Before the Tigers broke camp and headed to Detroit, Germany Schaefer and pitcher “Wild Bill” Donovan took time during batting practice to say goodbye to Cobb, who had hit about .300 against their club, and to offer him a few pointers. “Always slide feet first,” Schaefer said. Donovan advised Armour to keep an eye on the overzealous redheaded kid, because he was “going places.” Ty later admitted that he fantasized about joining the big leaguers for the trip north. Once the Tigers left town, his spirits sagged, and his average reverted to what it had been the previous autumn, when he had finished in a funk. Then it fell even lower. On the first of May, Cobb was hitting .243 and a week later .235. For the first time in his career, he was failing even to make contact—“Cobb did his fanning act again” became a Chronicle mantra. His problems were not confined to the plate. In right field, where he played most of the time, line drives slithered through his hands and fly balls plunked to the earth all around him. He pretended he didn’t care, and often it seemed like he truly didn’t. In a home game against the Savannah Pathfinders, he missed a routine fly ball because he had been munching on a wheel of caramel popcorn while standing in the outfield.
• • •
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Cobb at the moment was falling in love. The object of his affection, Charlotte Marion Lombard, was the eldest daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Augusta, a magnate whose money came from two distinctly nineteenth-century enterprises: an ironworks and a grist mill. When Ty met her, though, through a boyfriend of one of her classmates at Sacred Heart Academy, she gave her name as Charlie: a sign, or so it would seem, of proto-flapper, modern-gal spunk. She was only fifteen at the time but she started showing up regularly at Tourists games and her presence, in the ladies section, was hardly lost on Tyrus. They began seeing each other, at dances and other organized functions, and before long they were talking marriage. Her father, Roswell O. Lombard, thought she was too young and Ty’s profession too undependable, though, and so for the time being they made no firm plans.
Lombard was more correct about baseball than he knew. The Tourists, tired of Ty’s antics, and short on cash, were exploring the possibility of selling him to another team hundreds of miles distant. Ed Barrow, in his lively autobiography, My Fifty Years in Baseball, says that Roth at that juncture reached out to him to propose a deal: Cobb and utility man Clyde Engle for $800 as a package or $500 for either man alone. He neglected to mention that the latter—a talented player who would make it to the major leagues a few years later—had a sexually transmitted disease that would soon put him out for a long spell. But Barrow in any case was in no mood to deal. “I was not in a happy mental state” as manager of the Indianapolis Indians, he wrote. “I was still rankled when I thought of Navin and Detroit . . . further, I had Fannie Taylor up in Toronto on my mind and wanted to get back there. Indeed, I have told her many a time through the years that she cost me Ty Cobb.” Barrow’s book makes no previous or further mention of Ms. Taylor, and that’s a shame because the Ontario-based enchantress changed baseball history. By helping to scotch a trade that would have sent Cobb to Indiana, she put the troubled eighteen-year-old on a path to encounter George Leidy, the man he would always credit with saving his career from a premature demise.
George O. Leidy never made it to the major leagues, and he cut such a narrow swath through the bushes that it’s impossible to describe him in great detail. Contemporary reports note that he was of medium height with gnarled knuckles, for whatever that may be worth to your imagination. Even I, at this point probably one of America’s foremost George O. Leidy experts, cannot tell you what the O. stood for. He is an enigma wrapped in an Augusta Tourists uniform. Cobb said he had a Southern drawl, but Leidy was born and raised in New Jersey. His manner is rendered, in the traditional Cobb literature, as even-keeled and mild, but that’s probably just an assumption based on the stabilizing role he played in Cobb’s life. The facts, few as they are, suggest a more complicated man, who, though valued for his leadership skills, had flashed a temper from time to time and once been suspended from the Pennsylvania League (where he played on the same Harrisburg team as Roth) for “insubordination.” In 1904, when he managed the Monroe Hill Citys of the Cotton States League, Sporting Life described him as “cranky”—and in those days, as we’ve seen, you had to be practically a serial killer to register as such.
How this man of mystery came to join the Tourists in April of 1905 will perhaps never be known. Owner John B. Carter had been feuding with Roth over his inability to impose discipline, so it’s possible that Leidy, an experienced manager with a reputation for strictness, was brought in by the front office to help in that regard. What we do know is that no sooner had Leidy arrived than he announced his departure, saying that the Tourists were more unruly than he had expected, utterly beyond help. After some discussion with Carter and Roth, however, he calmed down, agreed to stay on, and was designated team captain, which made him the heir apparent to Roth.
Leidy had his first talk with Cobb on the evening of the day that Roth benched him for snacking in the outfield. “The wonderful old man,” as Cobb remembered his thirty-six-year-old teammate, took him on a streetcar ride to an amusement park on the outskirts of Augusta, where they strolled the gas-lit grounds and talked. Leidy “wasn’t angry, just disappointed,” Cobb recalled. “Baseball [he said] was a great game. It had unlimited opportunities for a boy who knew how to play. Eating popcorn in the outfield was all right if you thought the game was just a joke. But suppose you were too ambitious for that kind of horseplay? Suppose you kept your eye on the ball, studied, practiced, learned to make the most of what nature had given you. You could go to towns that would make Augusta look like a crossroads. You could be famous, you could make a fortune. And every boy in America would idolize you. Your name would go down in the history books. That night was the turning point,” Cobb said. “I made up my mind to be a big leaguer if it killed me.”
Leidy’s gospel was nothing more complicated than practice makes perfect, but he thought in terms of hundreds if not thousands of hours of repetitive drills. “Christy Mathewson wasn’t always a great pitcher,” he told Cobb that evening at the amusement park. “When he started out he had very poor control, so he’d go to the park early and take along a catcher. He’d have the catcher hold his glove in one position and try to hit the hollow of the glove with every pitch. In the winter he cut a hole about twice as big as a baseball about the height of an average man’s waist in the side of his barn, and he’d pitch for hours trying to throw the ball through the hole.” Moving on to Honus Wagner, the era’s other major star, Leidy recounted a strange story about how the burly shortstop, eager to get a better jump on ground balls, would “dig trenches and set himself in those trenches in his stocking feet to get a better start.” Even if some of Leidy’s lessons left Cobb scratching his head, the moral of every tale he told was: “You gotta keep pegging at one certain thing until you got it down pat.”
At the conclusion of that life-changing lecture, Leidy advised Ty to meet him early next morning at Warren Park and to bring a sweater. Cobb, for all his desire to explore the limits of the game, was not yet a good bunter, so the older man put the plumped-up cardigan just inside the first base line, about forty feet from home plate, and tossed Cobb baseballs so he could practice drag bunting into it. This went on for at least an hour, after which they transitioned to drills involving the hit-and-run play and stealing bases. Cobb also practiced sliding in loose dirt he dug up in a remote corner of Warren Park, hooking and fadeawaying and figure-fouring until blood from his leg wounds seeped through his uniform pants. Day after day, alone together on the field, not stopping until other Tourists started filtering in at around 11:00 a.m., he and Leidy repeated their lessons, sometimes putting the sweater on the third base side, at other times stopping the exercises and talking about commonsense things like getting enough sleep and eating lighter meals at midday. Cobb had once routinely enjoyed a platter of roast pork and sweet potato
es before heading to the ballpark; after hearing Leidy describe the digestive process as only a minor league baseball manager could, he cut back to soup, then eliminated lunch entirely. He knew he needed help, and he liked Leidy’s holistic approach, which posited a right and wrong way to live and play.
“Up to that time, I had been running hog wild all over the field. I was a bundle of springs. . . . I would run bases harum scarum and would gallop all over the field trying to get into every play. . . . In some ways my speed and energy were a handicap. I would frequently muss things up.” A change, he saw, was necessary, but being publicly chastised by men like Strouthers and Roth, and teased by his teammates, had only driven him deeper into his “harum scarum” approach. With Leidy’s help he found a face-saving way out. Leidy knew how to criticize Cobb without hurting his feelings, and spoke as a fellow hothead, a man who couldn’t suffer fools, a role Cobb could relate to and respect. Cobb didn’t become a conventional player by any means, but he became determined to channel his exuberance. “I began to find myself,” Ty recalled.
He began to find the ball, too, with almost scary consistency. On May 29 he was hitting .290, and two weeks later, .312. As his average improved, he began to carry himself with a little swagger. It was around this time that Ty began his trademark ritual of swinging all three of his beloved black bats while waiting in the on-deck circle. The routine rarely varied. He would start with a trio of biffers, then switch to one (which he twirled over his head), then pick up another, then swing with all three again before dropping two rather dramatically and striding to the plate. Today almost every player performs some variation on this routine, usually using a weighted club or a lead donut instead of multiple bats. For most if not all it is simply a matter of limbering up. But Cobb from the start saw it as more than just that. He thought of it as a way to intimidate the pitcher, who he knew was probably watching him out of the corner of his eye as he juggled his weapons like a samurai preparing to fight. “I was always doing something,” Cobb recalled years later, “always trying to rattle the other side any way I could.”
Toward the end of June, to the surprise of no one, Leidy became manager of the Tourists, while Roth stayed on as the starting catcher. Days later, Sporting Life congratulated “Cyrus Cobb” for becoming the first player in the South Atlantic League to reach 100 hits that season. The team wasn’t winning any more often than it had been a few weeks earlier, but the mood around Warren Park had at least temporarily brightened. On July 23, the Chronicle published a poem, the latest installment of its Augusta Tourists “alphabet book”:
G is for grouchy
Which is how we all feel
When Cobb gets a start
And then fails to steal.
Meanwhile up north, the Tigers were taking their by now customary midsummer swan dive through the AL standings. After losing nine out of 10 to Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia in late July and early August, their record stood at 43–47–1, and even their cadre of loyal cranks (as fans were called in those days) had started to grumble. “The boys have not been getting the support their record calls for,” Joe S. Jackson wrote in the Detroit Free Press, “the crowds having been slim and the applause frequently stronger for the visitors than for the home team,” who indeed received “loud guffaws for every slip that is made.” The pitching was “unreliable” Jackson conceded, the catching “far from the strongest in the league,” and the outfield had a “patched up” feel. That was putting it mildly; all but one of their six outfielders had some kind of serious complaint. Matty McIntyre was out indefinitely with a “paralyzed hand”; Bobby Lowe and Jimmy Barrett both had leg injuries; Duff Cooley had a perpetual hangover, and Charlie Hickman quit the team in a huff, saying Armour was blaming him for everything that was going wrong, and he couldn’t bear being the scapegoat.
The manager was indeed showing signs of desperation, begging men who had never played in the big leagues (and never would) to join his team. On July 7, he wrote to one Henry Melchior, a twenty-five-year-old outfielder for the Grand Rapids Orphans of the Central League, urging him to reconsider an offer Melchior had spurned a few days earlier. “What seems to be the trouble? There is an elegant opportunity for you with our team. My outfield is in pretty bad shape and I would be able to put you in and use you right along.” Melchior, unimpressed, chose to remain an Orphan. Armour next addressed a letter to “Mr. James, Ball Player, Lancaster, Ohio.” “Dear Sir,” it said, “I understand through a friend of mine that you are a left-handed pitcher. Would like to know what your age, height, and weight are, and whatever experience you have had in baseball.”
Armour also dispatched his chief scout Henry “Heinie” Youngman, a portly German immigrant, to comb the country for prospects. It is sometimes said that Youngman was told to “Go get that Cobb kid we saw in Augusta last spring!” But after trying and failing to recruit an outfielder in Massachusetts, the scout, it seems, hopped an Augusta-bound train to check out the Tourists on a whim. If anyone was drawing him there it was pitcher Eddie Cicotte, a Michigan phenom whom the Tigers had optioned to the Sally League team after a spring tryout. Cicotte was throwing almost nothing but knuckleballs and spitters, Armour had heard, and he was worried about the twenty-one-year-old prospect hurting his arm with the “freak pitches.” Neither Youngman nor Armour appears to have had Cobb—the player that pitcher Donovan advised them to watch out for—on his mind when his trip began. “Let me know when you will start South,” the manager wrote his scout on July 14. “I think the weather would do you a whole lot of good as you carry a little extra superfluous flesh with you anyhow. You will find the southern country mighty fine in the summer time. Do not be afraid to make a deal for any player that looks good enough for this company but do not let him hold you up.” It wasn’t easy to be clueless about Cobb—who was then batting about .315, leading the Sally League in hits, and getting write-ups in Sporting Life—but both Armour and Youngman somehow managed.
Youngman may have first heard the name Ty Cobb shortly after his arrival, when he ran into Leidy on an Augusta street. In a nicely evocative interview with a Washington Post reporter six years after the fact, the Tourists’ manager said that he had written to Fred Clarke, the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Connie Mack of the Philadelphia A’s, urging them to take Ty in the annual early-September draft, and was waiting to hear back from that illustrious duo, when he turned a corner and bumped into Heinie Youngman. I’ll let Leidy tell the tale.
“Anything in the lake?” Youngman asked, after we had shaken hands.
“Yes,” says I, “there is. I’ve got a ‘dinger’ here. He can throw the ball just as far as anybody else, get down to first quicker than any man who ever lived, hit just as hard and fast as he wants to, can lay it down in a five-foot ring anywhere if you want to mark it off—”
“What you been smoking?” interrupted Youngman.
“That ain’t no smoke talk,” says I. “It’s the truth.”
“Tell me about him again then,” said Heinie.
“No, you come out to the park this afternoon and see him work,” says I.
The first time Tyrus came to bat in that day’s game he smashed one at the pitcher that liked to have tore his ear off. The next time up he hit one about as high as a street car, and it went dang-ity-ding-ding up against the pickets in center field, for three bags. Then came a bunt, about three feet from the plate, and in spite of the quick fielding by the pitcher, Tyrus was on his way back to first when it was picked up. The last time up, he hit one so hard that nobody knew where it was until they heard it hit the fence in right field.
“Well, how do you like him?” I asked Scout Youngman, after the game.
“Oh, he did pretty good today,” said he.
“Well, come out tomorrow,” says I, sarcastic like.
He only made two hits the next day. We left that night for Jacksonville, but when I woke up there the first person I saw was Heinie Youngman, who had come about 200 miles to see Tyrus again. In the t
hree games at Jacksonville, Tyrus made eleven hits. Shortly after this, Cobb was sold to Detroit, and when he left me, he said,
“George, if I make good up there, you’ve got something coming to you.”
“Well,” says I, “if you keep your word, I’ve got it in my pocket, for you’ll make good.”
And sure enough, at the end of the season, he came through, like the thoroughbred he is, and always will be.
* * *
* * *
PART TWO
* * *
* * *
— CHAPTER EIGHT —
GEORGE LEIDY DIDN’T LIE ABOUT the role he played in Ty Cobb’s ascent to the majors. If anything, Leidy was overly modest about his contribution, to the point where we probably wouldn’t know his name if Cobb hadn’t brought it up so often. But at the same time Leidy’s recall was hardly flawless, as the passage at the end of the previous chapter demonstrates. For one thing, he referred there to Youngman as “Young,” a slipup I took the liberty of correcting. For another, Cobb didn’t get eleven hits in three games against the Jacksonville Jays, as Leidy claimed; he got seven hits in four games—still good for a .438 series average. And then there is the fact that those games weren’t played in Jacksonville’s Dixieland Park, a turn-of-the-century wonderland that—besides an exquisitely manicured baseball diamond—featured a collection of clockwork rides and a small oval track where ostriches raced to sulky. No, the Tourists faced the Jays at Augusta’s dusty Warren Park just prior to Heinie Youngman’s arrival. Indeed by the time his team set off for its next series in Jacksonville, in early August of 1905, Ty didn’t travel with it, owing to a family emergency.
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