Three days later, when the Tigers were in Chicago to face the first-place White Sox, many of the players effectively went on strike against their lame-duck leader, saying they were too sick or injured to take the field. Others simply got lost between their hotel and South Side Park. “Just as the game was about to be called [that is, started] today,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “Manager Armour discovered that [the announced starting pitcher George] Mullin was nowhere to be found.” Except for a couple of untested late-season call-ups, the entire pitching staff was missing or unavailable for that day and the next, as were many veteran position players like Donovan, Schaefer, and McIntyre. Cobb was one of the few regulars ready for action. “As the team played today against Chicago,” the Free Press said, “there was a pitcher in right field, a catcher in left field, an outfielder on first base and a first baseman on second.” Armour was said to be “frantic” as the White Sox beat the Tigers 2–0 in the first of what were warmly remembered as “the Cripple Games.” The supposedly Hitless Wonders won again the next day as well 13–5.
Peering back at those waning days of the season through the prism of old newspaper clips, it is painful to watch Armour, his pride mortally wounded, trying to put an ever-finer point on his position. In a bizarre joint interview with Navin on September 15, he told Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, “I’m not kicking on the money matters. I’m objecting to the treatment accorded me personally. Navin and myself have always got along fairly well. [Owner Bill] Yawkey for some reason took a dislike to me in midseason last year. Yawkey and Navin are not experts at baseball. They think they have a pennant winning team here. They have not. The best manager in the world can’t make a man hit. Yawkey is pleasant if you win, but he cannot stand to lose. He does not seem to consider that no one feels worse than I when a game is lost.”
Then it was Navin’s turn. “Personally, neither Yawkey nor myself have anything against the present manager,” he said. “He is conscientious, eager to win, has unquestioned ability in developing young players. I will not question his knowledge of baseball, either. The great trouble with Armour is, he is too lenient with his players. They know it and take advantage of him in every way.”
Armour said in rebuttal that he may indeed have been too easy on his players at times. “I’ve found it policy to be good to them,” he said. “But I am not disappointed at the outcome of my policy in handling my men. Other causes have been to blame. If we could have hit, we’d won. If we had not been constantly hampered by injuries we might have had a chance.”
Navin brushed aside the injury excuse, already shopworn in 1906. “A baseball leader must be recognized by his men as the leader,” he said. “He must be full of dash and ginger, so that his men will be filled with the same spirit. That is why we have secured Hugh Jennings. He is what the city wants. He is a scrappy Irishman who will not take anything from anybody that he does not see fit to take. Jennings is out on the coaching lines, fighting all the time, and never lets a man forget he is the boss and that they are not running the team.”
For Armour the indignities had only just begun. On September 22 the manager was “savagely attacked,” said the Plain Dealer, by former Tiger Jack Warner under the grandstand at Bennett Park following a doubleheader that Detroit had played against the Washington Senators, the disgruntled catcher’s new club. Oddly, it was Warner, wanting to put his spin on the story, who called the Free Press with a description of the assault, saying that it had been dark, and that Armour “had no time to ward off the first blows, which landed on his face.” Spectators on their way out of the stadium separated the two. Warner, said the Plain Dealer, “claimed that Armour branded him falsely as a disturber” earlier that season but, worried that his former manager would swear out a warrant for his arrest, he caught a train for Chicago, where the league offices were, so he could personally give Ban Johnson his side of the story (the rest of his team moved on to St. Louis). Johnson heard him out, then took no action in the matter, saying he was barred from doing so because the fight had not happened on the field. Curiously, he had never used that logic when punishing players for their involvement in barroom brawls—but then he was no doubt secretly pleased with Warner for pummeling one of his more vocal critics.
• • •
The Tigers won nine games in a row in late September, knocking the Highlanders out of the pennant race in the process, but it was the kind of meaningless run of baseball fortune that follows mathematical elimination and offers no real hope. An atmosphere of frontier lawlessness hung over the club as it became clear that Detroit would finish in sixth place and once again draw fewer than 200,000 to Bennett Park. Often in those final weeks, no one bothered to man the coaching boxes, and “consequently,” said the Free Press, “many runners died while making impossible tries for a bag.” Players stopped caring or concentrated on settling old scores as reality returned and the team lost five of its last seven. In the first game of a doubleheader in St. Louis on October 6, the penultimate day of the season, Browns outfielder George Stone, who would lead the AL with a .358 average, hit a sharp liner off southpaw Ed Siever into left center field. “Neither Cobb nor McIntyre made a move for the sphere, which rolled all the way to the flag pole,” said the Free Press. Thus a likely double became a two-run inside-the-park home run in what would be a 7–3 loss. Though he had just as much of a gripe with McIntyre regarding the play, Siever confronted Cobb in the clubhouse and said, in the parlance of the day, “You threw me down.” The two had to be separated.
That evening at Planter’s Hotel, the no longer grand hostelry where the Tigers stayed, Cobb was buying a pack of chewing gum at the lobby cigar stand when Siever abruptly abandoned a gaggle of teammates and came up to him from behind. Another Tiger—Bill Donovan—again intervened, saying, “Now don’t have any trouble here, fellows.”
After walking away, Cobb took up a position behind a column, hoping, he later admitted, to eavesdrop on Siever to see if he had something bad to say about him. The pitcher immediately noticed Cobb, though, and calling him what the Augusta Chronicle described as “a vile name,” swung around the column with his left fist high in the air. Cobb was often said to be more of a brawler than a boxer, but in this case he deftly blocked the blow with his own left hand and smashed Siever’s jaw with his right. Then he hit him in the face a couple of more times as the pitcher slumped to the floor. The final blows were particularly vicious, witnesses agreed, coming after the recipient was probably already unconscious. It’s not as if Cobb had lost control, though. Several eyewitness accounts said that after administering the beating he “calmly” stepped over Siever and walked away from the scene.
In retrospect it’s clear that something was happening at that moment, something more than just another fight. Or maybe something had already shifted, silently, inside Cobb, and the result was just then becoming manifest. He was on the verge of twenty years old now, and the fifth best hitter in the American League, with a batting average that season of .316. If baseball meant anything, he deserved respect, if not special treatment. And yet for months he had been harassed, ostracized, and assaulted by a clique of jealous, less-talented men—of which Ed Siever was a prime example. For the most part Cobb had taken his punishment without fighting back. But at some point enough had to be enough.
Several witnesses said that he returned to the lobby a moment later and, still exhibiting a strange calmness, kicked the prone pitcher in the face.
— CHAPTER THIRTEEN —
IF WHAT THE TIGERS NEEDED most in the opinion of their secretary, Frank Navin, and the league president, Ban Johnson, was a stern disciplinarian, Hugh Ambrose Jennings was a most interesting selection for the manager’s spot. Hughie had risen to prominence in the 1890s with the old Baltimore Orioles of the National League, a team rent by outlandish internal squabbling—mainstays John McGraw, Wee Willie Keeler, and Jack Doyle would wrestle in the shower like newlyweds while the beat reporters scuffed their soles and twirled their pencils, waiting for quotes—and fa
mous for cheating and tricks. The Orioles hid extra balls in their conveniently tall outfield grass, “stumbled” in front of opposing catchers trying to throw out a runner at second base or tag a man coming home, and went out of their way to be seen filing their spikes, as part of their nonstop attempt at intimidation. Sometimes they were penalized, sometimes not. Jennings, a scrappy, redheaded shortstop with oversized, freckle-flecked features—he looked surprisingly like Henny Youngman whereas the Tigers scout Heinie Youngman, not surprisingly, didn’t—was their resident expert at being plunked. The genial son of a Pennsylvania coal miner was hit by more pitched balls—287—than Craig Biggio (285) or any other major leaguer. On three occasions, he managed to get three free passes to first base by that means in a single game. When seeking victimization, he tried to pick his spots, looking for off-speed pitches to get in the way of, and he perfected a method of surreptitiously pinching himself to create a red welt meant to sway a skeptical ump. Still, he got stung frequently, and a fastball to the temple once left him unconscious for four days. Then there was the time, during the winter of 1900–1901, when he dove, one dark night, into the unilluminated Cornell University swimming pool, and found out the hard way that it had been drained. The accident, though not baseball-related, did the work of a thousand beanballs.
This last episode left him with a reputation. When he got in a fight with an umpire after that, he would often hear, “Well, at least I’m not dumb enough to jump into an empty swimming pool!” That was a low blow. Hughie was not stupid; he’d been at Cornell studying law. Yet for whatever reasons, his behavior, over the years, became increasingly strange.
By the time he reached the Tigers at the age of thirty-seven even his supporters—the staunchest of whom was probably Tim Carroll Hurst, the famous “Fighting Umpire,” who would punch you in the gut hard if you tried to block his vision—would have to say Hughie was an unusual man. That he managed the team from the first base coaching box when his boys were up to bat was not in itself strange—a lot of nonplaying managers did that back then—but the way he behaved in that box surely was. As skipper of the Tigers, Hughie had a habit of screaming “Ee-Yah!” and pulling up grass and tossing it like confetti, to either celebrate some good turn of events or rouse his men to action. As he did this he would bicycle-pedal his legs or perform an eccentric dance. Sometimes he would blow a tin whistle, shake a rubber snake, or put down a parade of windup toys that he had bought at a five-and-dime to scoot along the ground. At least once, as part of his attempt to distract the easily distractible southpaw Rube Waddell, he briefly shared his coaching box with a dog.
He was sometimes admonished for these actions, sometimes not.
How did the fantastic “Ee-Yah Man,” as he soon came to be called, get hired by the Tigers? Navin, after all, claimed to be looking for a sober, no-nonsense leader who would command the respect of his fractious club. It’s true that Jennings hadn’t behaved half so oddly the year before, when he was managing the latest iteration of the Orioles, who were then in the Eastern League, so Navin might not have known exactly what he was buying into. But Hughie’s connection to the raucous Baltimorians of the 1890s made him anathema to Ban Johnson, who, when he found out that Navin was considering him for the job of skipper, told the secretary, “Jennings has that old Oriole stamp on him. We cleaned Oriole rowdiness out of this league, and I won’t have it brought back!” Why, in the face of such strong resistance from the most powerful man in the league—Johnson wielded the same airtight authority over the AL as J. Edgar Hoover later would over the FBI—as well as his own stated objectives, did Navin persist in his pursuit of Hughie, ultimately offering him a relatively generous ($4,000) contract?
There are at least two reasons for his interest in Jennings. One was that the Orioles, for all their shenanigans, played the brand of baseball that Cobb would later be credited with inventing—“scientific” baseball. At a time when other teams were happy to swing the bat and get any kind of hit, McGraw and his boys judiciously employed the hit-and-run play, the sacrifice bunt, and, yes, the famous Baltimore chop to their enduring advantage, taking three pennants in the days before there was a World Series.
Beyond that, Hughie possessed a quality that has shortened the duration of many a courtship: he was being coveted by others—specifically the New York Highlanders (who were thinking of replacing Clark Griffith, or worried that he’d leave) and the Boston Americans (who found themselves in that awkward interval between one manager who wanders off occasionally and another who ingests carbolic acid). The interest of the more glamorous (and financially successful) East Coast teams fueled Navin’s desire to make Hughie his sixth manager in seven years. His only problem was that he didn’t want to pay the $5,000 that Ned Hanlon, the owner of the Orioles, was asking for Hughie’s signing rights—well, that and Johnson’s objections. He got around the latter by having owner Bill Yawkey not so subtly suggest to the league president that he might withdraw his investment in the team if couldn’t hire the manager his secretary wanted. As for Hanlon’s price, Navin simply ignored it and drafted Hughie as a player for the then standard $1,000 fee, though he had no intention of ever using him as such. Financially speaking, it was all the same to Hughie, who was just happy to be back in the major leagues, even if it was with a team he had never seen play.
Navin soon learned that his new manager was very different from his previous one, and not just because he comported himself during games like the entertainment at a rich kid’s birthday party. Whereas Armour had enjoyed negotiating with and nagging his men, at least via the U.S. mail, Jennings basically abstained from dealing with the team’s more difficult personalities. Cobb was at first startled and then offended by his almost utter lack of interaction with the new skipper. Why wasn’t Jennings reaching out to him? Between the time he took over the club, in September, and the end of 1906, Hughie had just one conversation with Cobb—a brief chat to assure him that he wouldn’t be traded, not to the White Sox or to the Naps for the talented but older (thirty) outfielder Elmer Flick, as rumor had it. (Except that rumor had it right. Hughie already had a line out to Cleveland manager Nap Lajoie about a possible Flick-for-Cobb swap.)
With no one doing the day-to-day player relations work, Navin had to step into the breach, handling the men’s nonstop requests. “You never know what strange propositions ballplayers will pop at you,” he said. “You have to be ready for any emergency.” When Cobb wrote in early February of 1907 asking for a $300 advance on his salary (which had been raised to $2,400, but which would not start arriving until April), and offering to pay interest on the loaned amount, Navin wrote back—for the last time addressing him as “Dear Sir”; after that it would almost always be “Friend Tyrus”—assuring him that the check was being processed and that he didn’t want to get into the unpleasant business of charging his players interest. When a few days later McIntyre bitterly informed the Tigers in writing that he refused to don their uniform again at any price—this was getting to be an annual ritual—the secretary responded with a dictated shrug, saying that he could not force him to play, of course, but neither would he facilitate his playing for anyone else by making a trade. The reserve clause gave the team all the leverage. “If you can afford to quit baseball,” he told Matty, “we can afford to have you do so.” Then the secretary wrote to Jennings to inform him of McIntyre’s latest outburst, adding, “I do not think there is any question but that he will weaken when the time comes.”
You have to wonder if Navin didn’t experience a bit of buyer’s remorse after signing Hughie in such a rush. He was suddenly working a lot harder than he had been when Armour was there, and that was no doubt cutting into his horse-playing time. Apart from dealing with the ballplayers and keeping Jennings posted about what was being said by both sides, the secretary had to buck up his new manager’s spirits whenever Hughie expressed pessimism about ever getting the Tigers to stop squabbling and focus on baseball. “Don’t get discouraged!” Navin urged Hughie in letters more
than once that spring.
McIntyre—who, as Navin had predicted, would report to camp and sign a contract—was a constant grouser and a disruptive force, but he was also a pretty good hitter, and, like most of the other players who had no money and wanted their egos stroked, he was easy for a sharp man like Navin to manipulate. Cobb, on the other hand, was, from a managerial standpoint, chess in three dimensions: more refined than most ballplayers, and more thoughtful, but after a year in which he’d absorbed a lot of abuse and endured the shame of having his mother on trial for the death of his father—all the while becoming the best hitter on the Tigers—his identity remained a work in progress. As a Southern gentleman, he had always drawn a line in the sand that marked the leading edge of his honor. Now it seemed that line was moving further from him, closer to you (whoever you were), and the wrath unleashed by crossing it (as Ed Siever could tell you) was proving much more violent. If you were a Tiger, he wanted to be friends, but not as much as he wanted to be Ty Cobb, something he was still in the process of defining.
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