.
On the trip back to Murphy, Ty may well have gotten a lecture about the dangers of impulsive behavior, but like many children before and since, he suffe
red few consequences for the indiscretions he committed while in his grandparents’ care. Nor did John and his wife, Sarah, monitor how much ball he played, an increasingly significant issue at home as he grew older. During his summer stays, Cobb’s Aunt Norah (his father’s youngest sister), a “wonderful woman,” according to Cobb, would drive him in a horse-drawn buggy to the equivalent of Little League games around Murphy, where the preference was still for town ball. As the perennial new kid, Cobb was always at risk for a particularly hard plugging and he seems to have accepted pain and the occasional minor concussion as the price of admission. In his 1961 autobiography, Cobb told about a Murphy-area game in which he hit a hopper back to the box, then tore down the line toward first base, screaming all the way in anticipation of the soaker that was surely coming. He awoke moments later with his head in Aunt Norah’s lap and her handkerchief in his ear to staunch the blood flow. (Just as he wasn’t always the grouchiest person in the room, he was not always the orneriest player on the field. A medical student who saw his naked corpse laid out on a gurney just after he died in 1961 noted that it was covered with knots, dents, scars, and lumps, the souvenirs of soakings, spikings, beanballs, and falls caused by strategically discarded catcher’s masks, and hip checks from shortstops as he rounded second base. The game—the world—was different then.)
Hits were hard to come by when the midget started out—a right-hander who batted left, perhaps because it gave him a two-step head start toward first, or because most pitchers are right-handed; it seems that no one ever asked him, and he never addressed the issue, so we’ll never know for certain why. (When questioned on this topic by your author, Yogi Berra, another righty who hit left, said that if he himself ever had had a particular motivation for switching over he’d forgotten it—“I guess it was something a lot of kids just did back then,” he said, though his “back then” was forty years after Cobb’s.) Too proud to go back to the silly-looking elongated paddles he had first used for bats, and too weak to get around like the big boys with his hefty “custom made” models, Cobb was at first of no real use to the Rompers, who may have taken him on as a benchwarmer, solely for his skill at making baseballs, or, to be precise, ball cores. Every so often, he would deliver a batch of the stringy things to another boy on the Rompers who couldn’t play very well, either, but could cut and sew leather, Cobb said, “as well as a harness maker” and thus was adept at stitching on the tanned horsehide used for covers. The system worked well enough—until the day a classmate noticed Cobb winding string beneath his school desk (again), and, still ticked off about a soaking Ty had given him in a game of town ball, tattled to the teacher. Cobb remembered getting “a whipping in front of the whole school,” after which his ball core production dropped dramatically. Clearly, he had to look for other ways to make himself valuable to the Rompers. For a while, he served as the designated retriever of foul balls, a chore that kept him close to the action, and technically on the team, yet only made him appear more pathetic. When he tried to talk his way into the lineup, pointing out to the manager and some of the more influential players that in Carnesville, the town where he had lived previously, he had made the first string at the age of nine, “they just laughed at me,” Cobb recalled.
If you understood the pecking order of north Georgia town teams of that era, you’d know why. Though roughly the same size in terms of population, Carnesville was the bushes compared to Royston, where a number of well-paid mercenaries played for the men’s squad, the Reds, and minor league scouts regularly came through on the Elberton Air Line Railroad to see, in the parlance of the trade, “if there was anything in the lake.” The team wore bright red suits and, said Cobb, “Believe me, whenever the Royston club went on the field they attracted attention—you could see that club a mile.” In a 1904 article, the Augusta Chronicle commended Royston, about seventy miles to the northwest, for its “push and pluck” as compared to other Franklin County whistle-stops and noted that it was “baseball crazy.” Partly because some of the choicest spots on the senior squad were taken by semiprofessionals, both the Rompers—who billed themselves as “the little potatoes that are hard to peel”—and Reds were tougher to make than your average small-town team, but the accomplishment was correspondingly more meaningful, a rosette on the résumé of anyone who wanted to go further in the game.
Cobb said that “so great was my anxiety to play” for Royston that he spent many hours concocting a methodical make-or-break plan. Though he was not especially fleet of foot, “How to Sprint,” a 25 cent pamphlet he saw advertised in the back of The Police Gazette, would help him run the bases, he believed, if he could ever figure out a way to get on in the first place. As for his defensive ability, that would be aided immeasurably, he felt, by trading in his tattered and freakish homemade leather fielder’s glove (“A disgrace,” he called it, “something betwixt a catcher’s mitt and a first baseman’s glove”) for a model that he had seen at the local dry goods store and had decided that “I couldn’t live without.” How he managed the $1.25 purchase price is, among Cobb scholars, such as they are, a matter of dispute. His mother, as noted, said he saved up the pennies he made in the junk business to buy it, but in the only slightly reliable Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball, Cobb says that he stole two “expensive” volumes from his father’s library and traded them for the mitt. (Why didn’t he just ask his parents for the money? In still other versions of the tale, he does, but W.H., who was starting to worry that his eldest boy was devoting too much time to baseball and not thinking seriously enough about the University of Georgia—or the other schools W.H. thought he might be able to help get him into, West Point and Annapolis—responded with a firm no.) Cobb goes on to suggest in My Life that he was punished for the theft after it was discovered, but he doesn’t say how severely. (A severe punishment for the Cobb boys in those days was being made to muck out the several cow stalls on the fifty-two-acre farm W.H. maintained just outside the Royston town limits.) In his 1994 biography of Cobb, however, Stump, without saying how he came upon the new information, or even acknowledging that he was changing his story, says that Ty earned the money for the new mitt by baling hay.
• • •
Transforming himself into a consistent hitter was Ty’s toughest task, as it would be for almost anybody. Hitting is a mysterious skill. Some seem to be born with the gift. Some hit well until they reach a certain level of organized baseball, at which point they stop suddenly, confounded by the curveball or fear of success (see Billy Beane in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball). Whether a coach can make a weak hitter or headcase into more of an offensive threat remains an open question—note that Dusty Baker’s 1992 treatise is not called How to Hit Better, but, rather defensively, You Can Teach Hitting. Ted Williams liked to talk about hitting and cheerfully told many young players that their approach was “horseshit.” In 1984, Williams published The Science of Hitting, a book that collects his primary thoughts on the subject, and which still sells fairly briskly. But whether Williams ever actually improved anyone’s batting average is debatable. His book, like the works of Stephen Hawking, is probably more dusted than read. Most struggling hitters feel their way is best, for them at least, and wish to be left alone so they can further ingrain the habits that have not served them well.
For hitters, advice, like grappa, is always taken with a premonition of regret. The esteemed baseball writer Roger Angell, when interviewed for this book, remembered how Rod Carew had once complained to him that he was deeply frustrated as a hitting instructor for the Minnesota Twins because players were reluctant to change the techniques they had been using since Little League—even though their numbers were anemic, and the doctor sent to cure their ills, Carew, had a pleasant plateside manner, and a career batting average of .328. It just may be that when it comes to hitting, people either teach themselves—the way Williams (a .344 lifetime hitter, and by the way another righty who hit left) did—or they don’t learn. As the author of The Science of Hitting felt compelled to admit in a
n early chapter, one of the best pieces of baseball advice he ever got was from Cobb’s friend Lefty O’Doul, who, when Williams, then a Pacific Coast Leaguer, approached him for tips, said, “Son, whatever you do, don’t let anybody change you.”
Cobb changed himself dramatically as a hitter in the early months of 1898. “I had the gift of being able to appraise myself, even at that age [twelve],” he said two decades later. “It has been the greatest asset of my life.” All of his life, in articles and after-dinner introductions, people would describe Cobb as “a natural,” thinking they were paying the supreme compliment—and he would respond that he was anything but. A natural, he would say, is someone like his friend Shoeless Joe Jackson. “Joe just busts ’em,” Cobb said, “and hopes for the best.” (Those hopes were often realized; Jackson, yet another left-handed batter who threw righty, hit .356 for his career.) Cobb would over time refine and trick out his approach to batting, adding, among other things, foot fakes meant to deceive the catcher, bursts of chatter, and—this was his true brilliance—a way of carrying himself that clearly conveyed that he was the pitcher’s problem to solve, and not the reverse. But in his desire to gain a spot on the Royston Rompers, Ty tried to put aside all impulses to employ “psychology.” He suppressed the urge to imitate the swaggering older boys—and reinvented himself as kind of rudimentary hitting machine, the patent application for which might say “A device for poking baseballs into unoccupied portions of the playing field.” His only desire was to make contact with the ball and reach base safely; how he looked doing it didn’t matter.
What he did was simple and straightforward. (“Ah, please never forget,” Christopher Hitchens wrote, “how useful the obvious can be.”) Ty’s first adjustment was to choke up severely on the bat and employ what he called “a snap swing.” Because there are only a few seconds of film showing Cobb at bat, we can only assume this looked the way it sounds—a short, fast swipe meant to put the ball just beyond the reach of an infielder. “I don’t recall whether it was by accident or study that I developed [the snap swing],” Cobb said. But “after that the pitchers never fooled me much.” Facing right-handers he stood far forward in the batter’s box, believing this allowed him to strike a curveball before it broke. Against southpaws he did the opposite, setting up as far back as possible so he could hit the ball post-break. (Many other players from the deadball era employed a variation on the snap swing, but virtually no one else moved around the box the way he did.)
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