Not surprisingly, those Tigers brought to the dark art of bullying the requisite fierceness but little imaginative flair. Barring a yannigan from batting practice was a cliché move in those “olden days,” Cobb said, when ballplayers were not yet the “higher class of men” they would become, in his estimation, just a few years later. So was running into a rookie trying to field a ball, or, if the hazee was a pitcher, playing purposely porous defense behind him to help tarnish his record. It didn’t matter if you were hurting your own club with such tactics as long as you were hurting the new guy’s chances and thus helping a veteran keep his job. Nor did baseball hazing have much pretense of being an outlandish practical joke that perpetrator and victim would one day laugh about and bond over. For the most part, it was just mean.
Hazing didn’t happen to every new player—the less talented ones, especially, didn’t seem worth the time, trouble, or thumbtacks—but if you were selected for the process you were supposed to take your punishment humbly and without complaint—to ride out the storm. Cobb, however, seemed constitutionally incapable of doing that. Before McIntyre could finish cursing him out, Cobb moved through stages of outrage. His first instinct was to enlist support, but when he appealed to other men milling in the on-deck area—his friends, he thought—they literally turned their backs on him. Even the graying, forty-year-old Bobby Lowe, a paternal figure at whose house Cobb had at least once eaten dinner, succumbed to the peer pressure, and said nothing. (Cobb would never forget that.) Ty’s next move was to stalk over to the dugout and demand redress from Armour. The manager, who tended to shy away from face-to-face confrontations with his men, tried to laugh off the matter as the sort of thing every ballplayer goes through. “Go up there and take your turn,” he told Cobb, according to the 1925 memoir. “If they say anything, shove ’em out of the way. They’re kidding you.” So Ty did just that, pushing his way to the plate and getting in his swings, as he said, “despite their looks.”
When he came back to the clubhouse a few minutes later, he discovered what he described as “a tragedy.” The black ash bats that Joe Cunningham, the Royston coffin carpenter, had made for him and that he’d been hauling wherever he went for the past several years, had been sawed into pieces—“and,” he added, “parts of them thrown away.” After that the indignities just kept coming. Cobb would on many occasions find his street clothes tied in knots and at other times his uniform missing. When he retrieved his hat from a restaurant checkroom—usually after dining alone—he sometimes found it twisted out of shape, or punched through at the crown. On train trips some of the Tigers seated behind him threw wads of wet newspaper at his head. The bathroom on his hotel floor (the johns were communal in those days, at least in the kinds of places ballplayers stayed) was always occupied or locked when he tried to use it. At one point, Cobb’s enemies pressured his roommate, pitcher Ed Willett, into asking Armour to move him out, leaving Cobb as the only Tiger without a partner on road trips. Speaking of this time years later to Grantland Rice, Cobb said that ostracization didn’t bother him so much “because it gave me more time by myself to think about baseball.” In any case, he did not, for the most part, fight back with his fists when harassed and abused in this way—to do so would have been futile because he was always outnumbered—but his defiant attitude was enough to keep his tormentors at their task. Some, like Sam Crawford, thought any excesses on the part of the anti-Cobb clique were basically Cobb’s fault. “He took it the wrong way,” Crawford said in The Glory of Their Times, sounding what was at the time a popular refrain. “He came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little razzing into a life-or-death struggle.”
The reporters assigned to cover the Tigers could see what was happening, but wrote nothing about it until months later, when Armour finally gave them an excuse to violate the unwritten rule about not airing a team’s dirty laundry by suspending McIntyre for his role in the harassment of Cobb. How much of a scandal they were sitting on, how much sympathy there might be on the part of the general public for someone in Cobb’s position, would be hard to say. Some people were starting to see the stupidity in hazing, especially after a famous 1898 case in which a West Point Cadet named Oscar Booze died after being held down and forced to drink Tabasco sauce. Yet most still believed, as Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana did, that the practice had roots in healthy male aggression. “A young man is like a male animal after all,” Beveridge said, “and those who object to his rioting like a young bull are in a perpetual quarrel with nature.” Charles Foster Kent, head of the department of biblical literature at the Yale Divinity School, said that the book of Genesis proved that Joseph has been “eft’ectually hazed” by his brothers, and came away from the experience “less fresh [as in impudent]. We all look back on the hazing incidents of our college days,” Kent added, “as a pleasant memory.”
The extent of Cobb’s hazing—its exact duration and the depths of its severity—is not known. Although he mentioned it a few times in his various memoirs, he didn’t dwell on the subject, mostly because he didn’t want to depict himself as a victim. The fact that Al Stump, his ghostwriter, featured the period prominently (and inaccurately) in chapter one of his autobiography is a key reason Cobb was preparing to sue to stop publication of the book when he died in July of 1961. (Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball came out that September.) What seems certain is that Cobb’s hazing was harsher and went on for far longer than the typical rookie’s. It also felt colder—more premeditated—since it started at an arbitrary point in the season after he arrived in the majors. One imagines a group of grown men sitting together somewhere, in the days before the initial batting practice episode, probably with drinks in hand, working themselves up over an oblivious if somewhat cocky teen, who was just then sitting in his room listening to Fritz Kreisler recordings. Why did Cobb upset them so much, and why did they erupt just then, after tolerating him the year before?
One thing that annoyed them was his Southernness. More than just another detestable attribute—like his bookishness or his popularity with the Augusta fans—this fact magnified and colored everything about him. Southerners were exoticized by their boreal brethren in those days—for their elaborate codes of conduct, their odd cuisine (possum? really?), and their feelings in regard to race (or rather the more open, or one might say less hypocritical, way that many expressed those feelings). For some of the Tiger players, Cobb’s Southernness played out most maddeningly in his air of aristocracy, his sense of being in some ineffable way better than them, an attitude they sensed, to their dismay, had a basis in fact. Writing fifty-five years later, on the occasion of Cobb’s death, E. A. Batchelor, a longtime sports editor for the Detroit Free Press and Daily News, said, “that Ty came from a higher social plane than had spawned the bullies made them all the more determined to drive him off the squad.” In the North in those days, Southerners who failed to display sufficient deference were often said, as Crawford said of Cobb, to be “still fighting the Civil War.” In The Glory of Their Times, Crawford added, “As far we were concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he met us.” Cobb wasn’t the only Southern ballplayer to hear this accusation. A few years later, Shoeless Joe Jackson, in his rookie season, was twice driven back to his home in rural Pickens County, South Carolina, by teammates on the Philadelphia Athletics who teased him mercilessly for being an illiterate hillbilly. Unable to stop the harassment, manager Connie Mack finally traded Jackson to Cleveland—where in his first full season with the Naps he hit .408. (“It don’t take school stuff to help a fella play ball,” Jackson said.)
Of course, Cobb had been Southern—and almost all the other things he was in 1906—the previous summer, when he had gotten along fine with everyone except Matty McIntyre. It wasn’t until the following spring that he added his only truly unpardonable sin, the one thing worse than being Southern: being good. When he showed up in Augusta that spring he was broader across the shoulders, having added about twenty-five pounds of muscle over the w
inter, in the estimation of the Free Press. Meanwhile, he seemed, at the age of nineteen, both faster and more powerful: from the start of spring training the ball jumped off his bat, and he would be halfway to first base before it bounced. He’d been working out hard during the off-season, he told the sportswriters who marveled at his condition—and reported that he seemed to be in midseason form while the other, older Tigers were, as usual, slowly and creakily working their way into playing shape, an observation that certainly did not increase his popularity among the veterans. In his first intra-squad game, Cobb hit an inside-the-park home run, immediately justifying his selection as a Regular. In his first official preseason game about a week later, against the Brooklyn Superbas, he got a triple and single. Against the Macon Brigands of the Sally League a few days after that, he was 3-for-4. The only game that month in which he went hitless was the one the Tigers played against the Augusta Tourists on the night before his mother’s trial for manslaughter. This is a small sample of performances, to be sure, but there was something about the way Cobb looked getting those hits that confirmed the initial impressions of those who thought he’d be first-rate. Despite a surfeit of outfielders, Navin and Armour turned down several offers for Cobb that would have allowed them to add a badly needed catcher to their staff. “I think we’ll keep Cobb,” the manager wrote to Ed Barrow, his counterpart on the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Eastern League, “at least until [Jimmy] Barrett comes around.”
Cobb was certainly playing like a keeper. In 1906 he came out of the gate hitting .300, a far better number than that of any of the teammates—Crawford, McIntyre, Jones—he was supposed to be understudying. Joe S. Jackson wrote in the Free Press that if the Tigers starting outfield was picked “on what they have shown thus far, Cobb would be the first selected of the four now in harness.” He wasn’t just a promising rookie anymore; he was . . . (drum roll, please) “the Georgia Peach,” or so Jackson wrote in the March 18 Free Press. At least one other player, pitcher Nap Rucker, a native of the Atlanta suburb of Crabapple, had been dubbed that in the past, but once Cobb got the nickname, it stuck.
A basic question arises: was Cobb thriving despite the turmoil that surrounded him—the ostracism, the broken bats and hats, the wads of wet newspaper—or because of it? This is not a simple question, and whatever the answer we do know that he was not a man able to block things out. It is impossible to talk to people who knew him and come away with the sense that he ever slipped and rolled with life’s punches; rather, he led with his chin. This tendency may have been rooted in the same Southernness that aggravated his fellow Tigers. Historian Ted Ownby, in his book Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920, says that the men of that region have never been good at letting a wrong roll off their backs. “They have always felt a need to exert their will over any enemy as directly and immediately as possible,” Ownby says. “The driving influence is not primarily a taste for blood but rather a consistent readiness for confrontation. Southerners have long been quick to take offense, quick to go to war, and, when at war, quick to mount a direct assault.” Cobb’s defenses, though constantly up, were anything but impermeable. Indeed—and this I think is key to understanding Ty Cobb—his defenses stunk. Sticks and stones broke his bones and names would always harm him. “We Cobbs cry a lot,” he said many years later, breaking into tears as, at the age of sixty-three, he announced his intention to build a hospital in Royston in honor of his father. He was hypersensitive.
One didn’t have to be as emotionally fragile as Cobb, though, to be hurt by what Matty McIntyre and his ilk were doing. The hazing he received in 1906 was long and brutal. Cobb thought about it night and day and later recalled that it left him with a “heavy burning” inside. “They sort of formed a gang which kept aloof from me,” he wrote. “They clearly made me feel my position—that of a recruit. I had no place in their counsels. I had to go about alone.” He was still technically a teenager, newly fatherless, far from home. “Other players have gone through struggles as hard,” he wrote, “but none harder.”
And yet for all that he was not worn down or weakened—at least not immediately—by either the hazing or the worry about his mother’s impending trial. He was, rather, at the peak of physical condition—on the verge, just as he suspected, of a historic comeback from his crummy .240 half year.
Cobb was learning something about himself that spring: despite his Irish bloodlines he was the kind of person who would rather have the wind in his face than at his back. “I like opposition,” he would observe years later. The many extra challenges he endured that spring and beyond seemed to help bolster his will and focus his mind. His great talent was not blocking out adversity but letting it come through, unfiltered, and turning it into fuel. As Cobb’s favorite historical figure, Napoleon Bonaparte, said, “Adversity is the midwife of genius.” Connie Mack once put it another way: “Don’t get Cobb mad.” Anger made him better. “When the hazing players would get me angry and upset by some petty act,” Cobb said, “I often gritted my teeth and declared to myself that I would get a base hit the next time up or die in the attempt.” In this way he made his enemies, and his worries, complicit in his quest for greatness. Whatever did not kill Cobb would make him a .350 hitter—and some years a .400 one.
Cobb was not entirely without support on those 1906 Tigers. One particularly difficult day the pitcher Bill Donovan called him aside. “Kid,” Cobb recalled him saying, “don’t think you haven’t a friend on this ball club. The fellows may razz you and give you that bush stuff, but there are some here who are your friends and who are going to [give you] an even break. Don’t let those fellows keep you from being a good ball player.” One night that spring, Cobb went with Donovan and two or three teammates to an Augusta theater where a female fortune-teller was doing a stage act that involved questions from the audience. Cobb couldn’t resist. The Free Press reported that he “called on the lady to ask what position the Tigers would hold at the close of the 1906 season.”
“Fifth place,” was the reply and, said the paper, “this crushed the Georgian, who thinks he’s aboard the flag-getter, and he refused to remain in the theater, hustling back to the hotel and seeking the seclusion of his room and the solace of slumber.”
A sensitive lad he was.
• • •
The trial of Amanda Cobb took Ty away from the Tigers, but only briefly. The vagaries of the Georgia Circuit Court system were such that everyone involved got just one day’s notice that the proceedings would begin on Thursday, March 29, in Livonia. Cobb caught a train from Augusta that morning and arrived late as usual. Due to the sensational coverage, the courthouse was packed with the overflow milling on the steps. “This case is the most important one that has been tried in this court for a number of years,” said the Atlanta Constitution, “owing to the prominence of Professor W. H. Cobb and his wife in this community.” Everyone wanted to see the pretty widow who would, said the Macon Telegraph, be cited for “alleged improper conduct during a visit to Atlanta” just prior to her husband’s death. Cobb was ushered inside during his mother’s hours-long, teary, sotto voce testimony about her relationship with the late W.H., including an account of the accident. That was about the only aspect of the trial that went as anticipated.
Instead of being a week-long battle royal among the ten lawyers, with much dirt dished, as many had hoped, both sides made their cases relatively quickly and the all-male jury began deliberations at 4:00 p.m. the next day. No transcript of the trial was ever produced, and the newspaper reporting is strangely detail-free, but it appears that in the end the Atlanta police chief was never called to the stand. From the opening gavel the case seems to have shifted dramatically in Amanda’s favor—as if for the sake of propriety, by gentlemen’s agreement, the key issue of adultery was left unmentioned. Perhaps W.H.’s angry brothers, or the prosecutors themselves, did not in the end have the heart or stomach to make a case for Amanda’s defamation and incarceration. In any case, th
e proceedings were almost perfunctory, and the jury took only an hour to find her not guilty. Cobb immediately telegraphed the news to Bill Armour, who tipped off Joe S. Jackson, who wrote about the verdict in the next day’s Free Press. In the end, Cobb spent only a decent interval away from the team, taking a day or so to get his mother resettled in Royston, and travel with his brother back to Georgia Tech, where Paul was enrolled that semester. He caught up with his teammates at the Slag Pile, the 600-seat home of the Birmingham Barons, as the Tigers barnstormed their way north from spring training, and despite physical and emotional fatigue and an increasingly sore throat, got three hits in his first game back.
In light verse, the Augusta Chronicle sent a message to Bill Armour on behalf of Cobb’s Georgia fans:
Ty Cobb Page 14