Things started off auspiciously for Strouthers in Augusta, where he got an opportunity to exhibit his modest flair for promotion. His “Name the Team” contest, meant to stir interest in the new franchise, which he and his partner, an Augusta railroad manager named Harlan Wingard, had each paid $500 to purchase from the league, would be the high point of his brief tenure in that city of 40,000. What the prize was, beyond the thrill of seeing one’s suggestion immortalized in felt and flannel on the players’ uniforms, is not known, but around April 1, 1904, just before Cobb arrived, Strouthers announced that he had identified the best and worst submissions. The worst was Augusta Grave Diggers, a reference to Magnolia Cemetery, the resting place of many a Confederate soldier, just across Third Street from Warren Park. The best suggestion in Strouthers’s opinion, Tourists, made reference to what was still an important industry in Augusta in those years before Florida tempted the snowbirds farther south.
As opening day approached, Cobb’s status with the team was vague at best. He was not named in the starting lineup that Strouthers submitted to the Chronicle on the morning of the first game—but he was in the open horse-drawn wagon that carried the Tourists on a circuitous route, through a light, cold drizzle, to Warren Park, preceded by the soggy Sacred Heart Cadets Band, for their encounter with the Skyscrapers. Cobb’s fate as a Tourist, as it turned out, was tied to backstage machinations involving Augusta catcher Andy Roth, whom the Nashville Vols were claiming was contractually obligated to play for them. Roth, a Pennsylvania boy who’d honed his skills with the Lancaster Chicks and the Harrisburg Senators, was understood to be the best player on the team, if not in the entire league: the Atlanta Constitution said he “bats like a fiend and throws like a Japanese rapid-fire gun.” Strouthers was confident he could prevail, but on the morning of the game, Sally League commissioner Charles Boyer ordered him to hold Roth out until the matter could be adjudicated, and the manager had to refigure his lineup, putting Cobb at center. He would bat seventh, behind a leadoff man whose name is rendered in the record book as “William Spratt?” and a cleanup hitter, Harry Truby, who was trying to catch on with his twenty-third minor league club.
There was something quintessentially American about the Augusta Tourists first-ever opening day, Tuesday, April 26, 1904, which was also Confederate Memorial Day in the South. The first two fans to pay the 10 cent admission fee, said the Chronicle, were “M. J. Murphy, of North Augusta, and Charles Love, colored.” (Murphy, for his dime, got to sit wherever he pleased; Love was limited to the Negro section in right field.) The Catholic school band played “Dixie” for the mostly Protestant crowd and a prominent lawyer named Henry Cohen threw out the first pitch (bouncing the ball three feet in front of home plate, and exiting to good-natured razzing). The president of the Augusta Rooters Club, Mexican-born music teacher José Andonegui, was offering $10 in gold to any Tourist who hit the ball over the center field fence that day. Even the parking was egalitarian: the city announced that it was putting in “hitching posts for horses, buggies and automobiles,” with a security guard present to discourage joy riders, a much discussed problem in those days. Just before game time, the sky brightened and the drizzle all but ceased. About 2,000 turned out and during batting practice “got up on their hind legs” to cheer the Tourists and “show that they could be counted on.” Two thousand was a decent crowd even for a midweek major league game in those days, and it certified the Tourists as the most popular attraction in town since a traveling show reenacting scenes from the Boer War had passed through a month earlier. In a matter of months, Con Strouthers would be begging for an umpiring job in a lesser league, and the skipper of the opposing Skyscrapers, Jack Grim, declared legally insane. But for now, hope reigned. Even though it was 3:30 p.m. when the home team finally trotted onto the muddy field, it was morning in Augusta.
The Tourists failed to keep the good mood going, losing a seesaw battle 8–7, but Cobb, after making out in his first two “organized ball” at-bats, finished the game in what would become his signature style. Leading off the eighth inning, he stroked a double over the center fielder’s head. He then immediately stole third and, two batters later, scored on a slow roller to the second baseman, coming into the catcher, Dennis Shea, like the Wabash Cannonball. “Cobb was enthusiastically cheered,” said the Chronicle. “His opening of the fireworks [the Tourists would score four more runs that inning] gave him a warm place in the hearts of the fans.” In the ninth he led off once more, and this time “slammed the ball over the ridge in left for a clean home run.” In its game notes, the paper prophetically called the opposite field blast “a peacherina” that drove the crowd “bughouse,” and added that Tyrus “was going to make a good man.”
Strouthers, though, seemed oblivious to Cobb’s popularity. The next afternoon, after Sleuth had gone hitless but scored a run in an 8–3 Augusta win, the manager cut his teenage center fielder, saying only, in a brief meeting in his office beneath the bleachers, “I don’t need you anymore.” Cobb was so surprised that for a instant he thought the older man was kidding, in the rough way ballplayers did. Ten years later, Cobb recalled that Strouthers also said that he wasn’t fast enough for the Class C Tourists, though that may be a flourish he added later, to make the manager look doubly foolish, since Cobb was by 1915 a base stealer of wide renown. In any case, Ty was devastated both by the news and by the coldness with which it was delivered. He expected more from adults. He expected courtesy. “Evidently,” Cobb said of Strouthers in 1914, “he didn’t understand a boy’s mind.”
I have on my desk a photocopy of the first real contract our sensitive young subject ever signed. It was not with the Tourists, whose roster he was on and off too quickly that spring for such formalities. Rather, the document bears the letterhead of the Anniston, Alabama, Base Ball Association, a franchise in the independent (a euphemism for Class D) Tennessee-Alabama League—a team I so wish I could tell you was called the Jennifers, but which in fact was known as the Steelers or the Nobles or sometimes the Noblemen, when it was called anything at all. (Team nicknames in those days were usually left to the imagination of sportswriters and fans, who changed their minds perfidiously.) It is dated April 29, 1904, two days after Cobb was cut from the Tourists. In that brief span, Ty, though reeling from rejection, was able to a) get a lead on another job from a fellow Strouthers castoff named Fred Hayes, b) call his father to explain to him what had happened, c) make his way to Anniston, a noisy mill town of 10,000, 240 miles west of Augusta, and d) hash out a new deal. The Professor agreed that Ty should not quit while he was down. “Don’t come home a failure,” he said, trying to help his son avoid a psychological scar. Cobb, it seems, negotiated levelheadedly with the Anniston team owner, a druggist named L. L. Scarborough. The two-page agreement called for him to be paid $50 a month for the season, down considerably from the $90 the Tourists would have given him, but either he or Scarborough used a fountain pen to draw a line through the clause that said “and when not so traveling the party of the second part [Cobb] will pay all of his own expenses.” That meant he would get board and meal money when he was “home” in Anniston—a considerable concession.
Horseplayers might apply the word “formful” to Ty’s experience with the Anniston Steelers. Dropping down a notch in class, he immediately stood out more than he had at the C level, hitting .357, if you believe the accounts written nearly twenty years later by Detroit News sports editor H. G. Salsinger, or .457 if you believe Cobb’s own newspaper memoirs. (It is really anyone’s guess; the Tennessee-Alabama League did not keep cumulative statistics.) But the months he spent in Anniston were not all ice cream sodas at Scarborough’s drugstore and huzzahs at Zinn Park. His teammates made his life difficult by riding him hard, partly out of jealousy, no doubt, but also because he played in such a raw and untamed way, jumping and shouting when on base, so as to distract the opposing pitcher, barreling into defenders, and chattering constantly. Instead of “Sleuth,” a nickname he had rather cottoned to, his
fellow Steelers mockingly referred to him as “Scrappy.” It was in the clubhouse at Anniston that he first battled physically with teammates.
Homesickness added to his woes. Years later, an Anniston businessman named Ed Darden recalled that his parents, who were also from the north Georgia hills, put up Cobb that summer in the third-floor bedroom of the Quintard Avenue house that Ed normally shared with his younger brother, Wesley. It had two double beds; Cobb, the talk of the town, slept in one, and the two bedazzled boys, ages thirteen and ten, attempted to sleep in the other. Some nights nobody got much shuteye. Their distinguished guest, it soon became clear, suffered from an unquiet mind. Cobb still simmered with rage at Con Strouthers for letting him go, and also felt lonely being 200 miles from home and at the bottom of the baseball barrel. “I’ll never forget that first Sunday,” Darden told the Anniston Star in 1961. “Ty moped around the house all day. My mother did the best she could to bring him around, but it just wasn’t any use. And the following weekend, after getting his first paycheck [for $12.50], he packed up and went home. Mr. Scarborough had to catch the train and bring him back.” In time, though, with the help of the Steelers’ kindly manager, George “Dad” Groves, a man to whom, Cobb said, “a life of hard knocks had given a broad understanding of human nature,” he settled down a bit and became easier to be around. Darden chuckled when he recalled “Ty’s method of getting me and Wes into the ball game. He would hand me his glove and Wes his bat and we would trail him into the park, carrying his equipment.”
Ultimately, Cobb really didn’t really want to go home, of course; he wanted to get to the major leagues, and as quickly as possible. On off days in Anniston, he spent hours at the counter of Scarborough’s store writing postcards and letters to Grantland Rice, trying to trick the columnist into doing for him what Rice had done for Happy Harry Hale—that is, tout him as the Next Big Thing. Each note Cobb wrote contained a rave review of his abilities over a fictitious signature. “Ty Cobb is really tearing up the horsehide in the Tennessee-Alabama League—Jack Smith.” Instead of sending off these pieces right away, Ty would drop them in mailboxes at various points along the Steelers’ circuit, the better to create the impression of a grassroots movement. In The Tumult and the Shouting, Rice recalled getting dozens of such counterfeit testimonials. Although Cobb’s pseudonyms—Brown, Jackson, Jones, Smith—were suspiciously common, Rice fell for the ruse, and feeling “under pressure” from his readers, finally inserted a note into his column saying “a new wonder had arrived, the darling of the fans, Ty Cobb.”
The idea of a groundswell for Cobb wasn’t so preposterous. The fans in Augusta certainly wanted him back. While Cobb led the Steelers to the top of the Tennessee-Alabama League, the Tourists were playing ineptly and nearing financial collapse. Some days as few as fifty people came out to witness what had become a sad excuse for a team. In a 4–2 loss to the Savannah Pathfinders on June 6, Harry Truby refused to leave second base after being called out on a close play, and had to be “melodramatically removed” from Warren Park by a mounted policeman, said the Chronicle. Later, Strouthers was arrested by another Augusta cop when he wouldn’t stop “kicking” at an umpire’s decision. By early July, some people were accusing the manager of “queering” games—that is, conspiring to lose so he could cash a bet. Meanwhile, every time Cobb stroked another game-winning hit for the Steelers, he made Strouthers look stupider for sending him packing. In early July, a contrite Strouthers wrote to Cobb asking if he would consider returning to Augusta. Ty, savoring the moment, said in response that he would never be a Tourist again as long as Strouthers remained in charge, and also made his precondition known to the Chronicle. Those reports sealed the skipper’s fate. By mid-July, Strouthers had sold his 50 percent interest in the franchise to a consortium of businessmen and hightailed it out of town just ahead of a tornado that blew the roof off the grandstand at Warren Park. Even before repairs were started, his once silent partner, Harlan Wingard, now the field manager, publicly summoned Cobb back to the Tourists.
This time Cobb agreed to return, but it was never easy to get him quickly from one place to another. Five days after telling Wingard he was on his way, he still hadn’t arrived in Augusta. The problem, he explained in a telegram from Anniston, concerned his need to track down team owner Scarborough to collect several weeks’ back pay. But when a new deadline for his arrival was set, and he again failed to show, “this did not suit the manager,” said the Chronicle, and the angry Wingard “wired instructions that Cobb need not report at all.” Nevertheless when Ty finally turned up the next day, Wingard immediately inserted him into the lineup.
Ty went 0-for-4 in his first game back with the Tourists, the start of a rough couple of months. As good as he was, he still had a lot to learn—about the hit-and-run play, about breaking from the batter’s box after a bunt, about the line between creative disruption on the base paths and pointless yannigan shenanigans. On top of that he got sick with what he decided was malaria. He stayed in the lineup but struggled for weeks, and when the season ended, with the Tourists finishing fifth out of six in the Sally League standings, he was hitting just .237.
— CHAPTER SIX —
PLAYING ORGANIZED BASEBALL FOR A full season temporarily took some of the edge off Cobb’s enthusiasm for the game. The Augusta Tourists, whether managed by a dyspeptic baseball gypsy (Strouthers), or a career railroad man (Wingard), were an unsettled amalgam of current and former hopefuls, the latter content to spend a few sin-soaked seasons playing games for pay before settling into the short, brutish lives that awaited many men born before the turn of the century. United by a sense that they were just passing through town on their way to something better (besides Cobb, the future major leaguers included pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Nap Rucker, and outfielder Clyde Engle) or worse, the Tourists collectively constituted what was known in those days as “a joy club.” They drank in the unlicensed “blind tigers” that were both a bane of and a source of side income for the corruptible Augusta police, and frolicked with the disreputable ladies who hung around the Warren Park grandstand, smoking cigarettes and drawing cross looks from spectators, and stern warnings from the Chronicle. (“Women of questionable character will save themselves the humiliation of being turned down at the gate by staying away from the park.”) Cobb couldn’t help being at least a little intrigued by his circumstances, and, yielding to the peer pressure, he got nonchalant about the game at times, a choice that always left him feeling crummy.
Andy Roth, the good-hitting catcher who became the Tourists’ third manager in their tumultuous first season, had led Ty to believe that, despite his lackluster batting average, a position on the 1905 team was his to lose. But Ty didn’t see Roth as the leader the Tourists needed—he was too unimaginative as a baseball man and too lenient as a babysitter, he felt, and by the time Cobb returned to Royston in the fall of 1904, exposure to the profession’s grimmer realities—not the least of which was that baseball was a game played by ballplayers—had tempered his passion. He wasn’t over baseball by any means, but he needed a break from the cynicism and vulgarity of the locker room, as well as from the constant losing. So he threw himself into small-town life, working on his father’s farm alongside Uncle Ezra, going for runs on the still unpaved roads, and catching up with old friends, like Clifford Ginn, a former teammate on the Reds and Rompers who was married to his mother’s kid sister and who in later years would serve as his accountant. What they talked about while sitting on Ty’s front porch on Franklin Springs Street we’ll never know for certain, but Topic A in town that winter was the Jones sisters, the Cobbs’ next-door neighbors.
Annie and Vinie Jones had been a source of controversy in Royston for about fifteen years by then, since before W.H. and Amanda Cobb and their children had moved to Royston in 1897. The unmarried sisters, both in their mid-thirties in 1905, claimed to be dressmakers as well as “teachers of a certain system of dressmaking,” but everyone knew they were prostitutes. Not wishing to call atten
tion to themselves, they were careful to live quietly, but they could not always control their customers. Late one night in the spring of 1903, Stephen Ginn, Clifford’s father and the breeder of the famous Ginn chickens, barged into their house in a drunken state and began smashing their possessions with a stick. When Annie called in another neighbor, Sanford Hulm, to help them, Ginn told him “in a maudlin fashion,” that he had paid Vinie $600 for a year’s worth of sexual privileges, but was disappointed to discover the arrangement was not exclusive. The police came and it was a mess. Ginn was no stranger to public humiliation. In 1892, he was startled from sleep by what he thought was an intruder, fired the pistol that he kept on his nightstand, and shot off one of his fingers. The police came and it was a mess—but that time in a kind of darkly comic fashion. The Vinie Jones incident—which took place just a few doors down from the house where Ginn lived with his wife and eight children—sent a chill through Royston because it threatened the social fabric. It made townsfolk wonder how many other fathers might be out there fooling around and falling in love. In short order, a summons was served on the women, and despite very little hard evidence, prosecutors managed to get an indictment, or as they said in Georgia, a “true bill.” It wasn’t until two years later, though, around the time that Cobb was packing for his second season with the Augusta Tourists, that their case finally showed signs of coming to trial.
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