Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Still, Cobb’s crazy energy continued to intrigue some observers, such as American League president Ban Johnson, who told Clark Griffith, the manager of the Washington Senators, he thought the unheralded young Tiger was an unpolished gem and a future star. Griffith begged to differ. “You are dead wrong,” he said. “Wait and see—Cobb won’t survive one swing around the circuit once the pitchers get wise to him.”

  His words initially seemed prophetic. Cobb was at first highly vulnerable to a left-hander’s curve, as left-handed batters usually are. As a result he saw a lot of them, and did more than his share of fanning. The year 1905 was a bad one for hitters in general. When Cobb came up at the end of August, only three American Leaguers were hitting above .300: George Stone of the St. Louis Browns, Willie Keeler of the Highlanders, and Nap Lajoie of the Naps. Sam Crawford would come close for the Tigers, finishing the season at .297. But Cobb ranked far beneath them in the batters’ standings. While the team played much better after his arrival, and won 19 of their final 30 games, finishing third in the AL behind the pennant-winning Athletics and the White Sox, it is hard to make a case for his causing the surge, since he ended up hitting just .240.

  Cobb could have gone home immediately following the final game of the season, a 7–1 win over the Naps in Cleveland on October 7, but, enjoying the distance from Royston, and no doubt wanting to pocket a bit more cash, he chose to stay with the team for two exhibition contests. The second of these, played on October 10, was billed as a “thank you” game. Fans expressed their appreciation to the players not just by buying a ticket (each man wound up realizing “a nice little bit of money”—$80—from the gate, according to the Free Press) but also by breaking into a “warm ovation” each time a Tiger made his first appearance at the plate. Cobb received prolonged applause, the papers noted, and later told the fans, through the press, that he was looking forward to seeing them again next season. The advent of Davy Jones, a highly touted outfielder whom Armour had procured from the Minneapolis Millers of the Class A American Association, seemed to leave him unfazed. When a reporter from the Atlanta Constitution ran into Ty at a Georgia Tech–Clemson football game in early December and conducted an impromptu interview, “Cobb intimated,” the paper said, “that he would get the position on the 1906 Tiger lineup without having to fight it out with another candidate.”

  Why was he so sure that he could bounce back from a lackluster season? No one ever asked him, so we’ll never know, but perhaps it was because he had done it before. Two-forty was only three points higher than the batting average he had wound up with at the end of 1904, as a seventeen-year-old Augusta Tourist. A few months later he was leading the Sally League with a .326 average. Granted, he was in the majors now, his father was gone, and his inner life was so roiled he didn’t know how to feel about his own mother. But this much he did know: he was Ty Cobb and Ty Cobb was no .240 hitter.

  — CHAPTER TEN —

  TY COBB HAD SEVERAL GOOD reasons for feeling like he’d been accepted by the veteran members of the Detroit Tigers in the autumn of 1905, starting with the fact that the season had ended and he hadn’t been harassed, abused, and made to feel like he should go someplace else—back down to the Sally League, say, or out of baseball entirely: in other words, he hadn’t been given a good old-fashioned hazing. Except for the brief flare-up with fellow outfielder Matty McIntyre over territorial rights, the Georgia kid had gotten virtually no guff from any of the interlocking cliques of cranky Yankees that constituted the Detroit Base Ball and Amusement Company. True, it’s not as if they hung around his locker asking if he’d read any good books lately (if they had he would have said Les Misérables, a lifelong favorite he was once again working through just then), but they treated him like just another one of the boys, sacrificing him over to the next base when the situation called for it, sliding in hard to make it difficult for a fielder to throw him out on the back end of a double play, and, on at least one occasion, interfering (artfully) with the catcher so he could more easily steal second. Such things were not done automatically for every rookie in that golden age of bullying. Yet they were done for him and as a result he felt like a full-fledged member of the ball club.

  The men in the Tigers front office did more than just tolerate their youngest player or take him for granted—they actively liked him. On January 6, 1906, Bill Armour sent Cobb a contract for 1906 that would pay him $1,500, “$300 more than I talked to you of before leaving,” the manager noted. “Before Mr. Navin left for California, we had a long talk on the subject,” Armour added, “and we both liked you and felt as we would rather have you satisfied than otherwise, have decided to do our part to make everything satisfactory to you.” To spend just a few hours in the Ernie Harwell Collection at the Detroit Public Library paging through the old letters is to know that the manager and team secretary, Frank Navin, did not talk to the other Tigers in such a kindly and supportive fashion. Armour, who typically sent players a contract with a cover letter saying, essentially, Take it or leave it, sounded almost paternal when he wrote to Cobb, whom he knew would be occupied during the off-season with his late father’s estate, and who had told some people that he wasn’t completely certain he would be coming back; his family might need him and, besides, he could easily make more money than the Tigers were paying, even in a small town like Royston. “I trust you will be able to round up your business affairs in such shape that you can give your attention to baseball,” Armour said. “Think you would be very foolish to pull away from the game at present as you have a bright future in front of you if I am any judge of a player.” Cobb felt kindly toward the manager in return. He quickly signed the contract and, though he was still among the lowest-paid players on the team, sent it back with a note of gratitude.

  Reaching out again in a way that showed his affection and trust, Armour in early February asked Cobb if he could make an advance trip to Warren Park to inspect the playing field, which was reputed to have been ravaged over the winter by a traveling carnival. Glad to be asked and happy for an excuse to get away from Royston and visit his girlfriend Charlie Lombard’s hometown, Cobb went to Augusta and reported back that the rumors were true: the field was indeed a mess. “Last year it was generally conceded that Augusta had the best diamond in the South,” he told the Chronicle, which covered him as a visiting dignitary and described him as “the idol of [local] baseball fans.” “But now we have the worst. Only a semblance of the real diamond remains while the outfield is boggy, full of holes and covered with trash. I was greatly surprised, not to say shocked, when I saw how matters were.”

  Though the name of the Warren Park groundskeeper did not surface in the report of the controversy, Cobb was in effect criticizing the work of Henry “Bungy” Cummings, a twenty-five-year-old black man who lived with his wife, Savannah, and their eleven-year-old son, George, in a small house adjacent to the Negro section of the grandstand, in far right field. Cummings was officially the janitor of the facility, but his prime responsibility was the maintenance of the strikingly grassless playing surface. After a few years on the job, he was well liked, and his work was occasionally complimented by the Chronicle’s sportswriters, yet he was also known around town as a hopeless if harmless drunk. Cummings didn’t lose his job over Cobb’s scathing assessment (he would remain the Warren Park groundskeeper for at least another ten years), but he must have been mortified—or enraged—when, in response to it, local volunteers formed a crew and went to work getting the field into shape for the Tigers’ early-March arrival. Whether Cummings tried to save face by directing their efforts or humbly made amends by working along with them we don’t know. But we should keep his name in mind because this otherwise forgotten man, misidentified in previous books and articles as Bungy Davis, will resurface as a key figure in Cobb’s story.

  • • •

  With the family breadwinner suddenly gone, money, for the first time in Ty’s life, was a concern. The Cobbs had a small financial cushion in the form of property in
the Narrows that had been bequeathed to Amanda and her siblings after their father, the Confederate captain who made good, died in 1893. Her share was worth a few thousand dollars, enough in those days to pay for the quintet of lawyers who would defend her from the charge of first-degree voluntary manslaughter, and allow the family to build a modest house elsewhere in Royston. Moving from Franklin Springs Street was absolutely necessary, Ty felt, because of the bad memories the house now held and because of the dynamite that townsfolk had starting putting around the Jones sisters’ place next door. The ladies usually found the scary red sticks before they could be detonated, but one day when they were away from home their porch was blown to smithereens. Later, the house would be set on fire by an unknown person or persons. Ty knew that he couldn’t be away for months at a time playing baseball while his family stayed fifty or so feet from an active war zone.

  To bring in a few extra dollars for day-to-day expenses, Ty took a temporary off-season job as a baseball coach at University School, a University of Georgia prep academy in Stone Mountain. It was only a two-week engagement, but it didn’t end until the third or fourth day of the Tigers’ preseason training camp. In mid-January he wrote to Armour asking for permission but mostly telling him that he would come to Augusta on or about March 11, three days after the official start date. Given his good stead and that so many Tigers were holding out for better contracts that year, ensuring that spring training would get off to a stutter-start, he didn’t think that would be a problem. The manager, however, quickly denied his request. “It will be to the advantage of yourself and our club to be with us during our training period as there are a few points in the game that I am anxious for you to get next to,” Armour wrote back. Why he took this strict position is hard to say, though he liked having Cobb around and may genuinely have felt his youngest player needed to bone up on some basics. In the end it didn’t matter. Whatever his motive for saying no, Cobb ignored his response and took the job anyway—and Armour ignored his late arrival. The manager rarely backed up his stern talk with strong actions, and by then everyone on the Tigers—including Armour’s boss, Frank Navin—knew it.

  Armour would spend the coming season gradually losing control of the club. His paralyzing butterfly phobia never seems to have become an issue, but his lack of leadership skills did. He had gotten off to a bad start the year before, sounding strident about salaries in his very first letters in January and February, then leaving his struggling team during the dog days and dashing about the country, desperately trying and mostly failing to recruit halfway decent players. As time went on it became ever clearer why the Cleveland Naps had fired Armour at the end of the 1904 season, and installed Nap Lajoie as player-manager. Apart from his poor instincts for personnel management, Armour simply made too many mistakes, such as, at the start of his second year with the Tigers, forgetting to order new uniforms. When the Tigers scattered for home in October of 1905, he had told them to “see a good tailor” and send along their current measurements by the first of the year. Then he seems to have woken up one morning in February of ’06 and realized that he’d never followed up. As a result he had to sheepishly survey the players by mail, asking anyone who had taken his uniform home to please bring it back—sometimes while in the midst of testy salary negotiations with those same men.

  In 1906, Armour’s second year with the club, those negotiations seemed more problematic than ever. When the Tigers’ train pulled into Augusta on the evening of March 4, it had only twelve players, less than half the roster, almost all of them pitchers. This presented some obvious problems. Who exactly would these men pitch to and how would this remnant of the club play intra-squad games? The manager’s short-term solution was to order the construction of a life-size dummy that would be propped up on a stake at home plate, presumably so the pitchers could have a sense of the strike zone, a target at which to aim. Armour was said to be quite proud of his creation, but most everyone else seemed a bit embarrassed by the silly-looking effigy—which said more about the Bill Armour era than the manager had intended.

  With Navin away for the winter, touring the racetracks of California, first winning a fortune and then losing two or three, the Tigers, as they at last signed their contracts and dribbled into camp, took to either bullying Armour or ignoring him. “Not even a troupe of emotional actresses presents any greater difficulty to management than a modern baseball club,” Detroit News reporter Paul Bruske wrote. Sam Crawford, Germany Schaefer, Charley O’Leary, Bill Coughlin, Charlie Schmidt, Bob Lowe, Tom Doran, Pinky Lindsay, and a few others all had refused to sign the first contracts Armour had sent them, or report for duty, or hop to his orders when they did arrive, and even the hot prospect Davy Jones, who had already signed for $2,400, took a shot at getting a little more of what the players sometimes called “tease.” If you followed Jones, this was not surprising; he had jumped so many contracts early in his career that the writers dubbed him “The Kangaroo.” (Armour denied his request, assuring him that he was getting “the club limit”—then later the same day offered Crawford $3,000.)

  Besides wanting more money, the Tiger players wanted more respect. Holdouts who had been sent what Navin called “booze contracts” (the vast majority of the team that year) said they were offended by the idea that $200 to $500 of their annual salary would be set aside pending a postseason judgment by management regarding their “good habits.” Drinkers? Them? To a man they wanted these “sobriety clauses” struck, and the booze-bonus money folded into their regular paychecks. They didn’t have much of a case, though. Rare was the day when the Tigers clubhouse didn’t smell like stale hops. This was, after all, a team hampered by perpetual headaches and sometimes even intra-inning imbibing; their backup catcher, Jack Warner, at least once had to be led off the field drunk. (Even the chief baseball writer for the Detroit Free Press, Joe S. Jackson, was known as a “nipper” who would habitually sip from a flask during the course of a game.) “You know drinking was carried to an extreme last year,” Armour wrote to third baseman Bill Coughlin, the team captain, in early 1906. “The club owners as well as myself are broadminded enough to know that a glass of beer will not hurt anyone, but ten or twelve will, and this is what we are aiming to remedy.” He reminded Schaefer of a contrite promise about drinking that the second baseman had made to him one day the previous year after an exhibition game in Columbus, Ohio, but had failed to keep. He told McIntyre that he would give him $2,200 for the year, “and $200 additional providing you go to Hot Springs for a course of baths before reporting time” in order to “boil” the winter’s alcohol residue from his body. Cobb was one of the few whose contract had no sobriety clause; instead of temperance lectures he got back-pats. “Was glad to hear that you’ve been [practicing] bunting,” Armour wrote to him on February 19, “as you will find that it will be a lot of good to you.” Ty was a good boy, and for the time being, anyway, he liked being one.

  When there were finally enough men in camp for intra-squad games, Armour posted lineup cards that should have removed any lingering doubts about Cobb’s status. In contests between the Yannigans and Regulars, as the practice teams were called, Ty was always listed among the latter group. The message in this was unmistakable because, while some veterans were usually needed to round out the Yannigans’ lineups, the Regulars always remained rookie-free, the team of Crawford, McIntyre, Captain Bill Coughlin, and a few other stalwarts who could be considered the faces of the franchise. “The answer to one subject may be regarded as given, and that is the outfield proposition,” wrote Joe S. Jackson from the Tigers’ training camp on March 18. “Ty Cobb, the ambitious young Georgian who made a hit with the home fans last fall, will be with the club through 1906.”

  That was true only as far as it went, however. Cobb would be a fixture, but mostly on the bench: he wouldn’t be starting in center field, as he had the year before. That job would go to twenty-five-year-old Davy Jones, who, said Jackson, “unless he meets with some accident” would be a first-stringe
r when the Tigers played the Chicago White Sox at Bennett Park on April 14, opening day. Jones, who’d grown up poor in the tiny Welsh community of Cambria, Wisconsin, and had a law degree from Dixon College in Illinois, was a fine hitter and probably faster than Cobb, though nowhere near as unpredictable or inventive (who was?). Like almost everyone else on the Tigers, he had a temper and a tendency to settle disputes with his fists, yet he was certainly the more polished of the two prospective center fielders in 1906, having spent considerable stretches in the major leagues already, mostly with the St. Louis Browns and Chicago Cubs. He was also coming off a season in which he’d finished second in the American Association, a league far more esteemed than Cobb’s South Atlantic, with a .346 average.

  About the only knock against Jones was that he was prone to mishaps and illness. He’d sat out many games early in his career due to typhoid fever, a broken leg, and assorted other miseries. When Joe S. Jackson wrote that Jones would be in center field barring an accident, he wasn’t just employing a figure of speech. Indeed on the train trip north from Augusta that spring, Jones incurred the kind of injury you just don’t hear about anymore: while attempting to hang his hat on a hook outside his sleeping car berth, he hit his head on an (unlit) gas lamp, opening a sizable wound on his scalp. Since he was already suffering from tonsillitis, he felt especially miserable.

  By then, though, a sea change had occurred on the Tigers, making the innocent days of late winter seem far away indeed. Cliques were constantly forming and disbanding in that cranky, cotton-mouthed clubhouse, but it was the dramatic realignment of certain players in opposition to Cobb in the early spring of 1906 that would have a dramatic effect on the team for years to come—and on Cobb himself forever. The conspiracy first revealed itself, appropriately enough, on or very near the Ides of March. When Cobb trotted onto the field for batting practice at Warren Park one morning, he found Matty McIntyre waiting for him, and blocking his path to home plate. What was this about? Six years older than Cobb, a fair left fielder and a solid .260 hitter, McIntyre was a darkly handsome, and decidedly gruff, Staten Island Irishman, yet another Tiger who liked to express himself with his fists. But that day his anger seemed to have no precipitating cause (Cobb said he was “shocked” by McIntyre’s behavior), and employing the most obscene terms (“It was unbelievable to me that men could use some of those epithets and be manly”), he informed Ty that he wouldn’t be taking any batting practice, not that day, perhaps not ever. If Cobb wanted to occupy himself, McIntyre said, he could run around in the outfield and shag fly balls hit by the veterans, or, better yet, pack his bag and return to the second-rate Southern minors from whence he’d slithered. A half year behind schedule, but with no power lost for being pent up for so long, the hazing of Ty Cobb had begun.