Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  My dear Johnson,

  I have your letter regarding Cobb. I thought that Cobb was getting the worst of it last year on the club, but on investigation, I found that a great deal of the trouble was caused by himself. He has the southern aristocracy notion in his head, and thinks he is too good to associate with ball players. He will not allow any of the older members of the team to make a suggestion to him. When a suggestion is made, he will make some impertinent answer. He has the notion that he is quite a fighter. He has been arrested at night for fighting on the street with citizens of Detroit, who had nothing to do with the ball club at all. [There is no record of such an arrest.] In fact he is what you would call a real fresh young man, with an inflated idea of his own importance. I think exaggerated ego would fit him exactly.

  Donovan, Lowe, Crawford and some of the older members of the club were his friends until he absolutely refused to be friends with them. Lowe told me on the quiet that Cobb was one of the freshest young men he had ever seen, and when I told Lowe to talk with him and make suggestions to him on several occasions, he did not think he wanted any more insults.

  [Cobb] does not associate with good people, and the women who are his friends are of the worst class in the city. As an illustration, he left a couple of passes one day at the box office for some women who came to get them. One of the detectives of our city happened to be standing around the office and asked what player left the passes for those women. We found out it was Cobb, and when Cobb “was called” for it, he tried to bluff the detectives though, until they agreed to show him on the register where they had been arrested for almost all the crimes on the calendar a number of times.

  Not for publication, no matter whether Smith [he means Schmidt] was in the right or not, I am tickled to death that he got a good trouncing. It might do him a world of good.

  Yours truly,

  Frank Navin

  Satisfied with the secretary’s response, Johnson let the matter drop without disciplining the team or either of the battling players. Thus by dint of mock outrage and false umbrage, Navin created a diversion and hustled Cobb past a dangerous checkpoint.

  But if Johnson was assuaged, Cobb wasn’t. On March 29, he wrote to Kid Elberfeld, venting his disgust. Eleven years his senior, and a major leaguer since 1898, the fiery Highlander shortstop had become a sort of mentor to the young man whose face he had once pushed, pedagogically, into the stony ground at Bennett Park as Cobb slid headfirst into second. In the eighteen or so months since, Cobb had acknowledged receipt of the lesson by knocking Elberfeld off his feet as he slid into second at Hilltop Park (“My feet collided with his leg and he was knocked four or five feet. He got up, rubbed himself, looked at me calmly and went back to his position without saying a word. ‘Well, you’ve learned something,’ his look implied. ‘You beat me to it that time, and I’ve got nothing to say.’ ”) and the older man had become a sounding board for Cobb’s burgeoning frustration.

  The letter:

  Mr. Norman Elberfeld, Atlanta, Ga.

  Dear Sir & Friend:

  I wired you yesterday, at least had a friend send, so could not explain fully, so I thought it best to write you. Well in the first place I had more trouble—Schmidt takes a shot at me without any provocation in the least. He called to me as I started out to warm up at the ball park and as I turned he said either he or I would get whipped so we had one. It was short. He belted me one in the eye so I left the park and met Jennings on his way down and I told him it was all up as to me staying on the team. He called a meeting last night and he said they all—McIntyre, Siever, Killian and Schmidt—was ready to make friends and the rest seemed very nice to me when they came down from the meeting. Then I saw Jennings. He wants me to stay but I told him I was not going to stay that I would put him on notice then and that I guessed I would go home from Birmingham and stay until I was traded, or I would quit the game for good—and by George I will before I play with this Detroit Club. I told him if he carried me to Detroit as he said he would have to do before he traded me so he could see Mr. Navin and Mr. Yawkey that I would not play in a single game with them. I told him I would help him out in exhibition games as Jones is hurt. Rossman is out so that calls Crawford on first and then I thought it good policy to be as easy as I could and put him on notice that I would not play.

  Now Elberfeld, I am not going to play with these “suckers” some of them I mean and if I make good my threat which I surely will I am going with the club that will stand to me if I am laid off. I will want my time made good. I mean by that if I have to quit the game for a month before they trade me I will expect that salary to come from the club that gets me so will [Clark] Griffith do it?

  Now let me hear from you at once all about it at Little Rock, Ark. c/o Marion Hotel. Now you can bank on me making good on my threat as I see it’s my chance and now is the time, and I am glad I had the scrap because I want to go.

  I am writing Navin this a.m. and telling him I won’t play with this club any longer. So you can see I am dead in earnest—So answer quick.

  Your friend

  Tyrus R. Cobb

  Whether Elberfeld wrote back to advise a bit more patience we don’t know. Maybe the act of writing the letter relieved at least some of Cobb’s stress. All the record shows is that he never acted on his threat.

  • • •

  They had changed managers and tinkered with their roster but the Tigers were still not a lovable club—unless you embraced their outlandish misanthropy. When they stopped in Birmingham in early April, Davy Jones, normally one of the more even-tempered men on the squad, was arrested for assaulting a twelve-year-old newsboy who he said had “thrust” a paper on him and requested a nickel. Dusting off his Cornell law degree, Jennings represented the outfielder in court and won a prompt acquittal. This allowed the team to move on to the next town with its outfield intact, but assaulting an urchin and then outmaneuvering the kid in court were not the sort of feats that made you a must-see attraction. Back home in Detroit, ticket sales were sluggish.

  Still, Joe S. Jackson and some of the other beat reporters managed to see some bright spots. The team was healthy—“Not a cripple in the crop,” one journalist said of the pitching staff. “Crawford, Cobb and McIntyre are stinging the ball,” Jackson noted, and Claude Rossman, the Tigers’ new, left-handed first baseman, though a man of delicate nerves, was proving to be a brilliant bunter who fit nicely into the lineup behind Ty. Rossman was Cobb’s roommate that year, and together they worked out a play that demonstrated the near-telepathic levels of communication that can be attained by a Georgia Baptist and an upstate New York Jew. The strategy behind it was simple: when Rossman came to bat with Cobb on first, the latter would sometimes flash a subtle signal just before the pitcher began his windup, then take off for second. Rossman would push a shy little roller toward the left, the third baseman would rush in to field it, and by the time he did and threw to first, Cobb would have, as the scribes liked to say in those days, “achieved the penultimate sack,” aka the hot corner. If the throw to first was even slightly imperfect, he came home—and the cranks went bughouse.

  So there was cause for hope yet.

  “If we only start off winning,” Navin had written to Hughie Jennings, “I think everything will be all right.”

  — CHAPTER FOURTEEN —

  The TIGERS DIDN’T JUST WHIP the Cleveland Naps in the first game of the 1907 season—they looked like the Chicago Cubs doing it. “It was an opener to enthuse the home fans,” wrote Joe S. Jackson of Detroit’s 2–0 victory. “It showed the ginger that was promised in the reports from Dixie land.” With gunmetal clouds scudding ominously above the Bennett Park cobbles, and temperatures hovering around 40 degrees (and a little German band getting laughs by playing “In the Good Old Summertime”), George Mullin threw a three-hit shutout, Germany Schaefer stroked two doubles, and Cobb had what every opposing club would soon fear most: a typical day. He went 2-for-4, stole a base, and scored both Tiger runs. In the fourt
h inning he reached first on a bad throw and went to second on Rossman’s “Lone Star League base hit,” said the Free Press. Then, wrote Jackson, “on a short passed ball Cobb hustled to third, beating the play by an eye-lash, long growth.” He jogged home soon afterward when Schmidt stroked a single. In the eighth, Cobb hit a single, broke for second as soon as the ball was returned to catcher “Nig” Clarke (so called because of his swarthy complexion), then kept going when Clarke’s rushed throw got by Nap Lajoie and skittered into the outfield. It was, as it often was when Cobb forced fielders to make fast decisions, a comedy of throwing errors. Center fielder Flick’s peg was wildly off-line, and as soon as Cobb saw despair in the upward-rolling eyes of third baseman Bill Bradley, he bounced up from his slide and dashed home, where, in a cloud of dust, he was judged safe by another longish eyelash.

  In Bennett’s stands and in the next day’s newspapers, joy mingled with surprise. The Tigers looked sharper than even Navin had expected. Maybe he shouldn’t have canceled the ceremonial first pitch as well as the annual opening day appearance of the Elks Club marching band—decisions that suggested he was less than optimistic about the new season. As the Tigers trotted off the semifrozen field the (subpar) crowd of 6,322 souls rose in warm appreciation. The feeling was mutual. It had been ages since Detroit players heard even something as applauselike as the muffled thump of gloved hands clapping.

  “If we only start off winning, I think everything will be all right.”

  True stories don’t turn on a dime, though. Except for Rossman, the Tigers, at least on paper, were essentially the same imperfect ensemble they had been the year before, when they led the league only in dissension. Meaningful success was out of the question for 1907—or was it? They dropped the second game of the season, won the third, lost the fourth, and for the next few weeks seesawed their way through the schedule, teasing the public and the press. Attempting to analyze the situation and solve the riddle of whether he should bother to get his hopes up, Joe S. Jackson could only conclude that it was the semi-good pitching staff that rendered the Tigers semi-bad. Hmmm. The maddening .500-ness of it all made people fidgety, as ambiguity always will. Besides, so-so no longer satisfied the once quaintly sylvan center of the carriage-making trade; Detroit was picking up steam—and carbon monoxide—in the race (with Indianapolis) to be America’s Motor City. A year before the Model T Ford arrived, and revolutionized society by allowing average Joes to afford an automobile, the town was already starting to feel like Cobb was feeling: feisty; ready for respect. Detroit in 1907 was a cosmopolis shooting its cuffs. In baseball terms, the attitude adjustment meant that Bennett denizens, no longer happy just to be part of the pack, yearned to contend for the pennant, and maybe even win the World Series, already a four-year-old tradition. Like Narcissus staring pond-ward, Detroiters yearned to see their burgeoning fabulousness reflected in the ball scores. Today we call this “being a fan,” but back then hitching your mood to the fortunes of a sports franchise was something new, and still thought to be harmless.

  For Cobb, April was the cruelest month. Suffering from what the patent-medicine peddlers of the day called catarrh, a fancy fin de siècle name for a cold, he was hitting .247 on May 9 and acting sluggish on the bases. But then the fog began to lift, inside and outside his head, and everything looked brighter. In retrospect, we can see things already improving in the dark and dank area of team morale, thanks in large part to Hughie Jennings’s decision to rotate certain players through the third base coaching box while he cavorted (and cajoled and Ee-Yahed) on the starboard side. So there was method to his sideline silliness after all. Stationing McIntyre across from him now and then meant that Matty and Ty were forced, at least in theory, to interact and behave like teammates when the latter was on base. Jennings also arranged for Cobb and McIntyre to sleep in facing Pullman berths on train trips, like Dick Powell and Joan Blondell in Footlight Parade. If such tactics didn’t transform them into best buds, exactly, they did stall the momentum of their reciprocal hate. The pair might even have progressed to frenemy status if McIntyre hadn’t shattered his ankle in early May sliding into second. That put him out for the season and effectively atomized the anti-Cobb clique. Everyone exhaled. Cobb and Ed Siever soon got beyond their Planter’s Hotel fight, shook hands, and became pals. Before the year was over, Cobb even made up with Charlie Schmidt.

  As the Tigers lightened up, they flew higher, and maneuvered more nimbly through the schedule. On May 24 their winning percentage hit .600. Though third in the standings behind the White Sox and Naps, they had the look of a club on the come—and were suddenly more than sports page fodder. “Under the guidance and inspiration of manager Hughie Jennings,” said an editorial in the Free Press, “our boys have become a fighting force in baseball.” These Tigers never gave up—a pleasant contrast to their 1906 counterparts, who, as we’ve seen, sometimes didn’t even show up for games. On the 9th of May they beat the Highlanders in an exhausting contest despite being down a run with two out in the ninth. With the sun getting low and many cranks already slouching toward the streetcars, “Capt. Bill Coughlin spat on his hands, grabbed a handful of dust and hit the third ball pitched” (wrote Joe S. Jackson) for a double that knocked in a run to tie the score. Moments later, “Crawford fell on one for a clean single through the box, and it was all over.” It was over for the Highlanders, anyway; the Tigers had only just begun.

  Over and over that year, said Frederick G. Lieb in his highly regarded but only semi-dependable history of the club, the Detroiters displayed newfound courage. Ten days later, they fell behind 4–0 to the Philadelphia A’s in the third inning as more than 4,000 “sat silently and groaned,” according to Jackson—who apparently had superhuman hearing. In the bottom of the inning, though, “The Tigers transposed their supporters from mourners to merrymakers by what is variously described as a carnival of clouts, a batfest or a slugging bee.” Call it what you want, Detroit beat Connie Mack’s men that day 15–8. Cobb had four hits—two doubles and two singles—in six trips to the plate. His average had risen nearly 30 points in the previous two weeks, but more astounding was that the Tigers, essentially the same team that had finished sixth in batting the previous season, now led the AL with a .253 team batting average. “Three Pitchers Clawed by Jungleers to Please Big Crowd” ran a typical Detroit headline. The Free Press editorial writers felt obliged to remind their excited readers that “our boys won’t win every game.”

  They won enough, though, so that on July 25 they moved into second place, and a week later bobbed up to first, though really there was a roundelay of teams—the Tigers, While Sox, Naps, and Athletics—taking turns at the top that summer. The anxiety associated with snapping open the sports pages each morning caused an epidemic of “dementia baseballanus,” according to the Free Press, which noted, “If you’re immune you don’t belong here.” Each game day hundreds if not thousands jammed the downtown bars like the Metropole, Geis’s, and the Normandie, where electric news tickers delivered a bare-bones play-by-play of the Tigers game. (This was known to have happened elsewhere in America, but only during the World Series.) Detroiters who just wanted to drink their lunch in peace groused about the town’s sudden obsession. “Confound baseball!” said one unidentified man. “The bootblacks were talking about the game this morning, the barber could hardly spare the time to shave me as he was arguing the relative merits of Cobb and Crawford as hitters, and then . . . one man whom you would never have suspected of insanity came in and asked them to find out how the weather was in Philadelphia. When I asked him why he replied, ‘If it rains all morning and is gloomy all afternoon, Mullin’ll win sure!’ Can you beat it?”

  No one seemed more captivating to the general public than Cobb, who by early August was third among AL batters, with a .322 average. His steep ascent was strictly his own doing. He and Jennings were friendly, but the manager left him alone, wisely offering him nothing but back-pats and the freedom to turn himself into the iconoclastic player he wanted to
be. Hughie, who knew what was teachable and what was not (and also knew a little something about hitting—he had a .312 lifetime batting average over 18 years), didn’t desire, as a manager, to be surrounded by dimwits who demanded a lot of coaching. “If that guy’s brains were made of nitro-glycerin and they exploded the bust wouldn’t muss his hair,” he would say when he saw an example of bonehead baseball. “Give me a man who can think with his arms and legs, and I’ll make a ballplayer of him!” Or better yet, let him figure out how to do the job himself. At first Ty, who had cultivated a string of father figures (Uncle Ezra, Grandpa Johnnie, Leidy, Dad Groves, Armour, Navin, and, later, Connie Mack) didn’t understand what was going on; he felt rejected by the new skipper in spring training and asked one of the sportswriters to act as a go-between and ask Jennings if there was a problem. Jennings for once was not shy about communicating with Cobb. Instead of using the scribe as a messenger, he marched right up to his star and said, “There’s nothing I can teach you.” Ty, who no doubt would have bridled at being too closely managed, soon came to appreciate the laissez-faire approach. Hughie “allowed me to seek my own salvation in my own way,” he later told a writer for the Sporting News.

  Cobb’s thoughts about hitting are well documented. Like Ted Williams, he liked to talk about the craft to almost any scribe who sauntered up and asked. But unlike Williams, he wasn’t big on dispensing advice, especially during his playing days. Hitting was so personality-driven, he believed—Nap Lajoie crowded the plate, Wagner stood as far away from it as possible, especially small men used especially large “biffers” to a degree that surprised even him, a Napoleon buff—that there was, he felt, no use in trying to give general one-size-fits-all directions. For the most part, when the younger Cobb talked about hitting he focused on what worked best for him, specifically, as a batter. One reason was that he wished to stress that he wasn’t some of freak of nature—the dreaded “natural”—born with a rare knack for smacking a round ball with a round bat. He had to think through everything he did at the plate (and on the bases), accepting this and rejecting that bit of conventional wisdom, as all the best baseball men did. Beyond that, he wanted it understood that the techniques he employed as a hitter were part of an overarching philosophy that came down to keeping the opposition anxious.