Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  No such luck. Tension and gloom still permeated the Tigers clubhouse. Though he stopped openly taunting and abusing Cobb, McIntyre continued to seethe at the sight of the team’s best hitter, and Twilight Ed Killian became downright enraged by the way the front office was making an example of his roommate, to the point of one day being drunk and disorderly at the ballpark. Although it is difficult to pin down the dates, it is likely Cobb had the second of his several fights with Charlie Schmidt, the catcher being groomed to replace the oft-inebriated Warner, at around this time. The first, which had occurred early in the regular season, “arose,” Cobb said, “over some trivial incident on the bench. He was a much bigger man than I but we mixed it up. In the struggle he fell over a barrel and I pounced on top of him as he lay on the barrel. They pulled us apart but the felling had started.”

  The second fight happened because Schmidt was being teased by his teammates for his failure to subdue his much less bulky opponent in the first one. “As I turned around the corner of the bench [one day],” Cobb said, “he soaked me with a hard one right on the jaw. There wasn’t any fight after that. I simply hit the ground.”

  On July 3, the tension broke momentarily when the Tigers played in Cleveland before 1,400 fans and amid a shower so persistent that, said the Free Press, “players slid about as if they were on roller skates, bats slipped from the hands of batsmen and sailed fifty feet, and base running was made possible only by the runner keeping on the grass and leaping to the sack.” In the sixth inning Germany Schaefer, trying to send a subtle hint to umpire Billy Evans that the game ought to be called, appeared at second base wearing a yellow rain slicker, and actually played with the coat on, though he got tangled in it while taking a relay from Cobb, and his fashion statement cost the Tigers a run. It didn’t matter. When Evans finally called the game in the top of the seventh, Detroit was down 5–0 and even more securely in fifth place. The brief catharsis was over and the unhappy caravan moved on.

  Baseball statistics don’t always reflect a team’s true reality. The Tigers went 11–14 in July, but their record was that balanced only because they played some truly dreadful clubs, like the Boston Americans, who would go on to lose 105 games that season, and whose manager, Jimmy Collins, kept going AWOL (he was fired, but his successor, Chick Stahl, committed suicide), and the reliably incompetent Senators, whom Charley Dryden of the San Francisco Chronicle would dub “First in war, first in peace and last in the American League.” Detroit felt and looked more like a 5–20 team. Everyone’s batting average except Davy Jones’s plummeted in July. Cobb’s fell more than 20 points in the first week and kept falling. A mini-epidemic of illnesses and injuries swept over the club. The Tigers had made it this far on anger and adrenaline, but now they seemed worn down. Almost every man complained of some kind of antique deadball era ailment, like a sore finger (Warner), a sore neck (Donovan), “neuralgia of the head” (Fred Payne), a thumb smashed by “the descent of a sleeping car window” (Charley O’Leary), a rupture (Jones), or lumbago (Killian), but Ty seemed to be troubled by something vaguer and more virulent—more modern, too. When he couldn’t take the field at the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in Boston on July 17, the Herald said it was because of “all-around complaints.” Armour was not always sympathetic when players said they were sick, especially if they wanted the team to pay their doctor bills. Schaefer once told him he thought he needed a stomach operation and the manager told him to “Just take a big teaspoon of the best olive oil you can find before each meal and you’ll be fine.” But Cobb was a more precious commodity than Schaefer and so was treated differently. On July 18, with Ty still out of the lineup and the Tigers scheduled to move on to New York for a series against the Highlanders, Armour sent him home. The morning of the 19th, Cobb, with his bag of clothes in one hand and his bag of bats in the other, got on a train bound for Detroit—and disappeared.

  — CHAPTER TWELVE —

  THE OFFICIAL EXPLANATION FOR COBB’s absence was that he was in the hospital for an operation. That statement, provided jointly by manager Bill Armour and secretary Frank Navin, was so brief and so vague as to obviously be code for “Don’t ask us where Cobb is, okay, fellows?” If the beat writers did follow up nevertheless, and if they were confided in by the Tigers’ front office, it apparently was on condition that they keep the answer secret. Not only was information about Cobb scarce immediately following his July 18 departure, but until he returned forty-four days later, on the 2nd of September, the scantest references to him, a brilliant young player who’d hovered among the top five hitters in the league, were hard to come by. Tiger cranks might have rubbed their eyes and questioned their sanity. Had there really been a tall young redhead who walked every day down Woodward Avenue from his rooming house to Bennett Park, got a hit or three, stole a base or two, then strolled back home for an early dinner—a fresh, sober face on a squad dominated by dour drunks—or had Detroit just dreamed him?

  It is left for Cobb historians to puzzle out what happened. Some consider his sudden absence in the heart of the 1906 season to be among the game’s great unsolved mysteries—and it is true that privacy laws, the passage of time, and the then prevailing standards of propriety, as well as the severe misfortunes that have since befallen the city of Detroit, do combine to daunt the modern scholar searching for truth. A lot of Michigan medical records have been destroyed just because it was too expensive to move or keep them. But let us see by applying what is knowable how far we can get.

  The first thing I will suggest is that we eliminate the Augusta Chronicle’s theory, which was that Cobb’s problem was dietary in nature and stemmed from a lack of good Southern cooking. “Ty Cobb can’t digest the food that’s been given him in the North,” the paper said, in an editorial that at least acknowledged his absence, and which urged Armour to get him back in the lineup by “feeding him blue-stemmed collards and corn bread.” Cobb might have appreciated those victuals, assuming he had an appetite, but the Chronicle failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. When a star ballplayer drops from sight, and his hometown papers tiptoe around his absence, the cause can be assumed to be beyond the powers of even pork chops or fried catfish. Still, in a general way—in the sense, that is, that Cobb’s stomach was the source of his troubles—the Chronicle might indeed have been on to something. So let us for a moment ponder that.

  To assume gastrointestinal problems made sense. You can only feed off psychological abuse and physical intimidation for so long before you start feeding off yourself. Cobb’s ultrasensitivity, coupled with his circumstances, would seem to put him at a high risk for disorders like irritable bowel syndrome or ulcers—things that might need to be addressed with the “operation” he was in fact said to be having. Intestinal ills can sometimes have inconvenient, embarrassing consequences—which might explain the secrecy surrounding his leave. But with all the polite, scientific, and pleasantly imprecise terms available for use in those decorous times, would someone really maintain a lifelong information lockdown about a six-week interval (as Cobb did, avoiding any mention of his 1906 absence in his several serialized memoirs and autobiography) if the problem was basically a bad bellyache? That does not seem likely.

  Something stronger than embarrassment—and more akin to shame—probably drove the silence. Could Cobb have been experiencing a disorder of the emotions or of the mind? As fodder for gossip, a nervous breakdown certainly beats diarrhea. And Cobb was a candidate for psychological problems. Apart from his particular personal issues in Royston and Detroit, he was a brittle man living in a tilt-a-whirl time, a period, as historian Philipp Blom shows in his book The Vertigo Years, when the automobile, the airplane, the typewriter, and mass entertainments like movies (and organized baseball), were transforming society—and throwing all kinds of people off their stride. Just being alive in 1906 America, as women joined the workforce and hundreds of thousands migrated from farms to cities, starting life anew, stressed the nervous system and roiled the mind. The concurrent ris
e of psychoanalysis (and alcoholism) and the numerous newspaper advertisements for patent medicines that relieved “neurasthenia” showed that millions who had never met Matty McIntyre, or learned that their mother had killed their father, were actively trying to maintain a sense of mental serenity. The writer and advice giver Margaret E. Sangster, in an article published in the Detroit Free Press later that year, said, “The prevalence of nervous disease cannot be ignored by anyone who is familiar with social conditions in America. It is no longer an extraordinary occurrence in life,” she added, “to be obliged to spend a period of retirement at a rest cure or a sanitarium.”

  It would seem that as a strapping young Southern man, given to athletics and the outdoor life of hunting and fishing, Cobb would rank, in the popular imagination at least, as an unlikely mental patient—and yet his confinement in a psychiatric facility is the most common explanation of his 1906 dropout among biographers and buffs. Al Stump, in his largely fictitious yet generally unquestioned biography of 1994, Cobb, says merely that Ty was sent to a “sanatorium” “on the outskirts of Detroit.” The more trustworthy Richard Bak, in his 2005 book, Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours, writes that “the club quietly arranged for his convalescence at a sanatorium in rural Oakland County, north of Detroit. There, with the aid of medication, he slept long hours, giving his mind and body a chance to rest. He fished, swam, and hiked in the woods. . . . Visitors and newspapers were forbidden.” Bak no doubt means the Pontiac Asylum, a Gothic, archetypically Gilded Age facility in Pontiac, Michigan, which was demolished in 2000—but he does not say where he gets any of his (curiously detailed) information. Charles Alexander, in his 1984 biography, Ty Cobb, says only that “A close reading of contemporary press coverage suggests that Cobb suffered some kind of emotional and physical collapse.” He also notes that “Joe H. [sic] Jackson” nine days later wrote that Cobb was at “a sanitarium” and “probably will be there for some time.” Unmentioned by Alexander or anyone else is that the Detroit News also reported that Cobb was “laid up in a local sanitarium,” and though “still very weak” was expected by his doctor to return before the season’s end.

  “Sanitarium” was not always synonymous with “mental ward.” It could mean a long-term-care facility for tuberculosis or postsurgical patients, a place for anyone who could be said to be convalescing. It could also be a kind of health spa, like John Harvey Kellogg’s famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, where rich folk took recreational enemas. But the word “sanitarium” alone, with no brand name or modifiers, sounds (and sounded) like a euphemism, and inevitably conjures up a psychiatric facility.

  Many who closely followed Cobb’s game would probably not be shocked to learn that a player had cracked up. In more ways than one, baseball was bedlam. The pressures of the public arena were intense, the lack of role models and precedents destabilizing (professional ballplayers were not heroes, and in some places not even a topic of conversation when Cobb and his contemporaries were growing up), as all the fighting and drinking suggested. Boxers, it was true, had preceded ballplayers as celebrated athletes, but they didn’t need to stay in the spotlight over the course of a 154-game season, getting publicly berated by their managers, being urged by their daddies to come home and help with the harvest, heckled and, sometimes, hazed. Yes, they lived with every prizefighter’s worst nightmare—being knocked unconscious and having their wives and girlfriends rush simultaneously into the ring—but overall they didn’t face the same daily level of stress. It almost goes without saying that baseball, that most statistic-minded of pastimes, kept a semiofficial list of player suicides going back to Frank Ringo of the Phillies in 1889 and including the aforementioned Tigers manager Win Mercer, who in 1903 left behind a note about the false promises of the baseball life. By 1910 there would be fourteen such deaths, not counting that of Harry Pulliam, the president of the National League, who in 1909 was arrested for attempted suicide even as he lay in a widening crimson circle on the floor of his Manhattan flat. We’ll never know how many of the early players sought professional help, but clearly some were desperate enough to risk social stigma for a chance at relief. It was only a few years after Cobb’s unexplained absence that a Wayne County sanitarium-cum-farm called Eloise entered into a arrangement with Frank Navin to become the unofficial mental facility of the Tigers. Before it closed in the late 1970s, a number of Detroit players had dropped in discreetly.

  I set the likelihood of Cobb’s having retreated to such a facility at about 60–40. The attendant secrecy supports that explanation, as does the likelihood that a hyper-touchy teenager will eventually crumble before a star chamber of older men, even if he is at first fueled by his own defiance. So, obviously, do those several seemingly off-the-cuff references to a sanitarium in the local papers—unless, of course, that was an idea journalists were testing just to see if the Tigers management would swat it down—or unless the mental ward was a ruse perpetrated by Cobb himself in cooperation with Armour and Navin to cover another, even more potentially scandalous scenario.

  And what might that be?

  Allow me to float a theory.

  Cobb didn’t end his relationship with Charlotte (Charlie) Lombard when he left the Augusta Tourists. They were still actively courting in 1906, though not engaged because Charlie’s wealthy father, Roswell, wasn’t happy about her marrying a $1,500-a-year ballplayer. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Charlie had become pregnant at around this time and experienced complications as a result of an abortion, miscarriage, or some other difficulty that compelled Cobb to rush to her side. The record shows that’s not a farfetched notion. Charlie was prone to obstetrical problems. Over the course of her life with Cobb, whom she would marry two years later, she would become pregnant thirteen times but carry only five children to term. Cobb would again without warning leave the team in midseason 1908 to travel to Augusta to marry Charlie in a small ceremony so unplanned for (or disapproved of) that several key relatives (including his mother and sister, Florence) would be missing, and a few months after that Charlie would suffer an unspecified medical crisis. Does Cobb’s disappearance of 1906 seem to presage his more widely acknowledged but still controversial departure of 1908? Could the operation and even the sanitarium have been cover stories to preserve a young woman’s privacy and reputation?

  And yet I remain, with qualms, in the “mental hospital” camp. The main reason is that if we believe Cobb left the club to be with Charlie we must also accept that he didn’t stay at her side for very long, or that he came and went a couple of times during his six-week sabbatical. The Free Press mentioned in a small note that he was in the stands at Bennett Park for a game against the Athletics on July 31. Though he would like to “get back in the game soon,” the paper said, “it will be several weeks before he is right.” Also, starting in mid-August, Cobb played at least a dozen games with the crack amateur team from the Detroit Athletic Club, presumably working his way back into midseason shape. (He didn’t hide his identity, but apparently posed for no photographs and the Detroit papers did not cover these appearances, a further sign that they were for the most part abetting his policy of silence.) All this wouldn’t have left much time to be with the woman for whom he had temporarily dropped out of baseball. That Cobb was off being treated for a nervous disorder or “breakdown,” as it was then called, is the most logical guess.

  • • •

  Changes were in order if the Tigers were going to win more games, fight less, and keep their manager. While Cobb was away, the team dealt with two of its biggest troublemakers: catcher Jack Warner was sold to the Senators, and Twilight Ed Killian fined $200 and suspended indefinitely for tearing up the clubhouse in a drunken fit. Armour also took off from the team, as he had the year before, to visit “parts unknown,” said Sporting Life, and sign an unnamed outfielder for the 1907 season, probably someone intended to replace McIntyre—though what the Tigers needed most was a good-hitting first baseman. None of theses moves, however, succeeded in slowing the club’s
downward trajectory. As August wore on, the Tigers sank into sixth place. Rushing to the aid of team management, as sportswriters frequently did, Joe S. Jackson attempted to assure cranks that the brain trust was taking a smart, measured approach. It would not panic and make meaningless late-season moves that would leave the Tigers in poor shape for next season. It would husband its resources wisely. “The club realizes that a bag containing $5,000 cannot be put on the slab to pitch a game of ball,” Jackson wrote.

  The public, however, wasn’t buying his line, or many tickets, either. On some days barely 1,000 people scattered themselves in the Bennett Park stands. Rumors circulated that Ban Johnson, who as president of the American League seemed to possess powers beyond any of the magnates, once again was considering moving the strife-ridden and barely profitable club to Pittsburgh, or even recasting it as a minor league franchise. On August 28, Navin had to deny a report that he had already decided not to re-sign Armour for the following season and was talking to Hugh Jennings, the thirty-eight-year-old manager of the Baltimore Orioles, who themselves had migrated downward from the National to the Class A Eastern League several seasons back.

  Cobb rejoined the Tigers on September 2, at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. “The entry of a hero on the public scene goes unnoticed,” the great A. J. Liebling wrote in The Earl of Louisiana, “but his rentrée always has an eager press.” Not so in this case. No beat reporter acknowledged in print that the young star had ever been away for the heart of the season. Cobb got a single and stole a base as his team lost 1–0 to the Browns in a dull, rain-shortened contest. The next day the Tigers dropped a Labor Day doubleheader to the Browns, and Navin, who had traveled with his team, announced that, despite what he had said a few days earlier, Bill Armour would indeed be succeeded by Hughie (as most people called him) Jennings in 1907. Armour, who had agreed to finish out the season with the Tigers, wasted no time in demonstrating how awkward the next month would be by making a rambling, self-aggrandizing speech in which he blamed Ban Johnson for his firing, saying the AL president, fed up with the club’s internal squabbling, had forced Navin’s hand. Armour also said that he was “persona non grata” in the National League because of all the brilliant poaching he’d done from it over the years, and concluded, “Hence, I am practically out of major league ball.” He was right about that—he would move on to the Toledo Mud Hens of the American Association and then out of baseball. He was managing a drugstore in Minneapolis when he died, “of a fit of apoplexy,” in 1922.