Ty set off for Augusta in early April of 1904 with his friend and Reds teammate Stewart Brown, who had written to and received back from Con Strouthers the same unbinding agreement. Five years older than Cobb, Brown was a pitcher of some local renown, but of his experience with the Tourists we know almost nothing, except that he failed to make the grade and wound up playing briefly for the Vienna, Georgia, town team before returning to his medical studies. In 1950 his son Stewart Jr. would be named the first chief physician at Cobb Memorial, the hospital his fellow Tourist prospect founded in their hometown.
• • •
Cobb in some ways fit demographically into the community of professional ballplayers he aspired to join. Most major leaguers of his day were middle-class natives of English-Irish stock, 75 percent had some high school, and quite a few (only 10 percent of the total, but more than three times as many as the general population) had fathers who were professional men. Yet as a lad from the Southern provinces Cobb was an outlier in key ways, too, since the vast majority of National and American Leaguers came from the Northeast and, although every team seemed to have at least three guys called Rube, had grown up in cities. From the moment he started working out with the Tourists, Tyrus, the rawest of raw recruits, showed that he either didn’t know or didn’t care how professional athletes comported themselves on and off the diamond.
That was not necessarily a bad thing since in those early years of the game professionals often comported themselves abysmally. So many of our great-granddaddies’ heroes played drunk or hungover, or were on the DL with STDs, or gambled on games in which they participated, that the championship seasons were to a great extent shaped by sin. (From the 1892 Spalding Guide: “Season after season have clubs become bankrupt solely through the failure of their teams to accomplish successful field work owing to the presence of two or three drunkards in their team.”) Rules were to men like King Kelly and John McGraw—and there were a lot of men like Kelly and McGraw—as the melody line was to Parker or Gillespie. Third baseman McGraw—who had at least twice as many fights as Cobb ever did, and was called “mean and vicious” and “ready at any time to maim a rival player or umpire” by the president of the National League—kicked, tripped, pushed, elbowed, hip-checked, or, on days when he was feeling merciful toward his fellow man, merely held the belts of opposing runners who were trying to dash home. Kelly, in the era when the league provided just one umpire for each game, would, when he noticed that the ump was keeping his eye on the bouncing ball, go from first to third by cutting across the pitcher’s mound, or so it was often said.
Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby—who had a much worse reputation than Cobb for being an SOB—once wrote a magazine article called “You’ve Got to Cheat to Win” in which he contended that cheating occurred in each of 2,259 major league games in which he participated, starting in 1915. (He wasn’t even talking about the use of spitballs, which were legal until 1920.) Diving into a pitched ball was perhaps the most common illicit practice; “Kid” Elberfeld, a short-fused shortstop for six major league teams, managed to get about 165 trips to first that way. “They didn’t care,” Sam Crawford said in The Glory of Their Times. “They had it down to a fine art, you know. They look like they were trying to get out of the way, but they managed to let the ball just nick them.” Sensitive about his acting skills, Elberfeld once responded to being called out for interfering with the pitch by flinging a handful of mud into the umpire’s open mouth.
How these men got away with rule breaking and umpire abuse—fines seldom exceeded $50 and suspensions rarely lasted longer than three days—is easy to explain: cheating and fighting were believed to be central to the game. When Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton wrote that “in baseball almost anything short of maiming and injury are permissible,” he forgot that maiming and injuring were permissible under certain circumstances, too. In a 1909 Zane Grey novella called “The Shortstop,” the protagonist stabs a base runner with a horseshoe nail to slow down his progress toward the plate. The action “embodied the Great Spirit of the game,” Grey wrote. “Ball playing is a fight all the time.” According to W. O. McGeehan, who covered sports for the New York Herald Tribune, baseball wasn’t a polite game by nature—“and that’s why it is the National Pastime.” “Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame,” wrote Bill Veeck, the owner at different times of the Indians, Browns, and White Sox, “and you will find that baseball’s immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils, like the Third Army bustling through Germany.”
• • •
Things were often no less unruly away from the stadium, as the beleaguered innkeepers along the circuits could readily testify; the better hotels often refused to accept ballplayers. The poster boy for profligacy was . . . well, here we could easily get into a debate. Some would say Edward Delahanty, a fluid-gaited forerunner of Joe DiMaggio who patrolled left field for the Philadelphia Phillies, Cleveland Infants, and Washington Senators, an early power hitter who also drank for the fences, often to forget his racetrack debt. (When he was sober, said Crawford, Delahanty was “the best right-handed hitter I ever saw.”) After being put off a train in extreme upstate New York in 1903 for being crazy-drunk and brandishing a razor, “Big Ed” somehow wound up tumbling into Niagara Falls, where he both drowned and got mangled by the propeller of the Maid of the Mist. “Way to be remembered, Delahanty!” you might reasonably say. Yet others contended that his flashy demise obscured an otherwise run-of-the mill SOB story, and that the distinction of being a baseball commissioner’s worst nightmare more rightly belonged to “Turkey” Mike Donlin, pride of the Santa Cruz Sand Crabs.
Donlin, darkly handsome despite a long knife scar on his left cheek, was a terribly talented and extremely popular figure with self-destructive habits, a kind of Peoria-born, line-drive-stroking Sir Richard Burton. A major vaudeville star when he felt like it—he and his wife, the actress Mabel Hite, had a smash hit with a one-act play he wrote called Stealing Home—and an oft-sidelined outfielder who hit .333 for eight major league teams when he didn’t have the DTs, Donlin combined public adoration with public urination in ways that would not be seen again until the advent of Charlie Sheen. The St. Louis Perfectos should have sensed something was amiss when they had to address his first contract to a drunk tank outside San Francisco, but they, too, were smitten—until he beat up a couple of chorus girls. The Perfectos then traded him to the Orioles, where he began to shuttle between show and baseball business, parole and incarceration, moodiness and madness, coming close to being the worst role model in early professional ball.
I’m going to give that distinction—which let us not forget has been so often bestowed upon Cobb, who spent so many nights listening to violin records and diagramming plays on the hotel stationery—to Ned Garvin. If you combine Delahanty and Donlin and add in a little gunplay, you get Virgil Lee “Ned” Garvin, whose other nickname was the “Navasota Tarantula,” after the vice-ridden stagecoach stop in Texas from which he hailed. In his essential Baseball Abstract, Bill James says Garvin may be the hard-luck pitcher of all time because his terrible won-lost record (58–97) belies an elegantly low ERA (2.72). He also, fittingly, invented the screwball, which he called “the reverse curve,” and Christy Mathewson rechristened the fadeaway. Yet despite undeniable skill and interest in advancing the twirler’s art, Garvin managed to be blacklisted by the National League at the very moment it was being accused of being far too tolerant of miscreants. To do this he had to shoot a Chicago cop (nonfatally, but still) in the head, severely beat the traveling secretary for his team, the Brooklyn Superbas, in a St. Louis saloon, and then break the nose of an insurance salesman who “wouldn’t engage me in conversation” in a New Jersey hotel lobby, the desire to initiate conversation with an insurance salesman being in most people’s books prima facie evidence of depravity.
You may think I exaggerate the amount of eccentricity in baseball circa 19
00 for comic effect. Although there can be no way to count the crazies, the game surely had a higher percentage of them in the early 1900s, when it was to a degree a fallback for those who could not find more respectable employment, and no one knew exactly the correct way for a professional athlete to behave. In The Glory of Their Times various deadball stars, interviewed in the early 1960s, nostalgically and diplomatically refer to their mentally and emotionally disturbed colleagues as “characters,” but at the time more normal players grumbled that the “magnates,” as team owners were known, were signing up people without regard to their conduct or character, and making the respectable men look bad by association. Indeed the American League was founded in 1901 largely because Ban Johnson, a straitlaced former sportswriter, saw the need for a brand of baseball that was safe for family consumption, a game that did not include fistfights and bottle tossing, where the hurlers were pitchers, not ashen-faced alcoholics vomiting up last night’s beer in plain view of the kiddies. The AL met with instant success, but its pool of players just as quickly became less than pristine (NL-reject Ned Garvin resurfaced with the New York Highlanders in 1904), and its product indistinguishable from that of the senior circuit.
It is thus hardly surprising then that someone with Ty Cobb’s finely honed sense of propriety would not make a smooth entrance into this world.
— CHAPTER FIVE —
UNLIKE HIS FRIEND STEWART BROWN, who seems to have simply not been up to South Atlantic League (Sally League) standards, Ty Cobb made a kind of funky and complicated first impression with the Augusta Tourists, intriguing, perplexing, and amusing their manager all at once. Well, maybe not amusing the cranky Con Strouthers so much. A tall, skinny, pimply kid still growing into his own body, he reported for duty wearing his bright red Royston togs—the look of dismay Strouthers fixed on him in particular suggests that Brown was not similarly clad—and carrying a cloth bag holding several of his odd-looking black bats (the Augusta Chronicle said that they were “spliced,” presumably at the handle, like cricket bats, to give them “spring”), which he referred to strangely, in the singular, as “the Biffer.” Ty was the antithesis of the grizzled and jaded vets who tended to set the tone on the Tourists. He wasn’t perpetually hungover or too cool to appear enthusiastic. The wide-eyed kid from Royston couldn’t wait to show people an Indian-head penny with the words “Army and Navy” stamped on the reverse, where “One Cent” would normally be—a then still fairly common “commercial token,” produced by private companies during the Civil War, when coins were scarce, but to his mind a true collector’s item. He also told anyone who’d listen that his father was coming on opening day to watch him play.
The Ty Cobb of 1904 was, in other words, both young for his years and wildly presumptuous. Opening day? Who said he would still be around then? Preseason tryouts were still in progress at that point, and not shaping up terribly well for the hill-country youngster, owing to his bizarre behavior. While running the bases during intra-squad drills, Ty waved his arms wildly, barreled into infielders, and otherwise gave observers a foretaste of the man whom Germany Schaefer would describe with admiration a couple of years later as “the craziest runner I’ve ever seen.” In fielding practice, the local paper said, Cobb would puckishly cut off grounders and “fun-goes” that Strouthers was smacking to others. Was this just nervous bravado on the part of a crimson-clad bumpkin who might see this as his one big chance? It doesn’t seem so. Cobb said he felt “just full of life and pepper,” and it’s clear from the newspaper coverage that it pleased him to behave that way, even if he could tell, as he said later, that the manager “did not seem to look upon me with favor.”
The other would-be Tourists appeared to like him just fine, if their mild joshing is any indication. “Back to the plow for you!” Tommy McMillan, a fifteen-year-old aspiring shortstop yelled at him one morning when he muffed a catch. (You don’t hear that one much anymore.) By mid-April, Dave Edmunds, a veteran utility man, had christened Cobb “Sleuth,” “probably because that worthy ‘cops’ everything that comes his way,” said the correspondent for the Chronicle. Around Warren Park, Sleuth sprinted at top speed everywhere he went: to the plate for practice swings, to the outfield to shag flies, back to the dugout when the manager waved him in for a conversation—about not being such a maniac. “Don’t run like that!” Strouthers told him. “Save some of that pep! You’ll need it for later on!” Cobb heard him out but stubbornly refused to slow down.
Strouthers and the other Tourists—a motley mix of young prospects and older men who’d been kicking around the low minors since the days when foul balls were not strikes, and some fielders went without gloves—could not figure where, or if, the contumacious kid fit in. At the plate, during practice, he appeared formidable, “swatting ’em out,” said the Chronicle, “with his black bat. . . . He will make a big leaguer in a year or two.” But offsetting this, to some degree, was his inability, or refusal, to take direction, which for Strouthers, a burnt-out case at thirty-eight, was, either way, no small matter. A few days before the season opener, the paper reported that Sleuth “slid in home yesterday and one could hear his body grating against the ground. He came up all right, but out.” That Cobb’s rumbustious behavior caused the Chronicle to pay so much attention to him, a “yannigan” (or rookie) from a place, said that paper, that no one in Augusta had ever heard of, may have also irritated the manager. Cobb figured to be sent packing before the April 26 opener, if only because the fledgling Sally League had decided to go with mingy thirteen-man rosters. And yet in mid-April, Sleuth was still hanging around, taking up locker space and sapping Strouthers’s small reserve of patience.
The manager was probably glad to say yes when Cobb requested a day off in mid-April to go on a kind of educational excursion. At seventeen, Ty was a regular reader of Grantland Rice, later one of America’s premier sportswriters, but then a fledgling columnist for the Atlanta Constitution. Rice, proud of his ability to spot baseball talent in the rough, had lately been peppering his pieces with mentions of one Harry Hale of Happy Hollow, Tennessee, a six-foot-seven-inch deaf-mute with a killer fastball. Hale was trying to catch on with the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern League, and Cobb, “who never lost an opportunity to study his craft,” as Rice said in his memoir, The Tumult and the Shouting, desperately wanted to see him pitch and observe how opponents adjusted to his heater. The Crackers were playing the Shreveport Sports at Piedmont Park the day that Ty arrived by train from Augusta. For four innings Hale lived up to Rice’s hype, throwing smoke and holding Shreveport hitless. Then one of the Sports laid down a bunt and exposed the pitcher’s weakness: he was a painfully awkward fielder. One bunter at a time, Shreveport loaded the bases. Stumbling after the fourth consecutive bunt, Hale spiked himself in the hand; two runs scored and he had to leave the game for stitches. Years later, after they had become friends, Cobb kidded Rice about his great “discovery”—but in 1904 Shreveport’s dismantling of Harry Hale fascinated him. Three years later, when the even harder-throwing Walter Johnson came up with the Washington Senators, Cobb remembered the lesson well. We’ve already seen how Ty rattled Johnson by leaning far over the plate daring the Big Train to hit him, but in 1907 Johnson, besides being squeamish about plunking opponents, was notably slow off the mound. Cobb was among the first to spot the weakness, and he and the other Tigers laid down so many bunts against the tall, ungainly rookie in his major league debut that they made him realize he needed to work harder on defense. Once he improved his fielding, his place as an immortal was assured.
On the train back to Augusta that day, Cobb had an encounter that would mean little to him, but which had an enduring effect on the other party. Norvell “Oliver” Hardy, later the film partner of Stan Laurel, was then a chubby, precocious twelve-year-old who would frequently go AWOL from military school in Milledge, Georgia, to find work in Atlanta theatricals. Heading home after just such an adventure, he struck up a conversation with Cobb, who allowed that he was going to Warren Pa
rk to rejoin the Augusta Tourists. “Are you the bat boy?” said Hardy.
Cobb was indignant. “Bat boy?” he said. “You come to the game today; I’ll show you.”
Hardy, telling the tale to Rice forty years later on the Hal Roach Studio lot, and perhaps embellishing it a bit, said he took up Cobb on his offer to see him in what probably was a preseason intra-squad game. “He was something at that,” the comedian said with a chuckle. “Cobb hammered a single, two doubles, a triple and a home run—and stole two bases.”
• • •
If Cobb was too annoying for manager Strouthers to embrace wholeheartedly, he also was too promising, in his untamed way, to cut. On April 20, with the first regular season game, against the Columbia (North Carolina) Skyscrapers, less than a week away, Strouthers told him to go into the clubhouse and find himself a baseball-uniform-colored uniform, for Chrissakes, and the next day’s Chronicle reported that “Cobb has discarded his red suit” and referred to him as a “fixture.” But none of that meant that he had officially made the team.
Strouthers was not the best judge of talent, or the best anything. A portly fellow who resembled the stereotypical barbershop quartet bass, with handlebar mustache and hair parted dead center, he had what might generously be called a checkered past. Before his turn with the Tourists, he had been cited by various newspapers as an “utter failure” (as manager of Detroit in the Western League in 1895), the “hardest kicker [biggest whiner] in the Interstate League” (when he managed the Mansfield Haymakers in 1897), “about the worst that has happened” (as an umpire in the Interstate League), and “disgusting” (for his cursing and bullying of “Umpire Cline” while managing the Chattanooga Lookouts in 1902). To supplement his baseball income, he sometimes managed bad boxers and flop musicals. Solvency eluded him. In December of 1902, Strouthers was arrested in Columbus, Ohio, for stealing an iron coin bank containing $50 from one Bertha Chase, a boardinghouse owner who said that he’d also reneged on his promise to make her his third wife.
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