Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Donovan started for the Tigers, despite having pitched a complete game just two days before, and for a while he looked predictably weary. It was 7–1 in favor of Philadelphia going into the sixth inning, and some people back in Detroit, following the game via electric tickers in various downtown locales, were in need of a good bucking up. Fortunately, there were plenty of street urchins among the Tigers faithful and bucking up is what street urchins do. The next day’s Free Press recounted a bit of dialogue supposedly overheard in a store on State Street, where bulletins were flashed from Columbia Field: “ ‘It looks bad for the Tigers, doesn’t it son?’ asked a man whose fortune is reckoned in six figures” of a Detroit newsboy. “ ‘Bad nothing!’ replied the kid. ‘Them Tiges is never beat ’till de last guy is out in the nint’. Cobb and Sam Crawford and Shafe will git to dat Rube in a minit and we’ll make mornamilllion runs!’ ”

  Rube was of course Rube Waddell, who had replaced starter Jimmy Dygert in the second inning after the famously skinny spitballer (five-foot-ten and 115 pounds, by some accounts) had allowed just one run. Relief pitchers were still a rarity in those days, and being pulled for one was generally taken as a reprimand from the boss, and a kind of public humiliation, but Connie Mack would have used every last twirler on his staff if necessary given the importance of the game. Mack in this way was more coolly professional than Hughie, who worried about his players’ feelings, perhaps to a fault. Hughie kept Donovan, a Philly native, in for the whole game, simply because, as Mack noted ruefully, “Bill’s father, brothers, and a whole host of Philadelphia relatives and friends used to come out whenever Donovan pitched against us. Jennings never would have humiliated him in his own home town.”

  Leaving him out there wasn’t such a bad idea, though—not this time, anyway. Donovan got tired, then stronger again. All he needed was a few runs to work with. The Tigers scratched out four in the seventh, through a combination of poor Philadelphia fielding and fluky hits. The A’s scored once again in their half of the seventh, and the Tigers added a run in the top of eighth, so Detroit, down to their last three outs, was still behind 8–6. The tension was palpable, at least in the crowds gathered around the tickers back in Detroit, where, one paper said, nervous men kept throwing down their cigars and lighting up new ones. “One big enthusiast chewed off one side of his drooping moustache while others made a quick lunch of their finger nails.” Crawford led off the ninth inning and stroked a single on the first pitch. Cobb was up next.

  Waddell said afterward he hadn’t been worried about Cobb tying the game with one swing because the “the kid” hopped around too much in the batter’s box to plant his spikes squarely and get any leverage on the ball. In fact, Cobb, despite his high batting average, had hit only three homers that year, a modest number even then.

  His fourth came two pitches later. Waddell had thrown him an inside fastball for a called strike, and then thrown him the exact same pitch again, thinking it would be the last thing Cobb expected. It wasn’t. Cobb said he figured Waddell would try to be sneaky in precisely that way, and so he, Cobb, was sitting on the pitch. It was a home run all the way. A ball thrown in the ninth inning in those days might be lopsided and squishy from almost a full game’s use, and thus especially hard to knock very far, but with all the doubles and fouls hit into the overflow crowd that day, the pill Waddell dispensed to Cobb was relatively fresh and bouncy, and it sailed far over the fence in right field, tying the game. Connie Mack was so stunned, said his biographer, Norman L. Macht, that “he slid off the bench and tumbled into the bats lined up on the ground in front of him.” He arose with great dignity, however—and immediately replaced Waddell with “Gettysburg Eddie” Plank. The Athletics failed to score in their half of the ninth, so the game went into extra innings.

  In the 11th, Cobb doubled and Rossman singled him home, but Philadelphia retied the game when Davy Jones, trying to make a fancy one-handed catch, turned a can of corn into a double. His teammates were steamed. “When we all came to the bench we threatened to do him bodily harm if we lost,” Cobb said some years later. “Jennings endeavored to smooth over the situation, but none of us was speaking to one another throughout the rest of the game.” In the 14th, the Tigers came still closer to disaster. Attempting to get under a towering fly hit by first baseman Harry Davis, Sam Crawford pushed into the roped-off mob in center. As he made the catch, a Philadelphia policeman purposely jostled his arm and knocked the ball loose. Jennings jumped from the bench and screamed “Interference!” but Silk O’Loughlin, who was (of course) the home plate umpire that day, said he hadn’t seen what happened and asked his (sole) colleague, Tom Connolly, who had been positioned behind second base, to make the call. Connolly ruled in favor of the Tigers and declared Davis out, a brave decision given the combustible nature of the crowd. A stampede might then have ensued, but as spectators booed and hollered and seemed ready to rush the field, Rossman and Athletics coach Monte Cross squared off near second base, and fought furiously until police arrested the Detroit player and hauled him away. This was a lucky break. Later it would be said that by engaging in a kind of single combat, Rossman and Cross provided a distraction that forestalled a full-scale riot. In any case, within fifteen or so minutes, the grandstand noise had reduced itself to an intimidating simmer and the contest continued.

  Strangely, “the greatest game in baseball history” had no grand finale, no resolution whatsoever. In the 17th inning, with the ball almost impossible to see at more than a few feet’s distance and the score tied 9–9, the game was called on account of darkness, and the second half of the doubleheader postponed indefinitely. No voices were raised in protest, perhaps because no one had the energy. “When the contest ended,” said the Times, “players and spectators alike were simply exhausted by the terrific nervous strain.”

  The schedule, however, contained a few more games. Philadelphia faltered through its final week while the Tigers went to Washington and won four straight, with Cobb getting 13 hits in 18 plate appearances (a .722 average) and stealing four bases in the first game. It was another one of those hell-bent performances of his that hurt the opposition’s feelings. One play in the last game of the series was particularly telling. Cobb singled, then stole second, seeming to hurt his knee as he slid in. He limped around for a while—then stole third, “jarring himself sliding around Bill Shipke and hooking his foot into the sack,” wrote Jackson. To everyone’s surprise, though, he broke for home on the next pitch, a grounder to third—and got caught in a rundown. “He danced up and down the line with the entire infield after him. Finally Jim Delahanty overtook him, chased him toward the plate and stabbed him in the back with the ball. The force of the blow, following his exertions, knocked Cobb down and took all the wind out of him. Delahanty dropped the ball and it rolled away. But though Cobb was only a yard or two from the plate, he could not get up and step on the rubber, or even crawl to it. He lay there until he was tagged out, after which he was helped to his feet and back to the bench. He fielded one more inning and batted in the eighth, getting another single, after which he was forced to quit.”

  Three days later in St. Louis, in his last at-bat in the last game of the regular season, Cobb hit his fifth home run of the year. But by then the Tigers had already won their first pennant.

  — CHAPTER FIFTEEN —

  MAYBE HE DIDN’T PACE HIMSELF. Maybe his inability to go those last two feet to home plate in the final game of the regular season showed that he was completely out of gas. Maybe the Tigers as a team couldn’t deal with the extra hoopla, or had an inferiority complex when it came to the National League. Maybe they were the last team in history to feel intimidated by the Chicago Cubs. But for whatever reason the 1907 World Series went about as badly for Detroit as things would go for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid down in Bolivia a few weeks later.

  In the first game, the clubs played 12 quiet innings before the game was called on account of darkness with the score tied 3–3. The Tigers then lost the next t
wo games, both played at Chicago’s West Side Grounds, managing only one run in each. Detroiters, happy to be in their first Fall Classic, and accustomed to the underdog role, retained their buoyancy; the Free Press said they were, despite being behind 0–2, still “woozy” with glee. When the Series moved to Michigan for game four, “street fakirs” selling Tiger pins, buttons, canes, pennants, and “Hughie Jennings whistles” could be found on many corners in downtown Detroit. Dawn found kids lined up to buy tickets (and newspapermen there to observe them, the idea of people constructing their entire day around a sporting event still seeming novel). Sidewalks outside places that had a running news ticker became impassable.

  But the yearning of the bugs was, as usual, not enough. The Cubs played as if they were still angry about losing to the Hitless Wonder White Sox the year before in what remains one of the greatest World Series upsets. The Cubs won the next two games, and the world championship, allowing the Tigers only a single run in 18 innings. They deserved the crown. Although their leading batter, first baseman/manager Frank Chance, was a notch or three behind Cobb when it came to average (he hit .294 that year), they were consistent and clutch, and their defense, led by the double play combo of Johnny Evers at second and Joe Tinker at short, was the stuff of poetry. (“Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” written in 1910 by New York Evening Mail columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, begins, “These are the saddest of possible words, ‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’ Trio of bear cubs and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance.”) More important, they had a remarkable five-man pitching rotation, featuring the six-foot-two Orval Overall, who had 23 wins that season, and Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, whose farm-machine-mangled right hand proved a fine tool for fashioning curveballs. (Staff earned run average: 1.73.) “Them ain’t no Cubs, them’s bars [bears]!” advised a hideous cartoon Negro in the Free Press.

  Cobb was flummoxed, and ultimately stymied by the Chicago pitching staff. He hit only .200 for the Series, and since he was seldom on, could work little base path magic. He managed a triple in game four, but as the Sporting Life said, he “too often fanned at fatal moments.” In game five it was the Cubs who pulled off a flashy double steal and Cobb who got thrown out trying to “purloin” third. Jack Ryder of the Cincinnati Enquirer called him “the official lemon of the World Series.” (“I was hurt by that remark,” Cobb told a Detroit writer.) Goat horns could just as easily have adorned catcher Charlie Schmidt, who, playing with broken bones in his hand, consistently made what Sporting Life called “weird throws” that allowed the Cubs to run wild—but really no one on the Tigers was entirely blameless.

  Fortunately, Detroit had forgiving fans. Like movie actors honored just to have been nominated, they looked at the bright side and celebrated the Tiges and “Our Ty,” as he was becoming known, for bringing back a pennant. At a gala season-ending dinner for the team held at the Cadillac Hotel on October 16, 200 admirers, “nearly all men prominent in professional life or strong in the business affairs of the city,” gave Jennings a five-minute ovation. Edward J. Eaton of the Michigan Military Academy read a (rather leaden) parody of the Ernest L. Thayer poem called “Ty Cobb at the Bat.” The team presented Navin and owner Yawkey with “diamond cuff buttons.” Deep into the evening, some Tigers gave brief, funny talks and the entire assemblage joined in a rendition of “Michigan, My Michigan.” Everybody went home happy from a season that had started—a lifetime ago, it seemed—with the Bungy Cummings mess.

  Better than the love, perhaps, was the extra money that even limited success brought. With Yawkey magnanimously adding his owner’s share of $15,000 to the pool, each player on the Tigers realized $1,946, an amount that came close to doubling Cobb’s $2,400 annual salary. This was his first experience with feeling flush and he liked it. He immediately signed up for several barnstorming games and an assignment to referee a “catch-as-catch-can, best-two-out-of-three falls, strangle-hold barred” wrestling match at Augusta’s Grand Opera House. He also accepted an offer to serve as honorary editor for a “Special Ty Cobb Edition” of the Atlanta Journal. (Not paying much heed to the “honorary” part, he showed up for the one-day assignment with an armful of ideas, said Joe S. Jackson, including “a big layout for a ‘collection of stars’ ” that featured Matty McIntyre and Charlie Schmidt, but not himself.) In his serialized memoir of 1914, Busting ’Em, Cobb would write that 1908 was a turning point for all players, not just for him—a fork in the road where they needed to decide whether they preferred to keep treating the “modern” game as a temporary “frolic” the way “bad actors” like Rube Waddell and Bugs Raymond had done, or a profession “like doctoring or lawyering” that would provide one with the wherewithal to think long term, about a wife, a house, and a family. “Baseball is a healthy business,” he wrote. There was money in it for taking, though prying it from the iron fists of the deadball magnates was always going to be tough.

  • • •

  Up until that time Cobb had been relatively easy to negotiate with, so Frank Navin had not used much muscle when composing the letter that accompanied the one-year $3,000 contract he sent Cobb on January 9, 1908. “Friend Ty,” he started out, “I know you would expect and are entitled to considerably more than you received last year, and for that reason made the increase [$600] as large as possible.” Then he dropped in the boilerplate “times are tough all over” passage that all players got in the letter that accompanied their contracts (“Prospects in this country are not very bright for next year. There are thousands of men out of employment in this city”) before returning to the curious way that he usually addressed Cobb in salary letters, i.e., with a careful mixture of flattery and deflation.

  Of course you know the stringency of the money market as well as I. . . . I would like to give you everything you deserve, as you are entitled to every consideration, still I know that you are level headed enough to know that maybe next year everything will not break so well for us, and for you, and you know everyone loves the winner. Do not pay too much attention to what people say to you about yourself and the club, because you know that with a little bad luck we would not have won the pennant. I only wish we could get another crack at the Cubs, to see if our boys could even up our very bad defeat of last year.

  But things had changed from the days when Cobb was grateful just to have made the club, and he promptly sent back the contract, unsigned. If he included a letter, it has been lost, but he told reporters he wanted a three-year deal totaling $15,000. Further, he wanted his salary guaranteed, so if he got injured he would still be paid. If this sounded greedy (and to some people it did), Cobb said that the public must consider that

  the best part of my life is being spent in playing the game, and it is impossible to study and learn any other profession without giving up professional baseball entirely. In summer I find that I cannot read without injury to my eyes and corresponding injury to my batting average. Last spring I started on the road with novels and other literature but had to give them up. I even cannot read much in the newspapers without feeling its effect on my sight. So you can readily see that I am justified in asking for $5,000 [a year]. The best years of my life are being devoted to the game, and if I don’t make my maximum salary right now, I never will get above the sum offered me.

  Cobb was no doubt the first and last baseball player to argue that he should be compensated for having to forgo Henry James and Wilkie Collins.

  Cobb as yet had no formal ties to the nascent labor movement involving the players (in 1912 he would serve as a vice president of a new organization called the Baseball Players’ Fraternity), but he obviously had considered the need for major leaguers to improve their bargaining position in light of the baseball boom. He told Sporting Life that he believed all contracts should be guaranteed, and the reserve clause limited to five years, after which a man could become a free agent, selling his services to the highest bidder. Right now, he observed, “the league has a man just where it wants him.” This was radical thinking, generally re
sisted by the sporting press, which reflexively supported the status quo, though some papers in the South were sympathetic to Cobb’s stance, if not the larger notion of unionization. Cobb felt he was arguing from a position of strength, since attendance at Bennett had jumped to nearly 300,000 from 175,000 the year before, and he was surely responsible in large part for the increase. Walter Taylor of the Atlanta Journal figured that “about one fifth the attendance in the American League could be credited to Ty Cobb’s popularity,” so he was actually worth much more than he was asking for, and the Augusta Chronicle noted that “Cobb takes more desperate chances on the base paths than any man in the world today,” and thus deserved to have his medical expenses guaranteed.

  Within organized baseball, Cobb’s demands were viewed as unrealistic, a pointless disturbance of the rites of spring. Hughie Jennings called Cobb’s request for a multiyear deal (never mind the other demands) “absurd on its face.” The Free Press said that Cobb’s holdout was driving Detroit sportswriters “to a liquid if not a watery grave.” Navin, who in fact had already given Davy Jones a three-year contract on the condition that he keep the terms secret, wanted to keep his favorite player happy, but because he thought Cobb was sure to crow about a multiyear deal, he feared setting a precedent. To give Cobb what he wanted would “lead to a hold up on the part of every other player,” he said in a letter to Jennings. Still, in March he invited Cobb to come up from Royston for a discussion to see what they might be able to work out. “If the Detroit club wants me as much as I want to play for the Tigers we ought to be able to get together quickly,” Cobb told the Free Press, and Navin added that he expected no difficulty “now that Ty has agreed to talk to me directly.”