Ty is a Georgia laddie,
you took him north, we know.
And if you love us dearly,
you’ll give him a chance to show.
There may be big leaguers able
to beat Tyrus out of a job,
but promise us, Armour,
you won’t make a farmer,
out of our Georgia Tyrus Cobb
Cobb’s sore throat became unbearable by the time the team reached Toledo a few days later. He told Germany Schaefer he felt feverish and couldn’t swallow. The second baseman found a doctor and went with Cobb to see him. “Malarial tonsillitis” was the diagnosis, and Cobb immediately began two or three days of ham-fisted surgeries from which he was barely able to make it back to the hotel. He always maintained that the doctor who performed the procedure was later committed to an insane asylum. Whether or not that was true, he lost so much blood he had to spend a few days confined to his hotel room. When he rejoined the team, McIntyre and company were waiting.
— CHAPTER ELEVEN —
IN LATE JUNE OF 1906 Bill Armour decided he had to do something about the ongoing hazing of Cobb—who was then, by all the traditional methods of measuring baseball performance, the best player on the team—and so, on the 23rd, while the Tigers were in Chicago for a three-game series against the “Hitless Wonder” White Sox (they would win the world championship that year despite a team batting average of .230, the lowest in the league), he suspended Matty McIntyre “indefinitely and a little longer,” according to Joe S. Jackson of the Detroit Free Press. Other teammates might have been banished along with McIntyre, as the manager told his men in what must have been a tense clubhouse meeting the day before the announcement came down. But if Armour had punished everyone who was guilty of harassing Cobb, he said, he couldn’t have put a team on the field.
“And so it came to pass,” wrote Jackson, that Matthew McIntyre, up from the potato fields of Staten Island, New York, was cast “in the role of Horrible Example.”
Readers of the Free Press could be excused from at first wondering as they skimmed the sports pages for the latest news of their beloved “Tiges” that morning: a horrible example of what? Cobb’s hazing had been happening away from public view. Unless he chanced to be riding in a Pullman car with the club when Cobb was being pelted with wads of wet newspaper, or staying in a hotel where he roamed the hallways in search of an unlocked lavatory, no regular crank, as devoted as he might be to the team, knew anything about it. Armour, still thinking he could keep secret this particular example of his failure to maintain order, had tried to frame the suspension as his reaction to simple player recalcitrance. “I asked McIntyre if he wouldn’t ginger up his work,” the manager said in his official statement. “He said he wouldn’t hustle, and I told him he had put on a Detroit uniform for the last time.” His offense, technically, was “indifferent play.” Armour’s account was so far from reality, though, so patently ridiculous, that the beat reporters saw it as an excuse to tell the more interesting truth about how the team had been crippled by dissension since spring training, and that Cobb, the youngster everyone was talking about, was at the center of the civil war.
Armour may have done McIntyre a favor by suspending him just then. After several months of fixating on Cobb, the outfielder was showing signs of unraveling mentally and needing a “time-out,” as the kindergarten teachers say, to get a grip and gather his wits. What became the last straw for Armour was an action not even directed at Cobb, but at one of Matty’s own co-conspirators—a sign, thought the manager, that the overwrought hazers were starting to turn on each other, and that the war on Cobb might be devolving into a mad free-for-all. With the bases loaded in the fifth inning at South Side Park on the afternoon of June 22, White Sox catcher Billy Sullivan—the second-worst hitter in baseball history among players who had at least 3,000 at-bats (lifetime average: .213)—stroked a soft liner in the direction of McIntyre, who acted like it was too hot to handle and let it roll to a patch of no-man’s-land in deep left center. Before the ball could be fielded by Davy Jones (Cobb was out of the lineup that day), Sullivan had a rare triple and three RBI, which went to the discredit of pitcher Ed Siever. What McIntyre had against Siever, a workmanlike lefty who shared his strong aversion to Cobb, can only be imagined, but when the inning was over, the two had words about the incident and nearly came to blows on the bench.
McIntyre had already shown he was the sort of player who didn’t mind hurting the team if he could advance a personal vendetta. For the last few months he’d been ignoring hit-and-run signals and declining to lay down sacrifice bunts when Cobb was on base, and he had failed to heed Armour’s repeated admonitions to knock it off and be mindful of the common cause. About a week before McIntyre’s suspension, Cobb had finally repaid his slights in kind, letting a ball hit off Matty’s pal and roommate, Twilight Ed Killian, get by him in right field and go for a triple. (He and Killian also had words at the end of the inning.) As traitorous as this was—the hit knocked in a run that helped the Highlanders win the game—Armour remained staunchly on Cobb’s side, and blamed McIntyre for bringing the feud onto the field in the first place.
In some ways, McIntyre must have known he had already lost the battle with Cobb, who would always be favored over him as long as they both were Tigers. He was disgusted, and his immediate reaction to his suspension in late June was a demand to be traded or released. “I will never play for the Tigers again!” McIntyre told Jackson. Armour, as much as he would have liked to get rid of him, declined the trade request, preferring to punish his problem child by keeping him in a state of forced, unpaid leave. To add a little extra sting to the suspension, he also moved Cobb into McIntyre’s position, where the youngster seemed at home and remained potent with the bat, going 3-for-5 in his first game as a left fielder and bringing his average close to .350.
It had been an exhilarating few months for Cobb. Coming out of spring training, almost everyone, including Armour, believed to some degree what Clark Griffith had said the year before: that once the league’s smarter pitchers got a second look at him, they would contrive through slow curves and outside-corner-nipping pitches to bring his preseason batting average back down to earth. Cobb, in fact, sat on the bench for that entire first week of the regular season, not playing a single inning. But then on April 22 Crawford “strained his side swinging at a high one in the ninth,” said the Free Press (the problem was probably a pulled oblique muscle), and the next day Cobb got a chance to play against the Browns in St. Louis, where he beat out a sacrifice bunt and eventually made it around to score. After that he hit safely in every game but one for the next five weeks.
By the time of McIntyre’s suspension, Cobb’s rise was more than just a Detroit story. Sporting Life called him “a find of the first water” and Jimmy Collins, manager of the Boston Americans, inquired about his availability, but in vain; the Detroit club would entertain no offers. Washington Senators manager Joe Cantillon, who’d been in organized baseball since 1878, said he had never seen a player quite like Cobb. “Listen, the next time he pokes a bunt at you,” he told his overmatched third baseman, “run back to third base and try to head him off there!” Cobb wasn’t just good, he was exciting, the kind of player who sold tickets—who made the otherwise mediocre Tigers, said Paul W. Eaton of Sporting Life, grasping for a wildly futuristic figure, “worth four dollars to see.” Whether the Tigers won or lost, Cobb was always a topic of conversation. On May 17 he had the only hit in a masterpiece tossed by Rube Waddell of the Philadelphia A’s. A few days later, in a dramatic victory over Boston, he made what might have been the catch of the season, diving for a sinking liner, first swatting the ball into the air with his mitt, then snatching it bare-handed.
If there had been an ESPN in those days, Cobb would have hogged the daily highlight reel. Besides making noteworthy plays, he seemed to figure into every baseball controversy. On May 5 the Tigers played at home against the Browns in a game that started at 3:00 and was to be ended by mutual a
greement at 5:00, if still ongoing, no matter what the score, so both teams could catch a train to St. Louis for a rematch there the following day. Most games in those days took less than ninety minutes to complete, and such cutoff times, though at odds with the proudly clockless spirit of the sport, were fairly commonplace (and provided for in the league by-laws), but in this case the crowd for some reason was not informed of the conditions in advance. Trouble might have been avoided if the score had remained as lopsided as it was with two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning, when the Tigers were trailing 7–3. But then Cobb hit a bases-loaded triple, and Detroit scored another run in the ninth, which meant that when the game reached the two-hour mark, and was declared over, the score was tied. Agitated fans poured onto the field by the hundreds to demand an explanation from (lone) umpire Tom Connolly. Violence was avoided but the incident made national headlines.
Nine days later in Washington, Cobb was at the center of another squabble. With the game tied with two out in the top of the tenth, and men on second and third, he came to bat—and hit what looked like a routine roller to the second baseman. However, by busting out of the batter’s box and sliding (feet first), he was able to beat the throw, at least in the opinion of umpire Tom Connor. One runner scored, and the man on second advanced to third. Many Senators fans booed heartily and Washington manager Jake Stahl ran out to argue. As soon as things settled down in the stadium and the umpire said “Play ball!” Cobb broke toward second. The Washington catcher wisely threw to third to hold the runner there, but in his haste wound up launching the ball into left field. (If there was a stat for Causing Errant Throws, Cobb would hold another record.) Another run scored and the Tigers won that day, but the result was overshadowed by reports of D.C. police storming the field after the game to save umpire Connor, who was being “treated roughly” by spectators still livid about his calling Cobb safe at first the previous inning.
Cobb was on his way to becoming the best hitter the game ever saw, but it was his adventures on the base paths, the way he fooled with the already well established rhythms of the pastime while making his way from one of the era’s loosely secured, puffy white sacks to another—exploding down the first base line, bolting at odd moments, not stopping when virtually all others would—that made him a curiosity and, before long, a star. He was a true original, a young man with one cleated foot in the newfangled “psychological” era, and the other planted firmly in the unfashionable pre-1900 past, a time when raucous teams like the National League Baltimore Orioles dove and tumbled ’round the diamond like circus acrobats. (As Louis Menand said of T. S. Eliot, “It is often impossible to tell which direction he is pointing in.”) For the press, the irresistible temptation was to talk about his speed; Sporting Life compared him to the Thoroughbred champion Sysonby, and the Philadelphia Press reported that an “expert watch holder” positioned near first base at Columbia Park, the Athletics’ home field, on May 17, caught him beating out a bunt in three and one fifth seconds, a time that if accurate would still rank among the fastest ever.
Cobb always denied being especially fleet afoot, just as he resisted the label of “natural hitter.” For him, progress on the base paths was all about studying a pitcher’s habits, confounding expectations, and intimidating the opposition—giving the impression, through body language, chippy chatter (“I’m going on the next pitch! Watch me! Watch out!”), and his own past performances, that he had no hesitation about coming in very hard. Almost everything he did on the field was a considered, conscious decision based on his theory of the game. As both a lightning rod for controversy and a man of ideas he stood apart from baseball’s other premier players, who were either Goody-Two-shoes like Christy Mathewson or stolid, poorly educated, lunch-bucket types like Honus Wagner and Nap Lajoie. To gauge the true distance between Cobb and Lajoie, a player he resembled statistically, consider that as a signing bonus one year Lajoie received a mule. Decades later, when they were old men and Cobb visited Lajoie in Daytona Beach, they sat together on his porch and Lajoie told that story, shaking his head in wonderment at his own docility and saying, “I took a mule, Ty, a mule!” Cobb, though he hailed from what he called “a small town of the old fashioned sort,” was not the kind of player to whom you would ever think of saying, “Instead of money, how about a nice mule?”
• • •
Because Cobb, with his colorful style and obvious intelligence, was a blessing to a baseball writer, he received not just attention but also sympathy from Joe S. Jackson, the most influential scribe in Detroit. “Cobb is burning up the outfield and base paths with his speed,” Jackson (the founding president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America) wrote back in spring training, soon after he’d christened Cobb the Georgia Peach. In Jackson’s accounts, “Tyrus” never merely hit a double; he “delivered a huge drive to center for two bases.” When the story of McIntyre’s suspension broke and reporters finally felt free to write about the feud between Matty and Ty, Jackson made it clear to the public that the club was on the Peach’s side. He often praised the performances of other Tigers, and like all writers of that day could always find excuses for why the team was underperforming—but Cobb, it seemed, was the only player he liked to hang around with, to sit next to on trains, and accompany to the theater to see a fortune-teller’s show.
Cobb would always get along well with most writers; during and after his playing days he invited many to his home (a not uncommon practice in the days when reporters and athletes resided in the same socioeconomic class). But then in 1906, innocent and ostracized and often at loose ends, Cobb would chat up almost anyone who was friendly and polite, including fans who called to him as he stood in the outfield. In his 1913 memoir, serialized in the Atlanta Constitution and later republished by the Ty Cobb scholar Wesley Fricks as Inside Baseball with Ty Cobb, he said, “Frequently a bleacherite will ask, ‘Who is that pitching now or who is that pinch batter?’ [There were no uniform numbers in those days, and the only public address system was an announcer or umpire shouting through a megaphone from around home plate.] It is very easy to turn and tell him who it is or to say honestly you don’t know if it happens to be a youngster on an opposing club you have never seen before. However, there are players who will either keep their back turned on spectators or make some sarcastic reply. Then they wonder why they are jeered constantly.”
In writing about the young Cobb, Jackson often liked to portray him as a backwoods exotic, the classic rube (à la Gomer Pyle or Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies) who often spouts wisdom or folksy humor. While the characterization may, in Cobb’s early times with the team, have contained a germ of truth, some of Jackson’s anecdotes, such as the story of Ty’s aggrieved reaction to the Augusta fortune-teller, seem obviously exaggerated. Almost all of what Jackson’s bumpkinesque Cobb caricature says and does is innocuous stuff, stretched or concocted to fill a column on days of rain or travel. But in the Free Press of April 1, 1906, one finds an item of special interest, because it turns on the subject of race. On this occasion Jackson wrote about himself as a put-upon New Englander (he was born in Rhode Island) who couldn’t step outside in the South without getting his briefcase toted, his coat whisked, or his shoes shined by some tip-seeking “Afro-African boy.” Upon hearing the writer’s complaint, young “Tyrus,” his traveling companion, notes that when down in Dixie a white Northerner need not dispense abnormal gratuities in the hope of getting better service or assuaging one’s guilt about the plight of “the menials.” Cobb is not quoted directly in the brief item (“the menials,” it should be noted, is Jackson’s phrase, not Cobb’s), but we are reminded by Jackson (albeit not very coherently, so brace yourself) that he was “born and bred in the South” and “understands the negro perfectly and is ever ready to prove that the colored man more readily responds to the requests and demands of those of the South who maintains the old relation of master and man between the races, than to those of the Northerner, who proceeds on lines that indicate that he belie
ves that the fourteenth amendment means just what it says.”
The run-on nature of the writing suggests that Jackson is bluffing his way through a few column inches on a day when the Tigers didn’t play. Perhaps Cobb did say something like he is indirectly quoted as saying—that over-tipping can lead to feelings of resentment, and that an extra nickel here and there will not rectify the damage wrought by Jim Crow. Or maybe not. In any case, let the record show that this inconsequential little blurb is the only example of Cobb even purportedly talking about race relations until the 1950s, when he hailed the advent of Jackie Robinson.
• • •
For all the venom he seemed to be packing in his spleen, Matty McIntyre came around quickly. He never even stopped coming to the ballpark. Though his paychecks were on hold he showed up every day and took batting practice, saying to the reporters that he wanted to make the point that he was available for duty. The team wouldn’t put out a uniform for him, so he wore an old navy blue road uniform he happened to have. Since the Tigers were at home at this time, his outfit only made him seem like more of an outcast.
The indefinite suspension lasted about a week. With Cobb hitting .355 (the third highest batting average in the American League), and Navin and Armour backing their prized youngster in the newspaper, McIntyre understood he had to kowtow to the front office or return to the potato fields of his youth. The manager had said that Matty could regain his place on the club at any time by telling him face-to-face that he intended to play hard and focus on baseball. So on the morning of Saturday, June 30, McIntyre went hat in hand to the Tigers offices in the Hammond Building, a steel-framed, ten-floor “skyscraper” on the corner of Griswold and West Fort, sought out the skipper, and said the right words, however grudgingly. Armour put him back in left field that afternoon, moved Cobb to center, and kept Crawford in right. Davy Jones, who’d been struggling at the plate, was now officially the second-stringer that Ty had been at the season’s start. It was late June, the season was only half over, and there was still time to make a run at the pennant—if McIntyre’s apology signaled a true change of heart.
Ty Cobb Page 15