The meeting in Navin’s office, which lasted three hours, did not go as smoothly as anticipated and when Cobb left, calm but unsmiling, “nearly everyone had abandoned hope.” If negotiations failed to resume, Cobb did have some options. He could play in some kind of outlaw league, beyond the boundaries of organized baseball (like the new Union League, which was offering him $10,000 to join its Philadelphia franchise); he could coach (he had an offer from the University of Georgia, albeit for just $800 per season); he could take the Spalding Company up on an invitation to work for them as a glorified bat salesman; or he could cobble together some combination of the above. The Chicago Tribune dismissed these as “not even original bluffs” and Cobb himself said that the options did not appeal to him. Realizing that someone had to break the stalemate, former Detroit mayor George P. Codd volunteered his services, and after a few conversations with him Cobb said he’d accept a one-year contract for $4,000, with $800 to be added if he batted .300, and a deal was struck. “WE-E-AH! COBB SIGNS CONTRACT!” said the headline in the Free Press.
Although Cobb had hardly won a clear-cut victory over Navin, he would ultimately realize more than 50 percent more than he was originally offered, and more important established himself as a new kind of “serious” player who considered baseball a profession and was open to pursuing business opportunities as they arose. In financial terms, 1908 was a breakthrough year for Cobb, and a prelude to negotiations two years hence, which would result in a three-year contract at $9,000 per season, a deal that made him, along with Christy Mathewson, Nap Lajoie, and John McGraw, one of the highest-paid men in baseball. He was starting to become involved in myriad sideline schemes. He would soon own a Hupmobile dealership in Augusta (“I can easily see why people fall for the gas carts,” he said in an ad. “No happy home is complete without one!”), he became perhaps the first athlete ever to trademark and license his signature (initially to a company that made athletic shoes, including spikes), he purchased stock in the Augusta Chronicle, and endorsed Post Toasties (“Old Michigan’s wonderful batter/Eats TOASTIES ’tis said once a day. For he knows they are healthful and wholesome/and furnish him strength for the fray”). At twenty-two, Cobb was the key figure in what was quickly becoming a cultural and commercial juggernaut.
Of course, all the success hinged on how well he hit a baseball, and ran the bases; there were no guarantees. To the outside world, his greatness seemed to follow naturally and serenely from the fact that he was Ty Cobb, the greatest. Charles Comiskey called him that and so did Cy Young and Ring Lardner. Dear old Georgia exhibited him—and Nap Rucker—at the state fair that year, like blue-ribbon bulls. The city of Chicago presented him with a trophy for being its Most Popular Visiting Player. When Cobb came to town, Chicago’s best and smartest sportswriter, Ring Lardner, would buy cheap seats in right field in South Side Park, within shouting distance of Cobb, so he could banter with his favorite player for nine innings. Cobb never disappointed him, with his quips or with his play. On opening day of 1908 in the White Sox park, he hit a single, double, and home run, made two breathtaking catches (one a fence climber, the other a full-body slider)—and when a disgusted crank threw a lemon at him, “he accepted it with a bow of thanks,” baseball historian Marc Okkonen tells us, “and proceeded to suck it dry with pleasure.”
Cobb was playing with panache now. Trying to explain why such a fierce opponent could have followers in rival cities, Heywood Broun of the New York Morning Telegraph said it was “because he gave them more for their hard-earned ticket than any man alive or dead.” In Detroit he was as big a celebrity as Henry Ford, and much more exciting. At home against St. Louis in late April, he stretched a single into a double with a pretty fadeaway slide—then when second baseman Jimmy Williams bounced the ball hard in frustration for missing the tag, he scampered on to third, where he again slid in safely, and drew a standing ovation. By mid-May he was hitting .365.
Owing to some alchemy that defies explanation, the confidence Cobb exuded was achieved by means of constant worry. (This may be why he wanted the wind in his face.) It was as if he doubted himself to the point where his only option was to have faith in himself—the tortured “wearing, tearing,” insomnia-inducing thought process he looked back on and shook his head sadly at in retirement. He still kept notes—some on paper, some in his head—on every pitcher and catcher in the league, delineating their tendencies, weaknesses, and talents. He was sensitive to statistics and felt he had to work hard to keep his numbers high. He slept fitfully during the season and by his own admission could be bad company. Abusive fans found it increasingly easier to get under his skin. And if he slumped a bit forget it; he would explode at the clubhouse man for hanging his towel on a different peg than it had been on in the last game in which he got three hits.
“He fought for every point and fought his fellows if they did not battle as hard for victory as he had,” recalled sportswriter Hugh Fullerton. “I sat behind Cobb on the clubhouse porch once with Germany Schaefer, watching him instead of the game. He moved before each pitch, and leaped in one or another direction each time a ball was thrown, never still for an instant and always tensely observant of every move made on the field.” Cobb received his first major league ejection (from Silk O’Loughlin) on May 2 at Bennett, after trying unsuccessfully to stretch a triple into a home run; he simply couldn’t stop arguing. More eruptions would follow. On long train trips, he would sit by himself looking out the window, morosely cataloging things he could have done better in the last game, and plotting surprises for the next. “I would think, ‘I haven’t tried to score from second base on a bunt in a while—maybe they think I’ve given up trying’—and I would try that the next day.”
Is it any wonder that a sleep-deprived perfectionist, prone to such zone-outs and an abject failure at fool-suffering, would get into so many fistfights? No; what’s surprising is the vehemence with which he insisted he was no brawler. The late W. H. Cobb had told him in the letter he wrote when Ty was fifteen to “Conquer your anger and wild passions that would degrade your dignity and belittle your manhood,” and Cobb liked to think he had fulfilled his father’s wishes. He bridled when described as chesty, pugnacious, a temperamental Southerner who drew his sword too quickly. He insisted that the amount of fighting that he and other ballplayers engaged in was wildly exaggerated by the press and fans—“Loads of people I’ve never met think of me almost as a barroom gladiator,” he said. “I wouldn’t intentionally hurt another player for twice my salary”—even as his list of scuffles lengthened.
While it is true that he seldom if ever threw the first punch in a brawl—“I don’t believe Cobb ever picked a fight just for the sake of a row,” said Walter Johnson, “but start something unfair and you’ll get a fight whether you’re a ballplayer or a taxi driver”—he did have an exquisitely short fuse. Today he is often tsk-tsked for the quality, yet many in his day found his explosiveness entertaining. To a degree it humanized a virtuoso who played baseball spookily well, and because he provided such a dizzying array of examples to choose from—fights with complete strangers, fights with teammates, fights with rival players, fights with hotel employees, shopkeepers, and rowdy cranks and such—it also made him, as the expression goes, larger than life. He was like a protagonist in a penny dreadful or a silent movie: Ty Cobb took even less guff than the most take-no-guff guy on your Christmas list. True, some, when they read about his latest misadventure, gleefully hoped he had come out on the short end, but others liked that he had not lost touch with his inner wild-child, the way they, as they had gotten older, somehow had, sigh. He was a crash test dummy for the average Joe, an object lesson in what would happen if you didn’t always wait for the other guy to say the proverbial “just one more thing.”
But I’m making fighting sound like something it’s not. In the event, most spontaneous fights are ugly and stupid. Consider Cobb’s assault on a man named Fred Collins, which shows how his next battle was sometimes only a faux pas away. Or maybe not ev
en that far, since Collins almost certainly did nothing wrong. The incident occurred on June 6 of the year under discussion, 1908, as Cobb and roommate Claude Rossman exited the Pontchartrain Hotel to board a bus that would take the Tigers on the short ride to Bennett Park for a game against Boston. Collins, a twenty-nine-year-old, Canadian-born black man who worked for the Detroit United Railway, the transport company that provided the city’s trolley service, was pouring asphalt on Woodward Avenue, in front of the year-old “Pontch,” when he held up his hand to head off approaching foot and auto traffic “which would have cut into the newly laid asphalt,” said the Free Press. “You can’t cross here,” he told Cobb and others. Collins was a solid citizen, long on the job. Five years before, while pouring asphalt for a different Detroit company, he’d spotted a runaway horse dragging a carriage; he chased it down and saved the white woman huddled on the vehicle’s floor. He hadn’t received so much as a “thank-you” from the lady’s husband for his trouble, he had told the newspaper at the time, and his experience with Cobb would be even less pleasant. Cobb hadn’t liked his order to stop, Collins said, even though “I didn’t tell him anything more than I tell hundreds of people every day, and in fact I wasn’t talking to him.” The two exchanged “hot words,” and in a moment they were throwing punches. Describing it, the Free Press writer fell into Pierce Egan mode: “Cobb rushed the negro and both exchanged lefts and rights to the head and face in rapid fire order. Cobb’s blows had great force and truer aim and simply rained on the negro’s face. The negro landed half a dozen times fully on Cobb’s face, but his blows lacked steam, as the ballplayer had him working on the retreat.” And so on. Soon five other black men on the work crew “advanced towards the fighters with upraised irons, weighing 75 pounds each, and a sixth negro flourished a rake.” White men intervened and pushed the black men away. “An instant later the fighters grappled [again] and both rolled into the dust against the curb, Cobb on top.”
It was Rossman who “rushed through the crowd” and finally got between the combatants and stopped the fighting. The lines he is given by the Free Press sound like something Jimmy Stewart would utter on screen a couple of generations later. “What do you mean by getting into mixups like this?” he supposedly demanded of Cobb. “Do you want to break up the ball club and get killed?” As the first baseman posed these well-crafted queries, Collins went looking for a policeman to arrest Cobb for “striking him while he was wearing eyeglasses,” then considered an especially heinous offense.
The Collins episode is one of the cornerstones of the often advanced argument that Cobb was a full-throttle racist (though the word didn’t exist then; the closest thing was “racialist,” which suggested someone with formal theories about white supremacy based on genetics or some other branch of pseudoscience). It is easy to see why. Unlike the Bungy Cummings dustup (which devolved into a he said/he said debate), Cobb versus Collins was a clear-cut confrontation between a black and a white man, taking place in broad daylight outside a downtown hotel before some 200 witnesses. That Cobb overreacted seems beyond question. “If he wants to settle the negro problem, let him settle it,” said the Chicago Tribune, somewhat perplexingly. “But this is neither the time nor the place.” The Free Press, which chanced to have a reporter at the scene, definitely saw race as the flint in Cobb’s flare-up. “What the ___ have you got to say about it, nigger,” the newspaper says he asked Collins when he was being advised to not cross the street. Cobb was angered, the anonymous reporter speculated, because “the negro evidently did not treat him with the deference the colored brother extends to the white man down in dear old Georgia.”
Once again Cobb’s alleged racism can be attributed to a presumption about his attitudes based on the date and location of his birth. Royston, Georgia? 1886? The problem with newspaper reports about bigoted behavior in early-twentieth-century America is that the papers were often as racist as anyone else, if not more so. Northern dailies loved the idea of Southerners acting like stereotypical Southerners, and Detroit newspapers enjoyed Ty (as they defined him) being Ty. Shame, shame, and all that. But a wink came with every finger wag. In fact the Free Press, history’s main source about the Collins incident, was, like many other newspapers in matters regarding race, utterly without standards or scruples. In its gleeful account of the Collins incident (headline: “Ty Cobb Increases His Batting Average by Battering Up a Negro Wearing Spectacles”) Collins is called “the negro” or the “shiny Ethiopian” more often than he is called by his own name. (Cobb, meanwhile, is either referred to by name or called “the ballplayer” throughout.) Much more disturbing is the cartoon illustration that ran with the story, showing a chimplike being in overalls trading punches with a man in a checked suit, as other chimp-things scurry to the scene. At the lower right of the panel, a policeman holds one dark-skinned and one battle-stained white individual and asks, “Which one of youse is Ty Cobb?” Clearly, the Free Press thought its readers would enjoy an account of Cobb going off (again) like an overwound alarm clock and slugging a Negro. And since no one will ever know how much Collins’s skin color mattered to Cobb at the moment he erupted—he had the same reaction in similar situations with several white men, as we shall see—the paper chose to impute an attitude to Cobb that matched its editorial wishes or perhaps its cartoonist’s whims.
To its credit, the local court was less amused with Cobb’s actions than the Free Press was. The ballplayer received a summons and had to appear (with his face still swollen) before a Justice Jeffries the next day. “If you are guilty, you’ll have to pay a fine,” said the judge. “Your batting average won’t save you. We pay when we go to see you and you ought to pay when you come here.” Then “the court consulted its pocket [Tigers] schedule, found that the team would be home next Monday, and set the hearing for that date.” Ultimately, on the advice of his attorney, Cobb settled privately with Collins for $75. “When a man is insulted it is worth $75 to get satisfaction,” Cobb said when asked later. “I settled not because I thought I was the offending party, but because I did not want to be inconvenienced later on. I would have done the same thing to any man. [Italics mine.] I would act again in a similar manner under the same conditions.”
One reason we can’t make assumptions about Cobb’s attitude about race based simply on the year and location of his birth is that his immediate family is, as we’ve seen, rife with exceptions to the rule about Southern attitudes. Cobb himself left very little evidence of his feelings on the issue prior to the advent of Jackie Robinson—but he did leave some.
On a road trip to Chicago that happened a couple of weeks after Cobb settled the Collins case, Germany Schaefer came upon a sixteen-year-old black boy hanging around South Side Park, and invited him to come along with the Tigers and be their mascot. “The Tigers have a pickaninny batboy with hair full of corkscrew kinks,” noted the Detroit News a few days later. It was not unusual in those days for major league clubs to go about with one or more urchins in tow as a combination talisman/gofer, and more often than not those children were black. They got their expenses paid, and maybe a few pennies more, but job security was negligible; if a team went on a bad streak the mascot might get the blame, and a kid who got picked up in Chicago might get cut loose in Boston or St. Louis. Like the other youngsters adrift in organized baseball back then, the teenager Schaefer found got paid no regular salary and took his chances in return for food and shelter. It is frequently said in the Cobb literature that his name was “lost to history,” but his name was Ulysses Simon Harrison, one of at least ten children born to Robert and Maudie Harrison of Paragould, Arkansas. No one called him that, though, not after Schaefer, or one of the scribes, rechristened him Rastus, after the happy black chef on the Cream of Wheat box.
Even for a boy who’d probably seen a lot already, it was a bizarre interlude. Bill Donovan touched him with his pitching hand before each start for good luck. Third baseman Bill Coughlin, the team captain, constantly rubbed his head. Schaefer rubbed his bat in the bo
y’s hair before each plate appearance. Cobb, though one of the most superstitious men on the team, did not treat Ulysses as a talisman. Instead, “he was the Ethiopian’s main defender and patron,” H. G. Salsinger wrote. He made sure Harrison was fed and had a place to sleep, even if it was a corner of the Bennett Park clubhouse. Road trips brought them closer still. On segregated trains, Cobb stowed Harrison beneath his berth, sometimes obscuring him with luggage, and he even let the kid share his hotel room, secretly, so as not to rile the other white guests. “Rastus” seemed to have come and gone from the Tigers at various times for no discernible reason, but after both the 1908 and 1909 seasons Cobb took the boy back to Georgia with him and employed him as a domestic and later as a helper in his Hupmobile showroom in downtown Augusta. (Harrison also spent time at the Indianapolis home of shortstop Donie Bush in early 1910.) By 1916 the erstwhile mascot, by then twenty-four and married, was working steadily as a chauffeur for Detroit construction magnate F. H. Hubbard, a job Cobb may well have helped him procure.
• • •
Cobb got people agitated and stirred controversies almost everywhere he went but it’s interesting how in certain seasons those episodes would group themselves in a particular city. One year it might be Philadelphia where he had a lot of problems with rivals or fans or the authorities, another year New York or Cleveland. In 1908 Boston was his bête noire. His troubles there started in mid-July, when he got into a dispute with Amos H. Whipple, the manager of the Copley Square Hotel, the “High Class Modern House, Suitable for Ladies Traveling Alone,” over room service charges. Cobb refused to pay extra for meals brought up to him from the kitchen; according to the Chicago Tribune, this was “not something expected by Southern gentlemen when they were home.” Besides those checks, Whipple said he was also owed for a cuspidor—this was a very Edwardian-era argument—“which Cobb broke showing his friend how he made four hits in one game.” In consequence of the debt, Whipple was refusing to return the “shining badge” that Cobb had received for winning the previous year’s batting title, and which he upon checking in had consigned to the Copley’s safe. The dispute dragged on for two months before a settlement was reached. It was, in one sense, just another in a series of scuffles (and worse) that Cobb had with people in the hospitality business, but it also shows how boyishly proud he was of his baseball accomplishments—proud enough to take his prize along on road trips, to show to people along the way. (The truly dazzling diamond-studded medal is now on display at the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston.)
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