Cobb’s other modification, the split-hands grip, for him a necessary and inseparable part of the snap swing, was, despite what some people think, not borrowed from Honus Wagner, who, though twelve years older than Cobb, was in 1898 still an obscure shortstop with the Louisville Colonels of the National League, and thus unknown to most people outside Kentucky. In later years, Cobb liked to note that he and Wagner, by then a Pittsburgh Pirates star, were leading their respective leagues with a technique considered by most instructional books to be as sacrilegious as the headfirst slide. The split grip, however, was merely a starting position that let a hitter make a last-second decision to slide the lower hand upward or the upper hand down toward the knob—to place the ball, Wee Willie Keeler–style, “where they ain’t,” or drive it for distance. His new swing allowed Cobb to meet the ball in front of the plate, where he could almost but not quite see it making contact with his bat; as a result, he seldom swung and missed. “I did not have the physical prowess to drive the ball far,” he said of those early times, “but I would usually keep my strikeout record down to two, three or possibly four times a season.” He swore that one year, over the course of the 25- to 30-game town league season, he avoided strikeouts completely.
Cobb’s revised approach to hitting, coupled with a simultaneous growth spurt that added about four inches in height, as well as about twenty pounds in weight, did for him more or less what the devil did for Robert Johnson, down at the crossroads. No records of the Royston teams have survived, and remembered accounts get muddled, but it appears that a few games into his 1898 season with the Rompers, the shortstop on the Reds was injured in a farming accident, or had to go buy a mule or something, and the twelve-year-old Cobb got called up to the town team, where some of the players were in their twenties and several of the ringers were understood to be thirty or older. They needed a shortstop, and Ty, who had started out as a catcher and subsequently played every position except pitcher for the Rompers, was more than willing to give it a try. This was a bold and risky move, though. The Reds, after all, were an elite group, having already produced, in the person of Thomas Vandiver “Van” Bagwell, a pitcher who’d been given a tryout with the Nashville Volunteers of the revered Southern League.
The Royston Reds “were regular demigods to me,” Cobb said in 1913, but the admiration wasn’t mutual. “Come back when you grow up a little!” the older players told him when he first reported for duty with his big black bat. “Where’s his nurse?” someone shouted from the stands. “Have you got his milk bottle in that grip?” Cobb, ultrasensitive to any slight, even then, remembered that taunt for the rest of his life (“Unfortunately,” he once noted, “it is a human trait to remember the unkind things after the nice ones are forgotten”), but he didn’t act on it, as he would act on—and overreact to—so many insults and perceived insults in the years ahead. Like Joe Gans, the crackerjack lightweight champ of that era, he was willing to take a few shots to get inside. “I was met with parental opposition and rebuffs from managers and players,” he said, “and I permitted nothing to swerve me from that determination.”
Yet even in the faster company of the Reds, he stood out from the start, not just for his ability to get hits, but also for his base running and fielding. “When I was 12 years old I knew pretty well what I could do as a ballplayer,” he said at age thirty-nine. Besides the snap swing and split grip he now had confidence—by far the single most important attribute for any athlete, he would always maintain. (“He can conquer who believe they can,” Virgil told us.) When he talked to Stump for My Life in Baseball in 1960, Cobb recalled the moment that certified him as “a boy hero.” It happened in the ninth inning of a game against Elberton, when he came to bat with the score tied and a man on second. Stroking—or more likely poking—his third hit of the afternoon, and knocking in the winning run, he heard the cheers and felt “bewitched,” he said. Once a young man receives that kind of public adulation, Cobb noted on another occasion, “something happens in him.”
His fascination with fame was further inflamed by a letter Van Bagwell had sent, addressed to the Reds as a whole, from the Volunteers headquarters in Nashville. In it the blacksmith’s son spoke, Marco Polo–like, about his encounter with the colorful world of early organized baseball. He had seen in the flesh Davy Crockett—the one who played first base—as well as “Batty” Abbaticchio, “Deerfoot” Bay, “Hub” Perdue, “Snapper” Kennedy, “Scoops” Carey, “Punch” Knoll, and “Foxy” “Newt” “Ike” Fisher, the catcher who also served as the Vols’ manager, perhaps because he had the most nicknames. Bagwell wrote, Cobb said, “all about the professional league, how the players acted, what was expected of them, and so on. He told about the life in the hotels. Every line of this letter was fascinating. I read it and reread it. I didn’t realize it for a long time, but my future had been mapped out for me.” Although he was still too modest to think of the Southern League as being within his capabilities, or so he claimed, “nothing could keep me from satisfying my ambition of showing that I could be as good as any of them.”
• • •
Cobb joined the Reds during a period of great upheaval. Their new manager (and catcher), a bank clerk named Bob McCreary, had recently dismissed the ringers and added a residency rule—now you actually had to live in Royston to play on the team. But though the roster changed considerably, Cobb was still the youngest player on it—and the only one whose father wouldn’t allow him to travel for away games. Young Tyrus led a sheltered life; when he reached the Detroit Tigers at age eighteen he would be shocked by the coarse language he heard from the professional players. But it wasn’t just to shield him from the temptations of Elberton, Georgia, the “Electric City” of Anderson, South Carolina, or the other small towns the Reds visited that W.H. insisted he eschew road trips; it was to limit his playing time while simultaneously exposing him to more reputable professions. In 1898 or 1899, he arranged for Ty to visit Colonel W. R. Little, a prominent Carnesville attorney. The boy found the middle-aged man mildly amusing—“one of the old-fashioned barristers who grew his hair long,” he called him many years later—and he took him up on his offer to browse his library. But there was no initial chemistry between Cobb and the law. “I cracked those books three or four times and they were dry as hell,” he said in a 1958 interview with sports columnist Furman Bisher. “I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer.” At around the same time a group of Franklin County physicians, at the behest of the Professor, invited Ty to watch them perform an operation. The patient was a black teenager who had been shot by a white man under circumstances that Cobb didn’t mention. He said that at one point he was urged “to feel around inside” the young man’s intestines for the bullet, which he did without hesitation but also without luck, though the shooting victim survived. Cobb liked telling this story, to make the point that he was not squeamish about blood and guts, but the experience did not make him think seriously about medicine.
Ty also got a taste of farming in his youth, but that was out of necessity. W.H. needed help on his fifty-two acres, and as time went on Ty found the tasks not so distasteful. He liked the fresh air and sunshine, as well as being asked his opinion of which livestock to buy, and how much corn to plant in which field, and discussing with his father “the English import of cotton which competed with our Georgia output.” Cobb said “I never felt closer to [my father] than when he said of the cotton crop, ‘Do you think we should sell now or hold on for a better price?’ ” Even after W.H. relented, in Ty’s second season with the Reds, and allowed his son to travel with the team on the condition that manager McCreary, a fellow Mason, keep a fatherly eye on him, Ty found time for farmwork.
On January 5, 1904, when he was up at the place butchering hogs with Uncle Ezra, Ty managed to shoot himself with his “parlor rifle,” a .22 caliber firearm designed for indoor target practice at a gallery or arcade. The gun had been lying in a tangle of brambles, and when he picked it up a twig tripped the trigger. The bullet entere
d near the collarbone, and lodged in his left shoulder. Ezra provided first-aid, and although the wound was (as his father would write in a letter to his own parents several weeks later) “not much more than a big thorn scratch,” W.H. spirited Ty by train to Atlanta, where the hospitals had X-ray machines. The doctor there found the bullet on his film, and showed it to W.H., but suggested they take a wait-and-see approach, as probing might do more harm than the initial injury.
It was either on this trip, or more likely during a follow-up doctor’s visit in Atlanta several weeks later, that the Cobbs, père et fils, took in an exhibition game at Piedmont Park featuring the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern League versus the barnstorming Cleveland Naps, as the American League team was known in those days, after their second baseman Napoleon Lajoie. This was Ty’s first exposure to the conglomeration of commedia dell’arte troupes that was turn-of-the-century big league ball, and he was mesmerized. In addition to “The Frenchman,” the Naps that year featured the heedless headfirst slider Terry Turner, the convicted umpire beater Fritz Buelow (for “tuggling” an ump to the ground the previous season the German-born catcher had received a five-day suspension and a $10 fine), and Claude Rossman, an outfielder who had a psychological problem that prevented him from throwing the ball when he became excited. Every side, circa 1904, had its sideshow. During batting practice, Cobb went down to the field and asked the Naps’ Bill Bradley if he could take a snapshot of him; the brilliant third baseman—whose 29-game hitting streak of 1902 was a major league record until Cobb hit in 45 straight games in 1911—not only posed for the gangly, wide-eyed lad with the Pocket Brownie, he hung around and chatted. (“I kept those pictures until they turned to dust,” Cobb said.)
In some ways Cobb’s day at Piedmont Park resembles the portentous encounter between the sixteen-year-old Bill Clinton and President John F. Kennedy in 1963, or the famous photograph that captures a six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt staring out his Manhattan window at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortege. For here were players who would figure meaningfully in Cobb’s future: Lajoie, pitcher Addie Joss, and catcher “Handsome Harry” Bemis (who would three years later repeatedly beat Cobb over the head with a ball that Ty had just knocked from his hand while sliding in to complete an inside-the-park home run). The sight of the debonair Naps only made him yearn even harder for the baseball life. “Players in practice were performing wonderful antics,” he wrote in a serialized 1914 newspaper memoir. “I saw things that opened my eyes, that sowed in me the seeds of determination to emulate those major leaguers some day.” (The bullet, in case you’re wondering, remained permanently in Cobb’s body, and, although he later developed a hypochondriacal streak, caused no complaints beyond an occasional “burning sensation” on chilly mornings.)
As Ty passed through his teen years with the Royston Reds, it became increasingly clear that he was the best ballplayer anyone in that hotbed of baseball had ever stood and cheered for, better even than Van Bagwell (who returned to the Reds after getting a look-see from the Savannah Pathfinders). One day, in a game against Harmony Grove, when he was about sixteen, the locals effectively forced professionalism upon young Tyrus. After a rising line drive tipped off the glove of a fellow outfielder and Cobb, who’d been running for the same ball, made a fully extended flying catch “that all my life I have never thrilled to more,” a total of $11 in coins—about ten days’ pay for the average rural Georgian—came raining down upon the diamond, and he gathered them up gratefully. In its next edition, the Royston Record broke with its policy of ignoring sports and ran a page-one story about the game written by the editor, W. H. Cobb himself.
— CHAPTER FOUR —
THE VAUDEVILLE COMIC EDDIE CANTOR, born in 1892, once said that his grandmother employed “ballplayer” as a synonym for “lazy bum,” as in “Don’t lay around the house all day like a ballplayer.” To pack one’s pancake mitt and head toward a possible position with the Muncie Fruit Jars of the Interstate Association, the Des Moines Prohibitionists of the Western League, the San Jose Prune Pickers of the California League, or, as in Cobb’s case, the Augusta Tourists of the South Atlantic League, was tantamount to running off with the carnival in those days when almost no one asked an athlete for his autograph, and many big leaguers made only $1,800 for a season, or $2,000 if they kept their promise to stay sober—in other words, a romantic and often rebellious gesture that didn’t exactly enhance one’s bank account or reputation. Just as the thea-tah had long been a highbrow art form populated by randy vagabonds known as actors, baseball was a wholesome national pastime brimming with, as Cantor’s Grandma Iskowitz would say, ballplayers. One needs to remember that a father in 1904 was almost certainly pointing his son toward relative respectability and financial security when he steered the boy away from professional ball.
The conflict between Tyrus and his father over the former’s career choice should not be breezed by too quickly, but we oughtn’t make too much of it, either, as have others who wanted to paint W.H. as overly severe, and his children the damaged products of a dysfunctional hearth. The issue of Ty’s career path was ever-simmering in the Cobbs’ rented wood-frame home at 95 Franklin Springs Street, but the debate seems never really to have reached a rapid boil. Cobb wedged a reference to his father’s baseball phobia into almost every extended interview he ever did—to make the point, it seems, that he had a caring dad, and one who in his skepticism toward the then groundbreaking notion that a grown man could make a living playing a mere game, was typical of the times. “It has struck me as odd that of all the baseball autobiographies I have read not one of the successful players ever started out with the full consent of his father,” he said in 1925. “Parents are unanimously against baseball as a profession.” Indeed, Lawrence S. Ritter’s great oral history of the deadball era, The Glory of Their Times, begins with the story of Rube Marquard, who was born the same year as Cobb, telling his father that he wanted to become a ballplayer, and Papa Marquard belittling the idea and saying, “I don’t understand why a grown man would wear those funny-looking suits.” Young Rube had to sneak out of his house in Cleveland in the wee hours and hop a freight train to Iowa for a tryout. Later in the book, another masterful pitcher, Smoky Joe Wood, says that the only reason his father allowed him to attempt a career in baseball was that “it must have appealed to his sense of the absurd.”
If W.H.’s patience started to wear on occasion, it was because Tyrus was Yankee-pushy about his plans, going so far at age fifteen or sixteen as to accept $3 to play two games as a ringer for the Anderson, South Carolina, town team. While this may seem quaint and inconsequential, it was, in fact, a stubbornly defiant gesture that, even more than the shower of loose change from Roystonians mentioned in the previous chapter, effectively ended his amateur status, and scotched any hope of a compromise between father and son whereby Ty might play all the baseball he wanted, but for the University of Georgia (which of course permitted no $1.50-per-game pros). Never one to let the matter of his aspirations rest, Ty even sent a parade of friends to pay a call on the Professor and, with initially charming but ultimately tedious little lectures about how travel broadens a person and athletics opens the lungs, attempt to wear down his resistance. One evening post-supper not long after they saw the Naps play in Atlanta, as W.H. was working at his desk, Ty sucked up the courage to show his father the carbon copy of a contract he had recently received from the semi-famous Con Strouthers, part-owner and manager of the Augusta Tourists.
Young Cobb had written to all six skippers in the brand-new South Atlantic League, which envisioned itself as one small step down from the Class A Southern League, enclosing letters from prominent Roystonians attesting to his character and baseball talents. Only George “King” Kelly of the Jacksonville Jax, and Strouthers had responded, and only the latter held out any hope of a job. The provisional boilerplate contract he included—apparently after Cobb, undeterred by his initial silence, had begged a Royston preacher named John Yarborough to write to his Augusta
friend W. S. Sherman, asking Sherman to write on Cobb’s behalf to his friend Strouthers (like I said, Yankee-pushy)—stipulated that Cobb would get $90 a month during the season if he made the team. Before consulting his father, Ty had signed the original and sent it back addressed to Mr. John Cornelius Strouthers, Warren Park, Augusta.
The offer was specious—Tyrus would have to make the roughly 200-mile round-trip for a tryout of open-ended duration at his own expense—but even a noncommittal contract left Cobb feeling “intoxicated,” and, he said, it “shocked” his father by finally bringing matters to a head. Having turned seventeen the previous December, Cobb was, by the standards of the day, in a position to leave home anytime he pleased, but he wanted his father’s permission to undertake his great baseball adventure, as well as, perhaps, a bit of money for train fare. “Never in my life had I had an argument with my father,” he once said, and, from the way he most often told the tale, he didn’t exactly have one that evening, either, though the beleaguered W.H. may have spoken emphatically at first. “We discussed it fully an hour,” Cobb said of a conversation that in many accounts is tortured into something out of Long Day’s Journey into Night. At about the sixty-minute point his father took the position that he was probably coming around to anyway, at his own pace—namely that Ty should go and get professional baseball out of his system. Cobb said his father ended their discussion by calmly writing him a check for $50, and saying, “This will carry you through for a month. Now go down there and satisfy yourself that there is nothing in this baseball business. Then come back to your studies. I’m sure you will be back by the end of the month, if not before.” To the teenage Ty, this grudging concession resounded like Isaac’s blessing to Jacob in Genesis 27; he was packed and gone the next morning.
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