We’ll get back to that matter, which, it could be argued, played a key role in the Cobb family’s tragic summer, but let us say for the moment that in the early months of 1905, Ty was certainly aware of his notorious next-door neighbors—and yet still more interested in baseball. Refreshed after several months in the fields and on the roads of Royston, he eagerly anticipated the coming Tourists’ season. With training camp set to open at Warren Park, he packed two bags—a leather one for clothes, a cloth one for his beloved bats—and was among the first four players to check in for what were technically tryouts on Sunday, March 19, 1905. It was a rare instance of his being early for anything. Manager Roth, perhaps surprised, as others were, to see that he had over the winter completed the transition from midget to “big, raw-boned hulking kid,” greeted him warmly and penciled him in to the lineup for an exhibition game the next day against the Detroit Tigers—“the kings of the diamond,” as the Chronicle called them, erroneously.
The Tigers—who got their nickname back in the 1890s, when they were part of the Western League, from their yellow-and-brown-striped socks—were actually one of the less imposing teams in the four-year-old American League. They were training in Augusta for the first time ever, having spent their previous two springs in Shreveport, prepping for campaigns that ended with fifth- and seventh-places finishes, respectively. Detroit’s secretary-treasurer, Frank Navin, had arranged the switch to Augusta because its Albion Hotel, an officious-looking edifice just across Broad Street from the Confederate monument, promised to put up each player at the bargain price of $15 per week, and the Turkish bathhouse next door offered its facilities for just $2.50 per man, including one’s choice of “colored or white rubbers,” meaning masseurs. For Navin, running a ball club was always about getting a bargain; the Great Nickel Nurser, as he was sometimes known, had a reputation for being the most miserly man in the game.
He did, it was true, have some excuses for his stinginess: Detroit (population 300,000) was the smallest city represented in the eight-team American League and it had the smallest ballpark in the majors (seating capacity: 8,500). With a grand total of only 118,000 attendees the previous season it had the second-slowest turnstiles in the AL, ahead of only the hapless Washington Senators. The Tigers also suffered from the unique problem of “wildcat bleachers”: rickety wooden stands thrown up by entrepreneurs on the corner of Cherry Street and National Avenue that allowed people—for a 15 cent fee that the franchise never saw a penny of—to look over the Bennett Park fence and literally steal a peek at the action. Large swatches of the outfield walls went begging for advertising despite the bargain rate of $25 per season per panel, and the renting of seat cushions, a lively side business in some big league outposts, was a total bust in the nascent Motor City. That year the Tigers were also being sued by their former popcorn man for wrongful dismissal, and there was concern in the front office that a substantial settlement—meaning anything over a few thousand dollars—could capsize the financially tenuous franchise.
And yet those who worked with Navin knew he would have been just as tough with a buck if he’d been managing Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel. For the pale, bald, poker-faced son of an Irish railroad worker—he looked a bit like a thumb with glasses—pinching owner Bill Yawkey’s pennies was the game within the game, and he delighted in it. Reading through the letters he sent to his players each January, telling them to sign the enclosed contract and be quick about it, one gets a sense of the joy he took in sparring with men who because they were bound by the reserve clause (which kept them from becoming free agents) and had no agents or lawyers to represent them, were fighting with their hands tied. “I wish to call your attention to the fact that outside of [Ollie] Pickering, who has been released to Columbus, you were the lowest hitter in the American League of the regular outfielders” Navin said in a typically pleasant note to Sam Crawford in the early days of 1905 (the usually productive outfielder had had an off year due to an injury). The secretary hated writing checks, even for the small sums the Tigers paid for necessities: $72 for a gross, or one year’s worth, of baseballs; $429.32 annual rent for Bennett Park. His obsession with saving money sometimes tempted him across moral lines. Writing to a manufacturer of turnstiles in 1906, he asked if the company made a model with a concealed counter—an inquiry that would seem to support Cobb’s later contention that the Tigers underreported ticket sales so they could cry poverty to their players and lower the tithe they paid the league.
Navin’s tightness might have gone less remarked upon if it wasn’t juxtaposed so blatantly with his profligate personal ways. Letters in the Ernie Harwell Collection at the Detroit Public Library show that in the midst of arguing with players about three-figure raises, he would be ordering expensive lingerie from a fancy New York shop, presumably for his wife; promising to “stake” a friend in Boston “to a nice young lady” when he, Navin, next came to visit; and bantering about big investments in madcap ventures like an early forerunner of the parachute jump attraction then being considered for Coney Island. It was his gambling, though, that set him apart as a spendthrift. The working-class boy from Adrian, Michigan, had once toiled as a croupier in a Detroit casino, and he played a lot of poker, but horses were his métier, and he was frequently on the phone with his bookie. This Frank Navin resembled the cheaper model only in his emotionless demeanor. One day when he had $500 down on an 8–1 shot in the first race at some out-of-town track, his jockey bumped into the starting barrier and tumbled to the turf. Upon hearing the bad news, Navin without so much as a sigh, said, “I wonder what looks good in the second.”
That attitude would serve him well with the Tigers, who seemed to be a star-crossed team, especially after their manager, Win Mercer, who displayed a more rational reaction to gambling losses, committed suicide in January of 1903 by inhaling illuminating gas at a San Francisco hotel. Navin was a minor front-office figure then, but he had what Frederick G. Lieb, in his comprehensive and colorful history of the Detroit club, called “the ability to make figures stand up and say Uncle,” as well as a knack for pleasing his boss of the moment. When Tigers owner Sam Angus brought him over from his insurance business, Navin served him loyally, quickly becoming more than just a glorified bookkeeper. As the owner ran low on operating capital in the middle of ’03, and American League president Ban Johnson threatened to move the franchise to Pittsburgh, Navin deftly engineered the sale of the Tigers to William Clyman Yawkey, an old iron and lumber baron who was probably the richest man in Michigan. And when W. C. Yawkey died of a heart attack just before the contract could be signed, Navin even more deftly sold the millionaire’s only son on the idea of assuming the $50,000 obligation even though William Hoover Yawkey was a rudderless trust-fund kid who cared little about sports. The younger magnate (who was both the uncle and adoptive father of future Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey) was delighted to let Navin and manager Ed Barrow run the club while he fulfilled the duties of an Edwardian-era playboy.
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Barrow, though paid less than Navin, was probably the club’s most valuable asset, owning to his gimlet eye for talent. History knows him better as the general manager who presided over the transformation of Babe Ruth from pitcher to outfielder, then built a Yankees dynasty around him and Lou Gehrig in the 1920s. But Barrow’s work with the Tigers was no less remarkable considering that he was forced to operate within Navin’s severe financial constraints. His greatest single acquisition was the aforementioned Wahoo Sam Crawford, a future Hall of Famer whose rights he acquired from Cincinnati in 1903, but his best year with the franchise was 1904, when he brought in outfielder Matty McIntyre, shortstop Charley O’Leary and third baseman Bill Coughlin, forgotten names today but productive role players who would help turn the Tigers into league champs.
The one criterion that Barrow seems not to have considered too closely when assembling a team was chemistry. Even though men of color were not an option in those days, the talent market was diverse—“We had stupid guys, smar
t guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city and hicks from the country,” Davy Jones, who joined the Tigers in 1906, told Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of Their Times—and the potential for trouble when those types came together to form a ball team was substantial. But Barrow either didn’t notice or didn’t care about such things. It could be that, like many baseball men of his vintage—he was born in 1868 while his parents were rumbling through Springfield, Illinois, in a covered wagon—he wasn’t sensitive or sympathetic to the concept of group dynamics. Or maybe his budget simply prohibited the acquisition of players who weren’t huge pains in the ass. But for whatever reason, the Tiger team he assembled was a hodgepodge of sour and contentious personalities, awash (it almost went without saying) in alcohol—as unlovable to each other as they were to the citizens of Detroit.
No one personified this discordant pre-Cobb club more than Norman “Kid” Elberfeld. “Tabasco,” as the fiery shortstop was sometimes known, once wrestled the famous umpire Silk O’Loughlin to the ground after a disputed call and held the unofficial record for being ejected, no mean feat in that day when at least one umpire (Andy Gifford) carried a knife because he was so often set upon by angry players. Barrow, knowing how much Elberfeld hated being a Tiger, once accused him of indulging in “loaferish behavior” to force a trade. But, interestingly, I think, Barrow was not shocked by Elberfeld’s attitude. He didn’t even dislike the (usually) aggressive Kid, whom he recognized as a stock character in the pageant that was early organized baseball: the Hothead—a role that Barrow had himself played over the years. Barrow’s players trembled at his withering performance evaluations and expletive-flecked advice. Once outfielder Jimmy Barrett screwed up the courage to say, “Mr. Barrow, your methods take all the individuality away from a ballplayer.” Barrett immediately regretted the remark. “If you ever speak to me that way again,” Barrow told him, “I will take more than your individuality away from you. I will knock your block off!” Barrett actually got away easy. Barrow’s usual method for dealing with a troublesome player was to invite the man to his office, lock the door, and then pounce on him with both fists. It truly was a golden age of grouchiness.
Both Barrow and Navin hated it when owner Bill Yawkey would swan in from his pampered high-society life and bequeath $50 and $100 spot bonuses to players who had performed in ways that he adjudged to be above and beyond the call. But the two Tiger leaders didn’t agree on much else, and in fact came to dislike each other deeply. Navin needed a more malleable man in the skipper’s spot if his influence over the franchise was going to increase, and Barrow could not abide his boss’s constant meddling in player transactions. In December of 1904, after a particularly bitter squabble over a third-string catcher, Barrow quit and took a job in the American Association as manager of the Indianapolis Indians.
The Tigers weren’t at Augusta’s Warren Park the day Cobb reported for duty with the Tourists in March of 1905. They were involved in a publicity stunt at the local zoo, riding Lil the elephant as well as an unnamed camel or two and “gazing into the yellow eyes of caged lions” (there were no tigers available) while writers from the Augusta Chronicle and the Detroit dailies followed them around and observed their carefree and confident behavior. The message that the ticket-buying public was meant to take from this apparently unphotographed photo op was that the team’s 62–90 season of 1904 was a rapidly receding memory. Strengthened by several off-season moves, they were ready to take a run at the mighty Boston Americans, AL champs for the last two seasons. But for all their swagger in spring training, the Tigers did not really seem primed for happier times. While they had taken several steps forward under Barrow, his departure, combined with the advent of Bill Armour as manager, amounted to a substantial net setback.
Armour, whose career as an outfielder for the Paterson Silk Weavers, the Toledo Mud Hens, and other minor league clubs had been hamstrung by his morbid fear of butterflies, simply didn’t inspire confidence as a skipper. Fired by Cleveland for his failure to get along with the team’s beloved star, Napoleon Lajoie, he came to Detroit at Navin’s request—and hit the ground bumbling. It took him a couple of months just to find Germany Schaefer’s home address in Chicago to send him a contract; he alienated his best players by belittling their abilities in letters he sent them during their annual negotiations; and he amused rival managers by writing to them to ask if they happened to have any extra pitchers “of Cy Young caliber” available for trading. (They did not.) He might have been better cast as the team’s traveling secretary; he obsessed about every detail of the Tigers’ accommodations at the Albion in Augusta and, in lieu of landing hot pitching prospects, devised a system whereby each Tiger player would retain the same number sleeping car berth for the entire season, thus saving valuable moments at the start of every road trip. Connie Mack he was not.
Armour did dress like Connie Mack, though, wearing a suit and tie in the dugout, the way Mack did as manager of the A’s from 1901 through 1950, in hopes of commanding respect. (He was also, it would appear, the last man in the major leagues to sport a mustache until Rollie Fingers came along in the 1960s.) Armour’s players, however, were not impressed. It was only when he wielded the cudgel of the reserve clause, in letters that channeled his boss’s heartless tone, that they acknowledged his superior position.
“Dear Sir,” Armour wrote to Matty McIntyre in January of 1905 after the left fielder had threatened to jump to the Eastern League rather than accept the Tigers’ offer,
I have always wondered why you didn’t make a better showing last year, and now I have discovered the cause. Any young player that stays one year in the American League and then wishes to go back to the Eastern League shows what he is made of. . . . There have been hundreds of failures for the same reason that you will be a failure and was [sic] a failure practically last year. We hung on to you and kept bolstering you up, but I can now see it is of no use. As far as the Detroit Club releasing you, we have not the slightest idea of so doing. You will play ball if you play in organized base ball with the Detroit Club at a salary of Two Thousand Dollars, and you can report or not, as you see fit. I don’t see that you tore things loose so much on any of the American League Parks last year.
Such nastiness is what passed for normal discourse with those early Tigers. Former manager Ed Barrow had set the tone by pulling together players who didn’t get along well, with the world or with each other, and keeping them in line by means of threats and corporal punishment. Armour would continue the tradition, even managing, via his inept impersonation of a martinet, to make matters worse. And no one would remember what happened back then in the bowels of Bennett Park if the planets weren’t aligning in a way that put Ty Cobb and the Tigers on intersecting paths.
— CHAPTER SEVEN —
IF THERE WAS ANYONE WHO could put the swagger back into the browbeaten Tigers, it was the decidedly Class C Augusta Tourists. There were several ways that Warren Park would never be confused with a major league venue, starting with the fact that its infield remained unsodded, and thus in its very lack of lushness served as an ironic reminder that the place was severely bush. Then there were the not-so-uniform uniforms of the home team; manager Andy Roth had found himself six suits short at the start of the Tourists’ second season, and had put out a call for donations, which arrived by the bundle but naturally did not match. Newcomers to Augusta baseball also had to adjust to the singular way the spectators behaved. Instead of reacting instantly to something that happened on the field, they would sit in silence, noted Detroit Free Press correspondent Joe S. Jackson, the way playgoers might pause to ponder “a subtly humorous line,” and then, a long moment or two after the fact, “burst into a manifestation of appreciation that lasts twice as long as a similar ovation does elsewhere.” Both the ground and the groundlings set the place apart. But the Tourists and their ballpark never looked more backwater than when they played host to what everyone then called “fast company”—a major league club.
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Detroit played Augusta five times that spring and won four times, whacking the ball through the barren, brown infield seemingly at will while stymieing their opponents with sparkling glove work and sparrowlike curves. In every game but one the Tigers reached double digits in hits while the Tourists could only scratch out a handful. They executed double steals, hit-and-run plays, and sacrifice bunts, all at a speed that left their audiences of 300 or so agog. On defense, Detroit shortstop Charley O’Leary was especially impressive, “cabbaging” grounders on the short hop (one correspondent wrote) and whipping them to Crawford, who was being tested that spring, said the Chronicle, at “the initial sack.” The fawning (and fickle) hometown paper said that young Tyrus especially should pay attention to the master class the Tigers were conducting. “Cobb is showing up well,” said the Chronicle’s “Diamond Dust” column of March 24. “Only one word of caution to the clever sticker in running bases, to wit: You are not in the amateur game now, and reckless endeavors to steal a sack on an experienced pitcher, when he has the ball, is a failure nine times out of ten. Fast sprinting, clever sliding and neat swings around the basemen, well practiced, will pay you better in the long run, Cobb.” It wasn’t just the Chronicle that thought Ty should tone down his flamboyant play. When George Leidy, a veteran outfielder, joined the Tourists a couple of months later, he noted the Royston kid was “the butt of all the would-be comedians on the club” for his overly aggressive style. Ty wouldn’t stop running wild, though, until Andy Roth finally forbade him from stealing—and then he sat and sulked.
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