This was not a common way to frame one’s approach to the game, but more unusual still was his desire (need?) to have strangers who knew less about baseball than he did, and who sometimes showered him with bottles and curses—the common cranks, in other words—comprehend what he was up to on the field. If they only understood, he felt, they would stop asking if he filed his spikes and stop calling him “the Dixie Demon” and much worse. They would appreciate the game more and have a better time at the ballpark. They would see he was not a bad guy. Cobb’s worst fear, apart from going 0-for-4 on any given afternoon, was being seen as a semi-civilized, club-wielding, spike-brandishing brute. Alas, explaining himself turned out to be a lifelong endeavor. His autobiography, My Life in Baseball, written in his final months, was one last attempt to set the record straight, his capstone apologia—but it didn’t work out. In the end it was hackwork and half-truths. The only things coauthor Al Stump explored deeply were Cobb’s reserves of Scotch and bourbon.
If Stump were a better ghostwriter he might have picked up on the pugilistic strain than ran through Cobb’s philosophy of the game and made something interesting of it. Cobb was like a professional fighter not because he occasionally beat up people in hotels and beneath grandstands and was beaten up in turn, but because he thought in terms of footwork, force, and feints. Start with force. Base path collisions were nothing terribly interesting in themselves but, used judiciously, they gave context to his every move as a runner by creating a constant anxiety in the opposition, a feeling that anything might happen next. “I rarely took a chance that I had not figured out carefully in advance,” he said—and yet “I tried to make it appear that I was acting on sudden impulse, and relying on luck.” If you were a defender who thought he was heedless, the sight of him dancing just off a sack would command a too large portion of your brain. The threat of violence was a valuable commodity, as effective as violence itself and much less dangerous, but it had to be cultivated. Cobb understood this, and it is why in the late innings of games in which the Tigers were far ahead or hopelessly trailing he would often be at his most bizarrely belligerent, wishing to convey that he was likely to sacrifice his body at arbitrary moments. It wouldn’t be far off the mark to say that Cobb spent the first half of his life trying to seem unhinged, and the second half explaining he had been acting deliberately the whole time.
You might say the fancy footwork started as he strode confidently from the bench, juggling three bats. What he was doing, with a subtle swagger, was what Mike Tyson did when he stalked into the ring wearing an old ripped poncho: making it clear that you, the pitcher, were the person with the problem, and, by the way, your problem was him. Thus an opponent becomes gelatinized before the battle is joined. One must manage one’s macho, though, and not just swing for the cheap seats. His pitty-pat hitting was the equivalent of wearing down an opponent gradually with stiff jabs; fighting cleverly. Getting on base was the point in those days. All of the stars of that era “choke up on their bats and use their brains,” Cobb said. But getting the pitcher to choke is even better. So stride to the plate, and then stand in there confidently, like you’ve never heard that baseball is basically a game of failure, and the best batters make out two thirds of the time. The single most important rule of hitting, Cobb once said, is “don’t let the pitcher think he has anything on you.”
Once in the batter’s box, Cobb’s feet did double duty, as foundation and camouflage. His default position was a stance previously unseen; H. G. Salsinger called it “a freak stance.” “Instead of standing with his feet far apart, flat and firm, he stood with his feet close together, on his toes, crouched over, his hands gripping the handle of the bat,” Salsinger wrote in a 1951 remembrance in Baseball Digest. “In this position [the pedal equivalent of the split-hands grip, it sounds like] he was able to shift quickly with the pitch.” Cobb would never be so predictable, though, as to always stand the same way, like, say, Ted Williams did to Cobb’s oft-expressed (but fundamentally paternal) consternation. The placement of his feet was sometimes an effort at misdirection—Cobb might take a wide stance to suggest he would be trying to pull the ball to the right side of the diamond, then jump his feet together at the last second and poke the ball toward left field.
“Ty was the only lefthanded batter who could ever line an inside pitch into left field just inside the foul line,” Salsinger wrote in 1951. “Curious to know how Ty did this, Jean Dubuc, a very smart pitcher, kept studying him closely in practice and discovered that when the ball left the pitcher’s hand Cobb would sometimes shift around and be facing the third baseman when he hit the ball. If the opposing team had an outstanding first baseman, Cobb never hit in his direction.” At other times he might plant his feet wide, and yank the bat back like he was trying to hit a home run—but at the last millisecond slide his left hand high up the barrel and deliver a bunt. We have no film, but his bunt swing and his home run swing were said to be shockingly similar. (Likewise, if he ever assumed a bunt stance during a pitcher’s windup, he probably wasn’t bunting.)
On still other occasions, he might plant his feet precisely where they needed to be to handle a particular pitcher’s curve—and stay put. He felt you always had to respect a good curveball. “If there is a right-handed pitcher in the box I stand ahead of the plate and remove about a foot,” he explained to Dudley Porter, a quote-polisher for the Atlanta Constitution. “If the twirler is left handed, I stand well back to get ready for the curve after it breaks. In other words, I try to catch the curve on the right-hander before it breaks, and that of the southpaw after.” Cobb had been tinkering with this approach since his days with the Royston Reds, but 1907 was the year he fine-tuned it to something like perfection. Cobb actually hit better against left-handers that year (.378) than pitchers in general (.350). Against Rube Waddell, a much better than average southpaw for the Philadelphia Athletics, he hit .417.
To merely skim the 1907 chapter of The Ty Cobb Scrapbook, an invaluable, career-encompassing collection of game summaries by Marc Okkonen, is to get a sense that Cobb was playing a richer and saltier version of baseball than most of his opponents—imagine regular versus Canadian bacon, truly an unfair fight. When he wasn’t drawing a walk, then scoring from first on a sacrifice bunt (August 8, at Philadelphia), he was stealing home (twice: June 29, against the Naps, and July 5, against the A’s) or doubling up runners at first with pinpoint throws from right field (twice on June 18 at Philadelphia) or making a bare-handed catch of a sinking liner as he skidded along the outfield grass, “eventually doing cartwheels to regain his balance” (against the Highlanders on May 14). An equally remarkable play involved a catch he didn’t quite make, at Columbia Park in Philadelphia, where, attempting to haul down a towering fly hit by A’s outfielder Rube Oldring, Cobb ducked under the rope in left field, pushed his way through a sea of startled standing-room-only spectators, and managed to come within a foot or two of the ball (September 27). Cobb crashed into those reliably hotheaded Philly fans “like a football player bucking the line,” said the Free Press.
The kid was fearless. He had no trouble hitting the great Cy Young (a double and a single on July 6) or causing the revered Highlander first baseman Hal Chase to double-clutch and make what biographer Charles Alexander saw as “maybe the most embarrassing” throw of his storied career, allowing Cobb to (once again) score from third on one of Rossman’s patented squibblers (June 11). Among the great pitchers of his era only Addie Joss, who held him to an average of .266, and Waite Hoyt (.265) were able to more or less tame him. Against Walter Johnson, whom he often called the best pitcher he’d ever faced, Cobb hit his lifetime average of .366, just as he did against Hall of Famers “Chief” Bender and Herb Pennock. He hit .343 against Eddie Plank, .362 against Stan Coveleski, .335 against “Red” Faber, .341 against Ed Walsh, and .429 against Smoky Joe Wood.
And not everything was Punch-and-Judy. No one ever hit a shot farther at Cleveland’s League Park than Cobb did when he smacked a rare (for the deadba
ll era) outside-the-park home run to the opposite field on May 30. On the very best days, of course, he did it all. On July 30, 1907, at Hilltop Park in New York, Cobb got four hits, scored three runs, stole a base, and made a circus catch to save a homer as the Tigers thumped the Highlanders 6–1. Winning pitcher Twilight Ed Killian, who once turned crepuscular at the mention of Cobb’s name, now brightened. “Let him get on first base and all he’s got to do is keep running,” he told the assembled press. “The other fellows don’t know what to do with the ball when Cobb starts!”
A life of discipline and denial ran behind this larkish-looking style. As he would tell Grantland Rice years later on the radio, baseball was “all work,” a 24/7 deal. Cobb didn’t drink or even smoke the occasional cigar just yet. He bragged that he avoided “dissipation of any kind” including “going to parties in cafes.” He swore off “picture shows” (thus missing the first, fifteen-minute version of Ben Hur, which came out in 1907), chewing gum, and coffee, believing they were bad for the eyes, and therefore the batting average. He wore sliding pads early in the season because they gave him blisters, and felt the calluses that replaced them allowed him to remove the pads and run more freely, though by the end of seasons his legs were an archipelago of open sores, his flannel uniform pants often blotted with blood. When in early September of 1907 he jumped over a rope in Cleveland to catch a fly ball and cut his hand on a broken pop bottle while landing, he stayed in the lineup, even though the bandages interfered with his batting, even after the wound became infected. (The folktales notwithstanding, not all deadball players were such dead gamers.) While his teammates went out for the evening, he usually returned to his room after his post-dinner amble to be with his books and newspapers. Reading was also bad for the eyes, he believed, but he couldn’t forswear it.
In 1907 he began to make a scrapbook. “It was during the season when I first won the batting championship—my third year with Detroit—that I got my big thrills of newspaper publicity,” he wrote in 1925. “I saved every clipping. Looking them over now I find the articles of praise and just criticism far outweighed the unfair ones.” Then, though, the proportions seemed in reverse: “Unfortunately, it is a human trait to remember the unkind things after the nice ones are forgotten.” All his life, Cobb would be a prospector of pain, a relentless finder of fists that he could jam his chin against. Although unkind articles were hard to come by after the Tigers started winning, he always maintained a mental file of real and perceived slights that he could call up and pore over whenever his mood started drifting toward the serene.
His day-to-day existence did improve, though, once fate hustled Matty McIntyre into the wings. Cobb would have tense relationships with fellow Tigers in the years to come, but he would never again battle physically with a teammate. The heat and hate now emanated mostly from the dugout of the opposition. For there lurked men who took the brunt of his talent, and learned more than they wanted to about their own limitations. A Tigers-Naps game at Bennett on June 29 of that year provides a case in point. With two out in the second inning and Crawford on first, Ty hit a triple off the scoreboard in center. “Cobb rounded third as [Joe] Birmingham’s return throw was in the air, on the way to [third baseman Bill] Bradley” Jackson wrote. “Figuring that the latter would expect him to stop at third, Cobb kept going for home. [Catcher Harry] Bemis called for the ball. Bradley made a perfect throw. The ball was in Bemis’ hands when Cobb was three steps from home.” Ty looked like a goner. A smiling Bemis blocked off the plate, “presumably expecting Cobb to walk in and be put out. Instead, Cobb made a head-first dive. He struck Bemis with his shoulder, and the catcher was knocked off his balance, and dropped the ball. This, of course, made Cobb’s run count.”
From a play like this we can readily see why fans loved Cobb’s brand of baseball, as well as why someone like Bemis, a lifetime .255 hitter destined to be outshined in the annals by much lesser men than Cobb, didn’t: he felt, as Jackson wrote, “shown up by a player that outguessed him.” Indeed, so put out was “Handsome Harry,” that he began to beat Cobb on the head with the ball “as he lay across the plate, face downwards.” Davy Jones was the first Tiger to rush to his teammate’s rescue, and most of the others were soon at the scene, helping Jones and umpire Silk O’Loughlin, who sent Bemis to the showers and refused to listen to the Naps players’ pleas that Cobb be ejected as well. As Jackson noted, “he [Cobb] at no time exchanged a blow with anybody.” If Cobb was angry with Bemis on that balmy Saturday afternoon, he took it out on the ball, going 4-for-5 as the Tigers won 12–2 in another of those we’ve-got-to-stop-at-five-to-catch-a-train-shortened games.
It was not just Cobb’s mature playing style—the emphasis on base running (as opposed to simply stealing) over batting (as freakishly good as he was as a hitter)—that came more clearly into focus in 1907. He also set the tone that year for his long-term role on the team—the resident superstar who was neither a pariah nor just one of the boys. In some ways his was an isolated existence. Cobb was virtually alone in the “celebrity ballplayer” niche, the only other resident being Christy Mathewson, the tall, handsome Giants righty who’d been class president at Bucknell (where he starred in baseball and football) and who still holds the record (along with Grover Cleveland Alexander) for most wins (373) in the National League. “The Christian Gentleman,” they called Mathewson, though he was too slick, too naturally mass-market, to act overtly religious. The other greats of that and the previous era—Lajoie, Wagner, McGraw, Anson, Willie Keeler, Walter Johnson, Cy Young—were everything you could want in a ballplayer but not superstar stuff, not camera-ready copies of swashbuckling stage actors, or the romantic heroes of boys’ books, the way Cobb and Mathewson were; they were too plain and/or potty-mouthed to make anyone swoon. Cobb, by year’s end, had landed his first big endorsement deal, for Coca-Cola; many more would follow. But in the first decade of the twentieth century, celebrity came with few precedents and no owner’s manual. There were no back issues of People magazine to peruse for lifestyle tips or cautionary tales. Cobb was on his own as far as figuring out what the rules were, how to be in the world, where to draw the line with the would-be agents and brokers and the strangers who came up to you on the street and giddily informed you that you were Ty Cobb.
Besides his baseball skills, what put Cobb in that elevated category was his uncanny knack for being wherever the spotlight was headed. On September 30, he found himself in what the New York Times described as “probably the most exciting game ever played in major league baseball,” and he would always call the most thrilling of his career. Allow me to set the scene. By that late point in the season, the White Sox and Naps had fallen back into the AL pack, leaving Detroit and Philadelphia alone at the top to slug, or rather small-ball, it out for the pennant. The Athletics, ahead by four games on Labor Day, lost ground after their ace righty, Chief Bender (the putative inventor of the slider and the unquestioned master of the talcum powder pitch), hurt his arm, and led the race by just 3 percentage points when the Tigers came to town for a three-game series starting on Friday, September 27. The showdown would have been tense under any circumstances, given the closeness of the standings, but the presence of Jennings in the coaching box heightened the stakes. Hughie was hated in Philadelphia for the havoc he helped wreak as a Baltimore Oriole, and upon his return to the majors as the Tigers manager he was mocked mercilessly in the local dailies for his “bellowing and monkeyshines” (Connie Mack’s words) near first base. Horace Fogel, a former major league manager who’d become sports editor of the Philadelphia Telegraph, called him a “lunatic” who “chased up and down the coaching lines like a hyena. Why not build a cage for him at each ballpark in the circuit?” Fogel wrote. “If he must have a policeman’s whistle and toy sirens to blow why not give him bells to ring and pistols to shoot off?”
The opener was no thing of beauty, unless you were a Detroit bug (fan). Hughie’s men prevailed 5–4 as Bill Donovan scattered 13 hits over nine innings. The win put the Ti
gers in first (by 8 percentage points) with only a handful of games to go, and left the folks back in Detroit with a strange and exhilarating feeling. No team from there had won a championship since the Western League season of 1887, when a walk took five balls, home plate was made of marble, and as Frank Navin wistfully recalled, “Less than $5,000 covered the entire salary list of the players.”
More than 24,000 tickets were sold for Saturday’s game, to be played in a stadium that sat fewer than 14,000, but it rained hard and the washout was rescheduled as part of a Monday doubleheader (Sunday baseball was illegal in Pennsylvania until 1933). The demand for seats now reached dangerous levels. When the A’s locked the gates at 1:30 on the 30th, a half hour before game time, 25,000 or so were inside and from his perch in the press area Jackson could see a cataract of cranks pouring over the center field wall. He later learned that “there were thousands of fans outside, and they stormed the gates breaking the one to the grandstand and smashing the bleacher turnstiles.” The New York Times, which was covering the game because of its national implications, estimated the true attendance at 40,000, and noted that “roofs of surrounding houses were crowded, the thrifty householders charging from 25 cents to a dollar for standing room.” Inside the park, a sea of standees encircled and shrank the field. “All of the outfielders were crowded together towards the diamond,” Jackson reported, “while the catcher and first and third basemen had no chance whatever to go after foul flies.”
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