It’s an obscure footnote to the Cobb story, but among the first people to experience the new, even less easygoing Tyrus was an unfortunate farmer’s son from Royston named Charlie Putnam. He and Ty were about the same age and may have once been schoolmates. On February 18, 1907, about a month before Cobb left for training camp at Augusta, Putnam “made remarks said to have been about a near relative” of the ballplayer, most likely his mother. The quote is from a petition for Cobb’s arrest filed shortly after Putnam regained consciousness. Despite Ty’s growing renown, and the supposed leeway allowed in the South to a man defending his family’s honor, a grand jury indicted him on the charge of assault. The case would meander through the system for more than a year without ever coming to trial. Ultimately Charley Putnam and his father, James, had a change of heart, and wrote letters requesting that the accused not be punished as long as he paid their court costs of $9.45—which, though it represented about half of what he got for playing in one major league baseball game—Cobb did.
In the scheme of things, the Putnam fight was but a tune-up for a more famous fracas that happened not quite a month later, shortly after Cobb arrived for spring training. The first thing Ty did upon reaching Augusta on March 12 (a day late; he’d managed to miss another train connection) was to sit down with Hughie for what the Free Press described as an hour-long “heart-to-heart.” The manager wanted to make sure Cobb was generally happy and shared his optimism about the coming season. Hughie had no quarrel with “the beardless boy of 20 who is making good with a rush,” as B. F. Wright of the Sporting News had recently called him; he liked Cobb from the start and appreciated his talents, but neither did he have a strong sentimental attachment to the kid the way Armour and Navin did. Jennings saw Cobb as an asset of great value, a superb young player who was improving every day, but also perhaps the biggest obstacle to team peace, which happened to be his highest priority. As much as he liked him, the manager would not have hesitated to trade Cobb for a highly competent but less controversial man.
In taking this position, Hughie put himself in direct opposition to the team secretary. Either the manager didn’t care what Navin thought, or he simply didn’t pick up on his boss’s signals. Navin didn’t brag about discovering Cobb, the way Armour often did, but he had a gut belief, bolstered by observation and statistics, that the kid whom the Tigers found more or less by accident in 1905 would turn out to be better than Sam Crawford, their reigning star, or maybe anybody else in the majors. He wouldn’t have traded Cobb under any circumstances, for any number of reasons, some of which seemed to go beyond baseball. Navin, who never had children, felt close to Cobb from the day he met him, a nervous, travel-worn C-leaguer who had just lost his father under appalling circumstances. The two would excoriate (and extol) each other over the years as only a father figure and son-substitute could. The fact that a preternaturally stingy man like Navin had given Ty an unsolicited raise the year before said much about his feelings—as did his reaction a few months later when he caught the kid filching a sensitive document off his desk.
In late September of 1906 the secretary had been sitting in his office at Bennett Park with Cobb and Joe Smith, the sports editor of the Detroit Journal, when he turned away momentarily to take a call. While turning back he saw Cobb slip a sheet of paper into a newspaper, which he then folded beneath his arm. The page listed monthly salaries for all the men on the roster, confidential information in which Cobb and all his teammates would have a keen interest. The theft was a fireable offense, but because he didn’t want to part company with Cobb or have to explain to anyone else why he wasn’t, he made a snap decision to literally look the other way.
But we were talking about a fistfight.
Cobb was on his way to afternoon practice in Augusta on March 16 when Henry “Bungy” Cummings, the Warren Park groundskeeper, hove into view. He and Cobb were acquainted, if only because, as previously reported, Cobb had criticized Cummings’s work when Bill Armour asked him to inspect the field for carnival-related damage a year earlier—but it seems that everyone in Augusta knew Bungy, an affable man with obvious problems. The two or three noncombatants who witnessed the early stages of the encounter agree that Cummings was, as the Free Press said, “partially under the influence of liquor” and garrulous as ever. As he approached Cobb, he (depending on which paper you read) either extended a hand, or put out both arms for a hug, and shouted, “Hello, Carrie!”
What did he mean by that? The salutation has befuddled Cobb scholars for more than a century. Had Cummings mistaken Ty for someone else? Had the witnesses misheard his greeting? A venerable mystery may have a simple solution. Carrie Nation, the famous temperance crusader who destroyed saloons with an ax, had been touring the South that winter and in fact had visited Augusta, giving a lecture at its Miller Walker Hall a month earlier. Cobb (who by all accounts abstained from alcohol at this time) may have told the groundsman (then or on a previous occasion) to sober up or go sleep it off, and Cummings may have sarcastically referred to him as the lady prohibitionist. It was common in those days to ask a teetotaling friend or disapproving spouse, “So, who are you? Carrie Nation?”
Anyway, what seems beyond dispute is that Cobb, rather than shake Cummings’s hand, pushed him away. In modern retellings of the story, people often ascribe Cobb’s actions to racism—he didn’t want to be touched by a black man, they say, or he felt Cummings’s display of familiarity highly impertinent. This is one of those assumptions about Cobb that is based strictly on his being born in 1886 in Georgia; if he ever said anything to or about Cummings, racist or otherwise, we don’t know what it was. Meanwhile Bungy clearly was a man who, because of his alcoholism, had a tendency to violate people’s personal space; he would later be arrested for wandering into someone’s house, not far from the ball field, and babbling vulgarities. Cobb may simply have been trying to avoid an annoying person blocking his path to the clubhouse.
The sportswriters noticed nothing further, until a few minutes later, when Cobb and catcher Charlie Schmidt fell to the ground near Cummings’s outfield shack locked in combat. Players and journalists came running. “Schmidt landed heavily with a right to the jaw,” said the Chicago Daily Tribune, “while Cobb scratched the catcher’s face badly. A number of short arm punches were landed by both, and Manager Jennings had considerable trouble parting them.” Schmidt, who, as we have seen, already had fought with Cobb once, and sucker-punched him on another occasion, said he attacked his teammate yet again after he came upon Ty choking Cummings’s wife, Savannah, whom he said had tried to stop Cobb from bludgeoning her husband. “I have my opinion of anyone who would strike a woman,” Schmidt told the assembled press. In response, Cobb “immediately suggested to Schmidt that he should seek a climate warmer than Georgia,” said the Free Press, and further told the writers that everything the catcher alleged was untrue. It’s worth noting, I think, that he didn’t claim that beating up Cummings and his wife was permissible because they were Negroes who had become too familiar or aggressive (as is sometimes alleged or suggested); what he said, rather, was that he did not beat them up. Since there were no witnesses and none of the newspapermen saw fit to ask the Cummingses for their version of events, it was his word against that of Schmidt, a man who had assaulted him now on three occasions. Indeed the catcher seemed strangely obsessed with Cobb, determined to stir up trouble with him in a way that even Matty McIntyre wasn’t. Some fourteen years later the whole story would emerge when sportswriter Hugh Fullerton revealed that Hughie Jennings had used Schmidt to engineer a “gentle frame up” of Cobb—in other words to have him associated with so much turmoil that Navin would finally come around and agree to trade him. If you know this, then you know it’s possible that Schmidt may have exaggerated what happened with Cummings or, as Cobb insisted, made up the incident from scratch.
After the trouble, Cobb was “quiet as a lamb,” said one paper. “I am in the right,” he said, “and so long as I know that fact I don’t care what is said or
done.” Schmidt, meanwhile, “made no secret that he is sore over the occurrence.” Jennings, “who plainly is much wrought up,” soon issued a statement that more or less summed up his philosophy: “Harmony in a ball team is absolutely essential to success, and I intend to prevent dissension among the players at all costs, no matter who is affected.” A short time later Hughie penciled himself into that day’s intra-squad game and while at bat “purposely took three pitches” to the ribs, “bringing to mind,” said the Free Press, “the days of the past when he used to get hit at least once every game.” I suppose we all have our ways of working off job-related stress.
Virtually all reports of the scuffle suggested that Cobb’s departure from the Tigers was imminent. Whoever was right or wrong in this particular case, the words “Cobb” and “fight” were sharing too many newspaper paragraphs—or so the men who composed those paragraphs insisted. As good as he was on the diamond, said the beat writers, who in any discussion always assume the parental role, the kid was too much trouble and would have to go.
No one in training camp seemed more upset by Cobb’s latest dustup than Jennings. Without consulting Navin, he sent a telegram that evening to the Cleveland Naps’ spring headquarters in Macon, Georgia, trying to revive the Flick deal. Flick interested him both because of his batting average and because he was as dull as Cobb was charismatic. The diminutive Ohioan did have one famous fight—in 1901, with Nap Lajoie, who didn’t like being kidded about his decidedly rube-ish clothing (the Frenchman broke his hand and was out for several weeks)—but Flick’s name seldom appeared in the newspapers outside of game stories. Today he is one of those Hall of Famers nobody knows.
Cobb himself was all for a trade. He was tired of getting beat up every couple of weeks by the much larger Schmidt, and despite what he said about not caring what people thought of him keenly disliked the idea of being seen as a troublemaker. He wanted to go someplace different and start fresh. If Detroit couldn’t or wouldn’t place him on another major league team, he told friends, he might just drop out of baseball.
Navin couldn’t stop Cobb from quitting, but he could and did scotch a trade. On March 18, he wrote to Jennings, expressing sympathy about the state of affairs down in Augusta, but, while keeping up the pretense that the manager had the power to make whatever personnel decisions he wanted, he advised his skipper to dispassionately think things through. “Am very sorry to hear of the trouble with Cobb,” he said in a letter addressed to Hughie at the Albion Hotel. “It seems hard to think that a mere boy can make such a disturbance. On last year’s form he has a chance to be one of the grandest ballplayers in the country. He has everything in his favor. It would not surprise me at all to see him lead the league this year in hitting and he has a chance to play for fifteen years yet.” (Navin was right about the former prediction and off, on the conservative side, by seven years regarding Cobb’s career.)
“Flick [Navin continued] is a dangerous man to bother with for the reason that he has about all the money he cares for, and is liable to quit on you at any time, besides being a great deal older than Cobb.
Do not get discouraged. Keep after [the players] and things might turn out all right yet. . . . You will find that every club manager in the American League will be after Cobb on the quiet, making him all sorts of propositions, salaries as high as $4,000 or so, and everything to make him dissatisfied with his present surroundings. . . . It was published in all the papers that you wired Lajoie and he wired you back that he would not trade. [In lieu of Flick, Lajoie offered outfielder William “Bunk” Congalton, a proposition Jennings wisely rejected.] I think it is a good scheme not to let the papers know anything about trades for players until the deal is pulled off.
Now, Hugh, don’t let the Cobb business bother you too much and keep up your grand spirit and you might line them up all right yet. If we only start off winning, I think everything will be all right. You understand that I will back you up on everything you want to do, but we do not want to make any mistakes.
A week later, Navin wrote to Jennings again, reiterating how important the kid was to him personally.
I would be sorry to let Cobb get away for the reason that he is such a young ball player. There is no telling what kind of a ball player he might make in the future. I had in mind that if he still continued his fresh tactics that I could get the clubs in our league to waive on him, and send him to some minor league club for a time. It might reduce the size of his head, and let him know where he got off at. I think I can do this if you cannot get along with him. I would not like to part with him.
A few days later Jennings told the press that the internecine warfare had ceased, and that there was peace in our time. “Talk about the affair of Saturday having caused dissension is all rot,” he said. “The matter has been entirely smoothed over and both players regret their hasty conduct. I am sure there will be no more of it.” To further ensure against trouble, Hughie moved Cobb to right field and put Sam Crawford in center, making him a buffer between Cobb and McIntyre.
Jennings seemed sincere in his optimism—and he must have been heartened when, a day or so later as the Tigers worked their way north, Cobb requested permission to make a side trip to Royston to pick up his family. Amanda and his sister, Florence, would live with him at 2384 Woodward Avenue for the entire 1907 season, and his brother, Paul, also an outfielder, was heading for a tryout with the Kalamazoo White Sox of the Class D Southern Michigan League (he would play in 34 games for them, hitting .242, before moving on to a semipro team in California). Surrounded by his closest kin, Cobb would surely be less likely to be picked on or to provoke others. But upon rejoining the team in Columbia, South Carolina, a few days later, he was still agitating for a trade. “He cornered the manager one night and said, in substance, that he wanted to get away from Detroit,” said an unsigned piece in the Free Press. Despite Navin’s several letters about the importance of keeping Cobb, Jennings told Ty that he was in fact trying to arrange for his exit. Flick was now signed for the season with Cleveland, but Clark Griffith of New York had hinted that he might want to make a swap. When Hughie heard back from the Highlanders the next day, however, they were offering only Frank Delahanty, a .238 hitter, a proposal that was either, as Hughie said, “a humorous effort,” or an indication of just how wary some people were of young Tyrus.
Why would any manager hesitate to take a kid who hit .316 the previous season? Baseball men are conservative by nature and a lot of them didn’t know what to make of Cobb. He frightened them because, for one thing, he didn’t look like the other deadball era stars. Lajoie, Honus Wagner, John McGraw, Elmer Flick—those men were all squat and thick and hammy, while he was tall and (in those early years) relatively lithe. Even stranger was the role he assigned himself as an offensive player—to be the cause of worry in the opposition. He did this not by running wild on the base paths but by seeming to run wild. “Some of my greatest thrills in baseball,” Cobb said in his 1925 memoir, “came from taking third and home when I was expected to stop at second.” What pleased Cobb, others found upsetting (which was, of course, the point). Bill Donovan, though his friend, called him “too wild,” and predicted “the baseball gods” would punish him one day for disrespecting “the laws of baseball.” “No one person is bigger than the pastime,” the pitcher said—and Cobb probably agreed with him, just not with the limitations men like Donovan imposed upon the game.
• • •
Charlie Schmidt, meanwhile, was scary in a different way, the way a wounded beast is. This was in part because he was actually wounded and hobbling around that spring on his left ankle, which he’d broken toward the end of the previous season and never got fixed. The Tigers refused to pay for an operation, a position they took more or less automatically with any .240 hitter with so-so defensive skills. Before the players’ union, teams went case by case when it came to medical bills, and Schmidt was a classic example of a man who didn’t merit special consideration. He knew it, too, and that probably hur
t more than the ankle. Cobb they coddled, but the only time Navin and Jennings paid attention to him was when he whined about wanting a raise—and then they told him to shut up and play better and something might eventually happen. Schmidt’s teammates also tended to ignore him, except when he was doing his popular barroom trick of pounding a nail into a block of wood with his bare fist or retelling the story of the time he’d sparred with heavyweight contender Jack Johnson.
When Schmidt came up from the minors the year before, no one bothered to haze him, even though he was, like Cobb, a Southerner, from Coal Mountain, Arkansas. He didn’t even merit their disapproval. Schmidt may have thought that beating up Cobb would make him more popular with the McIntyre clique, so he kept on doing it. It was on March 29 at Meridian, Mississippi, where the Tigers had gone to play two games against a team of all-stars from the Cotton States League, that the catcher attacked Cobb for the fourth time. Once again, there appeared to be no inciting incident, no words exchanged before the bigger man hauled off and punched the slighter man in the face. Cobb, bloody and dazed, had to be helped back to the New Southern Hotel, where he was tended to by his mother and sister.
What was happening with the Tigers was pathetic. Yet instead of playing the incident in Meridian as an example of serial bullying, the papers went with their familiar “Cobb gets belligerent” motif. It simply made for a grabbier story, the wiseass kid who got his comeuppance. “Cobb Had Enough: Lasted One Minute in Fight with Schmidt” was the headline in the Sporting News. The reader was meant to shake his head and emit a rueful chuckle.
Ban Johnson wasn’t laughing, though. Never one to see beyond the surface of any situation and have anything other than a knee-jerk response, he immediately wrote to Cobb demanding an explanation, and to Navin, chastising him for allowing this pugnacious youngster once again to run wild. We don’t have his letters, or Cobb’s response, but Navin’s reply to Johnson is a museum-quality con job. In it we see a man who, while no doubt exasperated with the situation, is conniving full-bore to keep Cobb on his team—by convincing Johnson that no one was angrier at the youngster than he, Frank Navin.
Ty Cobb Page 18