When Cobb returned to Bennett Park the next day, Armour told him to “go get a glove and go out there,” pointing toward the Detroit Tribune billboard in center field. He’d be batting fifth. Scheduled to pitch for the Highlanders was the formidable righty Jack Chesbro, a specialist in the spitball, which was legal then and would remain so for another fourteen years. The future Hall of Famer, yet another well-known grump, never claimed to be a showman. With no need to be especially secretive about his “saliva pitch,” Chesbro would stand on the mound and lick his fingers, then apply his “tobacco juice” to the ball. The brownness made his pitches difficult to see; the moisture lent them a maddening unpredictability. Chesbro called the spitter “the greatest invention of the baseball age.” For catchers, whose mitts were mitten-sized, it was difficult to handle, and of course disgusting to touch. Highlanders backstop James “Deacon” McGuire objected to it on sanitary grounds, but his opinion didn’t matter in light of Chesbro’s phenomenal results. In 1904, using the spitter in combination with a mysterious “slowball,” “Happy Jack,” as he was ironically known, had gone 41–12, still the most wins ever compiled in a single season. As the Free Press said of Cobb the next day, “For a young man anxious to get along in the world it was not an auspicious occasion.”
About 1,200 turned out for the Tigers-Highlanders matchup of August 30. Many years ago I met a man—my theater professor at Fordham, Vaughn Deering—who claimed to have been one of them. “You could tell right away Cobb was going to be special,” he said, in the same gravelly but pear-shaped tones he had employed as a member of Otis Skinner’s theatrical troupe. Deering, who talked more about baseball than drama in class, was old enough to make his attendance at the game possible—and ads in the Free Press show that Skinner’s company did indeed stop in Detroit at the time. So I may very well have shaken a hand that pushed a turnstile or shelled a peanut on the historic occasion of Cobb’s major league debut. I only wish now I had probed Deering for details, especially about Bennett Park, which seems to have been a most quirky venue. Built in 1896 on the site of the city’s hay market, and named for a beloved old minor league catcher, Charlie Bennett, it was the smallest and most eccentrically shaped park in the league, thanks to stands that extended almost all the way down the left field foul line but on the other side barely made it halfway around to first base. The cobblestone floor of the hay market occasionally breached the playing surface, causing balls to take freakish bounces. Aha, you might say, the ghost of the buried nineteenth century breaking forth to bedevil the twentieth! But the infielders who played there just said, “Shit, it hit a cobble!”—an excuse you didn’t hear anywhere else.
Cobb would later say that he was nervous, but not as much as he thought he’d be as he trotted out to a spot between left fielder Matty McIntyre, a belligerent New York City boy constantly at odds with the front office, and Wahoo Sam Crawford, at twenty-five one of the game’s best all-around players. As eager as he was to succeed, Ty was delighted, he said in one newspaper memoir, not to get any chances in the outfield that first half inning.
When it was time for the Tigers to hit they likely surprised themselves by getting to Jack Chesbro early. No sooner had Silk O’Loughlin, the sole umpire on duty, shouted “Baa-a-rup!” than leadoff man McIntyre was on with a line drive double to left. (O’Loughlin, the inventor of the seal-bark way of speaking that umpires still employ today, had an uncanny knack for being present at critical moments in Cobb’s career.) Then light-hitting first baseman Pinky Lindsay knocked in the runner with a single, and Germany Schaefer got Lindsay over to second with a sacrifice bunt. Crawford was next up, to be followed by Cobb. Before handing him the big homemade biffer he’d use in his first major league plate appearance, Tigers batboy Frank Brady kissed it for good luck.
As strange as that may sound, it was no big deal at the time. Baseball in 1905 was just getting started as a big business, but it was already rife with superstitions and weird rites. No peanuts in the clubhouse, never walk between the pitcher and the umpire, don’t let the ump toss his little whisk broom onto your side of the field, and for God’s sake don’t step on the foul line. Tigers pitcher Bill Donovan believed it bad luck to strike out the first batter, so he went out of his way not to. Connie Mack, often thought of as the game’s greatest sage, carried the right hind foot of a rabbit that had been killed in a graveyard at midnight by a hunchbacked Negro, and so on. If kissing a bat sounds odd, consider that Jack Fournier, when he played for the 1912 Chicago White Sox, kissed teammate Russell Blackburne before each plate appearance. What batboy Brady did on the Tigers bench would not have turned many heads in 1905. But Cobb’s next move—which was to take his bat and put it with two others and step into the on-deck area swinging the bouquet of black lumber back and forth and then above his head—that surely caught the attention of the Tigers. One can imagine them, with eyebrows cocked, making a mental note: Kid thinks he’s something special.
Crawford gently knocked one back to the box.
Cobb came to the plate then with two outs and Lindsay on third. Chesbro’s first pitch was a high spitter that Ty lunged at amateurishly.
The next pitch he took—a curve that dropped straight down over the plate. “Stee-rike Tuh!” said O’Loughlin. Then came another fastball, this one not so fast and waist high, which Cobb, letting both hands slide down toward the knob of his bat, drove smoothly into the gap in left center. “Believe me,” he said many years later, “it was some proud kid who sped around to second amidst the cheers of the crowd.”
— CHAPTER NINE —
IT WAS A GOOD DEBUT. Besides the double in his first major league at-bat Cobb also drew a walk in four trips to the plate as the Tigers, behind the stolid pitching of George Mullin, who had just rejoined the team after burying his brother, beat the Highlanders 5–3. The few balls that came Cobb’s way in the outfield that afternoon he handled cleanly, though he appeared not always certain of what to do with them next. The Detroit sportswriters publicly acknowledged his promising start, as did his manager, privately. “Tried Cobb out yesterday and he did first-rate,” Armour wrote to his scout Heinie Youngman on August 31. “He looks like he might make a pretty good man with the proper kind of training.” To C. D. Carr, owner of the Augusta team, Armour allowed in his next letter of the day that his new man “did very nice work” but “was a little slow in getting the ball away from him at two or three different times in the game, which I think was due to the fact that he was somewhat afraid of making a bad throw. He could have completed a nice double play [outfielders tended to play not far behind the infielders in those days and often participated in double plays], and another time caught a man at the plate, but of course, this will come to him when he is a little more experienced.”
Cobb’s advanced education had already started in the fifth inning of his first game, when he tried to steal second following the walk. Sensing that he’d gotten off a step too slowly, and that he stood a good chance of being thrown out by the Highlanders catcher, Deacon McGuire, Cobb lost his composure and dove into the bag headfirst, like he did in his early days with the Augusta Tourists. This was not considered the wisest way to slide, and shortstop Elberfeld showed him one reason why. The always cantankerous Kid, refreshed after an eight-day suspension for “grabbing umpire [John] McCarthy by the blouse and shaking him,” didn’t just tag Cobb with McGuire’s perfect peg; he brought his knee down on the back of Cobb’s neck and pushed his face into the barely concealed hay market cobbles. “My forehead and face were shoved into the hard ground and the skin peeled off just above the eyebrows,” Cobb recalled in his 1925 memoir (republished in book form as My Twenty Years in Baseball). But as painful as the experience was, he did not come up swinging; his feelings were not injured. “The clever way in which he moved completely blocked me,” Ty wrote. “When I got to my feet I was much subdued. I had run into a real big leaguer. I realized that he knew much of what I would have to learn.” The encounter turned out to be the beginning of a friendshi
p with Elberfeld, who while hardly as talented as Cobb, shared his penchant for always going hard and exploiting every opportunity an opponent unwittingly provided. Strong-willed, seat-of-the-pants players like Elberfeld may play a brand of baseball that can leave rivals beaten and bleeding, Ty once said, “but they were rarely malicious.”
On the way back to the bench, Cobb says in My Twenty Years, he had what sounds at first like an epiphany. “I began to think ‘that is no way to slide into a base! I’m all wrong.’ By going in there head first the baseman has all the advantage. From then on I watched closely. I noted how Elberfeld and other stars went into the bag—feet first, spikes shining. ‘By going in that way,’ I said to myself, ‘the advantage is with the slider. He is testing the other fellow’s nerve. Why let him test mine?’ ” It’s a nice story, and perhaps to a degree a true one, but it also feels like a too tidy version of reality. Cobb, by this point, had already been warned off the headfirst slide by both George Leidy and Germany Schaefer, and in fact he would, despite what they and Elberfeld advised, retain the move in his repertoire for the remainder of his career, convinced that in certain situations it provided a critical advantage. Cobb had great respect for anyone who played the game passionately and well, and he enjoyed learning from the masters. At the same time, he studiously avoided becoming a textbook player. He wanted to blend the best of the received wisdom into a refined version of his crazy-seeming “harum scarum” style. He wanted to play a slightly different game than everyone else was playing, to be out of sync with the anticipated rhythms, protocols, and conventions. Hit ’em where they ain’t, run when you really shouldn’t, keep going when you ought to stop. It was the modern age and his game was the baseball equivalent of modern art. It was at once a dramatic break from the past and a comment on it. It made people nervous. His game looked ugly until it looked bold and smart.
• • •
On the day of Cobb’s second major league game, August 31, 1905, the Highlanders made things easier for the Tigers by putting forth pudgy right-hander Jack Powell, who was known during his 16 seasons in the major leagues as a “nothing” pitcher, because he had neither a true fastball nor a breaking curve. Rather than being flummoxed by Powell’s vacuousness, as some apparently were, Ty stroked two singles. Neither figured in the Tigers’ 5–0 victory, but getting three hits in his first two games, said Cobb, “did more I believe than any other thing to restore my complete confidence and send me on my way for a major league career.” Confidence was 50 percent of baseball, Cobb often said—and that is why he cultivated the quality in himself and concentrated so hard on undermining it in others.
Overall, though, this was a weird time for Cobb. He was still grieving for his father, and the papers back in Georgia were ardently following his mother’s manslaughter case and working the unfaithful-wife angle awfully hard. On the evening of his second game with the Tigers, a reporter from the Columbus (Georgia) Ledger spotted Amanda back at the Jackson Hotel in Atlanta with “a man said to be her cousin.” Police knocked on her door “shortly after midnight” looking for one Joshua Chambers but found only Mrs. Cobb and her frightened daughter, Florence. “Arrests will follow the finding of Chambers,” the paper promised, leaving readers to imagine what the charges might possibly be.
Amanda was something of a mystery herself. It was hard to tell what was going on beneath that schoolmarmish hive of bright red hair. Was she the archetypal black widow, or an innocent victim of circumstances? The morning after the police came to her door, she and Florence moved from the Jackson to the Aragon Hotel, a fancier place farther from the train station—and into the sights of the Macon Telegraph. Amanda, “the mother of Cy Cobb, a professional ballplayer,” told that reporter she didn’t know yet when she would be tried, but felt “I have been done an injustice, a very grave injustice. For the sake of my children, however, who would suffer from going through so much notoriety, I will refrain from offering any explanations.”
If anyone was really looking for him, Joshua Chambers should not have been hard to find. He was in fact Amanda’s distant cousin, and, like her late husband, a prominent educator in Franklin County. He had worked with W.H. over the years, sometimes as co-principal of the same school. Whether Chambers was the cause of the loud argument between Amanda and W.H. that brought the police running in early July we cannot know. He would soon vanish from the newspapers’ narrative, flotsam in the scandal’s wake. But the larger story of the shooting and its aftermath would not go away. A few weeks later Amanda, for technical reasons, had to be rearrested and reindicted and her bail was raised to $10,000, a fantastic amount for someone who was not really a flight risk. The system seemed stacked against her and, overcome with hopelessness, she cried freely in the courtroom as the judge set her bail, or so the dailies noted with their usual overweening concern.
No doubt mortified by the melodrama being played out in the papers, Cobb tried to lose himself in the baseball life. Being a major leaguer meant frequent train travel, and many open evenings suitable for long summer walks in interesting cities that had recently started smelling more like automobiles than horse flop. As a flaneur and a constant reader (he especially liked biographies of Jefferson and Napoleon) Cobb was often away from his teammates, though he sometimes played cards with Germany Schaefer, Bill Donovan, and a few others. Some veterans resented Cobb’s apparent aloofness, but perhaps because he was so infrequently around those men, he didn’t immediately sense their feelings. He felt things were going fairly well, even if, as September wore on, his batting average hovered around .250 and his fielding was less than stellar. On September 24, the Augusta Chronicle ran an article saying that “a gentleman of the city” had received a letter from Cobb, who seemed in excellent spirits and was “enjoying the many interesting sights on the present road trip.” He had toured “the largest iron works in the world” in Pittsburgh when the Tigers played an exhibition game there against an “outlaw” team from Homestead, Pennsylvania. On a swing through Washington for a series against the Nationals he had visited the Library of Congress.
Such behavior in a rookie was not normally tolerated. Cobb was probably spared from harassment or worse in that first half year by the utter mediocrity of his play. If he had been hitting .320 and fielding brilliantly, his taste for high culture might have been impossible to tolerate. But the best you could say about Cobb in the latter part of 1905 was that from time to time he appeared promising. On September 12 at Bennett Park he went 2-for-4 and scored the winning run in the ninth inning in what would later be seen as typically Ty Cobb fashion—coming home all the way from second on a bobbled infield grounder. Looking like the Rookie of the Year at D.C.’s National Park on September 22 (the distinction was not actually awarded until 1947), he had two singles and a double, scored two runs, and stole a base in a 6–5 Tigers’ victory. A few days later in Sporting Life, Detroit writer Paul H. Bruske said that despite being “a bit green to the fast game” Ty was an “infant prodigy.” Manager Armour showed his satisfaction by penciling him into the lineup virtually every day, and Cobb was starting to feel at home in Bennett Park’s vast center field, between billboards for President Suspenders and LaVerdo Havana Cigars (“Couldn’t Be Better If You Paid a Dollar”).
But there was much to offset the good news. He went 0-for-5 in a September 3 game in which the rest of the Tigers feasted on St. Louis Browns pitching, combining for 16 hits in a 10–1 victory at Sportsman’s Park—one of many occasions on which he, as they used to say, took the collar. He also had more problems with the sun than your average outfielder, and at least once, at National Park, Armour had to move him from center to left field in midgame. (A few years later, Cobb would be one of the first players to smear his cheeks with black soot to diminish the glare.) Meanwhile, when he was in center his natural overaggressiveness often caused him to stray into Matty McIntyre’s left field workspace. One incursion in a home game against the White Sox was especially egregious and led to his first confrontation with a fellow Tige
r—though it doesn’t seem that he and McIntyre exchanged blows. The way the sportswriters told the tale, Ty was clearly in the wrong. “McIntyre called for [Lee] Tannehill’s fly in the ninth and got the ball in his glove,” the Free Press reported on September 6. “Cobb interfered with him, despite the call, and the ball was dropped.” The paper couldn’t resist a bit of finger-wagging: “When Mr. McIntyre tears loose the call for a ball, it is the best policy of the other fielders to step aside.”
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