Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Cobb in 1908 had a good year by anyone’s standards but his own, and he sounded apologetic as he gave his last interviews for the season to the baseball press. He promised he would keep himself in shape by hunting and hiking in the off-season and report to spring training—it would be in San Antonio, Texas—early “as I want to make a batting and base-running record next year that I always will be able to point to with pride.” He couldn’t wait to blot out the memory of that league-leading but disappointing .324. Feeling chastened, he declined to ask for a raise for 1909, and signed his one-year contract for $4,000 as soon as it arrived in the mail.

  — CHAPTER SEVENTEEN —

  TYRUS RAYMOND COBB WAS THE greatest hitter of them all, his .366 lifetime average over twenty-three and a half seasons still the highest ever recorded. This achievement is not traceable simply to superior hand-eye coordination; what it shows most vividly is that Cobb understood how to hit in his particular baseball moment, just as Adrian Constantine Anson and George Herman Ruth, the offensive stars who bracketed him historically, understood (or intuited) how best to approach the discouraging art in theirs. Pop (b. 1852) and the Babe (1895) both generally tried to teach the ball a lesson. Anson, a huge man, drove stinging line drives and had 21 home runs in 1884 for the National League Chicago White Stockings (who played in a bandbox, but still). Then came Wee Willie Keeler in the John the Baptist or if you prefer Christopher Marlowe role, presaging Cobb, who though built to be a slugger—built rather like Ted Williams, whom he in some ways resembled temperamentally as well—understood that muscle wasn’t the point. “I never take a good healthy swing at the ball any more,” Cobb told the New York Times in May of 1910. “I like to do that, but you can’t get anything in the big leagues swinging the willow. The spitball pitchers would make a dunce of you in short order, to say nothing of the boxmen who have mastered a good change of pace.” (The Times obviously got an insider’s price on quote polish, and lavished it on.) The men of Anson’s age “swung onto the ball with the force of a trip-hammer,” Cobb continued, but “the great hitters of our time grab their batting sticks a foot or more from the handle and, instead of swinging, aim to meet the ball flush. It’s just like the short-arm punch in the prize ring. The long swingers with their terrible haymakers seldom get the money nowadays. I stick to the sure system of just meeting the ball with a half-way grip.”

  Italics mine. Willingness to accept the things about the deadball era that he could not change—the deadness of the ball, for example—his.

  And yet hitting wasn’t quite half of his game. It was his base running that put him not just on top of the heap but up there in the penthouse somewhere (pretty much by himself, for better and worse) and made him—though he didn’t have much of a sense of humor himself when it came to baseball—the locus of joy. “I’ll tell you why fans go out and see Cobb above any man in the game,” Grantland Rice’s dentist said to him, according to a piece the writer published in McClure’s Magazine in 1915. “I went out to see him play the Yankees. He was in a batting slump, didn’t get a hit, but broke up the game. How?”

  Rice, in the chair, responded with “a weird gurgling, thrumming sound.”

  “I’ll tell you,” the dentist continued. “With the score tied and one out in the eighth he got a base on balls. He trotted slowly and carelessly two thirds of the way to first and then, thirty feet away, he suddenly started at top speed, rounded the bag, and whirled on to second. The pitcher, rattled by such a wild move, threw badly to second; and, before the ball was back, Ty was dusting the dirt from his uniform at third, waiting to score ten seconds later on a short outfield fly. Great stuff?”

  The patient “gagged again, and blinked.”

  “It beat all the home runs in the book! It was just a Cobb play—the kind of play that only Ty Cobb would try and get away with!”

  Rice’s dentist may have been apocryphal but the emotion he displayed when discussing Cobb was typical early-twentieth-century fan stuff. Although the modern era of two leagues had started only in 1901, the game had been around long enough for people to realize how intensely boring it could often be, despite its beauty, like a young Brigitte Bardot telling you about the dream she had the other night, and the Georgia Peach was the tangy antidote to that. He was always up to something, or someone else was in a dither because of what he’d just done. True stories about Cobb sounded like one-reel silent movie plots. Consider a game in Cleveland in which Cobb’s perfectly timed base running turned a tap-back to the box into an inside-the-park home run. Davy Jones had been on third, and when Cobb made contact Jones unwisely got caught in a rundown while Cobb flew around the bases at top speed. The second Jones was tagged out by catcher Steve O’Neill, “a foot from third,” said ex-umpire (and ex-Tiger) Babe Pinelli, who dined out on the story for years, Cobb passed him, kept on going for home—and, without sliding, scored the game-winning run, first baseman Doc Johnston being “too awed by what he was witnessing,” said Pinelli, to cover home plate, as the textbook suggests.

  Rice’s dentist, however, was probably referring to a game on June 4, 1915, at Hilltop Park when Cobb singled off Slim Caldwell, then stole second, third, and home, “his lithe body swerving away from [catcher Les] Nunamaker’s reach,” said the Times, “and clouds of dirt kicked up by his spikes blinding the eyes of Nunamaker, Caldwell and [home plate umpire] Silk O’Loughlin” (natch). Pitcher Caldwell was so frustrated by the result that “he threw his glove high in the air” and was “put out of the game for being mad because Cobb had outwitted him.”

  “The winged-footed wonder,” they called him but of course his pure speed was hardly the reason opponents skied their gloves or (remember Jimmy Williams?) slammed the ball into the dirt after Cobb had wangled an extra base or two. His bag of tricks contained actual tricks. Cobb sometimes slid into second, howled in pain, asked for time, limped around, winced, howled some more—and then lit out for third on the very next pitch. More central to his maddening running style, though, were his powers of observation, which could be employed from a stationary position. Like other base stealers, then and now, he focused mostly on pitchers and how their habits differed immediately preceding a pickoff attempt, particularly in regard to hands and feet. Cy Young, in his dotage by the time Cobb faced him, had a reputation for holding runners close—the hulking six-foot-two righty would basically stare them back to whatever bag they might have managed to achieve—but Cobb noticed that he held the ball away from his chest and up close to his chin, as opposed to right on the breastbone, when he planned to attempt a pickoff at first. Once he made the discovery, Cobb said, he watched the great man do the same thing at least eight times before acting on it—but after that he could usually steal second on “good old Cy” without even sliding.

  Cobb wasn’t always so methodical; other observations had to be made, and exploited, in the moment. Fred Mitchell, an American League catcher and later manager of the Cubs, recalled that one day at Hilltop in 1910, Cobb was on third base with two out, and Mitchell whipped a peg down there, just to keep him close. After taking the throw, third baseman Frank LaPorte “sauntered” to the mound to discuss Cobb strategies with the Highlanders pitcher, “tossing the ball up in his glove about a foot or so, as players unthinkingly do” as he went. The reader can probably sense where this is going. Cobb, said Mitchell, stood “carelessly” on the sack, seeming to stare into the middle distance. One toss, another toss—“and then Cobb broke for the plate at top speed,” Mitchell recalled. “I’ve never seen anything sprung more suddenly. Instantly there was shouting and confusion. I yelled for the ball, and LaPorte, startled, failed to see Cobb and didn’t know where the play should be made. By the time the ball finally reached me Cobb had slid in.”

  Cobb stole home so often—a record 54 times in his career, 21 more times than the man in second place, old-time Pirates outfielder Max Carey—that some people thought he could pull off what is perhaps the most exciting play in baseball at will. This was an impression he happily reinforce
d on April 20, 1912, when he scored the first Tigers run ever at Navin Field, the iron-and-concrete park that replaced Bennett, by dashing in from third, hook-sliding around catcher Ted Easterly, and stealing home in the first inning of the first game ever played in the new stadium. (Five days later he hit the first home run ever struck at Navin.)

  Some of Cobb’s contemporaries said his sliding technique was a thing of beauty—and we’ll have to take their word for it, since there is almost no moving footage of him on the bases, just a relatively few semi-helpful stills. “Cobb has developed a slide into the bag which no modern player can equal,” said Hughie Jennings.

  It is more than a fall away slide, although it is generally called that. He throws himself away from the baseman and around him, catching the bag with his toe or his hand. This is a stunt for a contortionist. It has caused endless arguments in the stand when Cobb has seemed to be out at second or third while the umpire insisted on calling him safe. Most of the time, at least, he was safe. Other players would have been out, but not Cobb. He had eluded the baseman’s groping hand and wriggled back to the bag like an eel. It is certainly a masterpiece, that slippery, baffling slide of Ty’s.

  Burt Shotton, a longtime St. Louis Browns outfielder (and later manager of the Dodgers), saw Cobb’s slides from a different angle. “One time, I had the ball in my hand behind third, backing up a throw there,” he recalled. “I positively had Ty trapped half way to the plate. I said to myself, ‘Ty you old so-and-so, I got you this time.’ I threw home in plenty of time to get him. Then I saw Cobb slide. Nobody slides today the way he did. The ball went in one direction, the catcher’s glove in another and our catcher, Paul Krichell, in still another. Of course, Cobb was safe.”

  In a semi-famous photograph of that incident Cobb appears to be flying foot-first into Krichell’s crotch while the catcher squints like the just shot Lee Harvey Oswald. By Krichell’s own testimony, though, the image is deceiving. The only ball Cobb was aiming for was the one in his opponent’s hand, and he struck it with force and precision. “Cobb came tearing into me, and when you talk about explosions that was one,” Krichell recalled in the early 1950s, by which time he was better known as the Yankees scout who had discovered Lou Gehrig. “He must have been loaded with TNT!”

  “The ball hit the grandstand on the fly,” Krichell said. “I was mad and stunned. He was mad and shaken. I started cussing him and he had a few dirty words that he shouted at me. The next thing I knew we were fighting, but it was one of those baseball fights where more words than blows are exchanged. Billy Evans was the umpire and he had us both fined.”

  • • •

  Cobb had nine styles of slides in his repertoire: the hook, the fade away, the straight-ahead, the short (or “swoop”) slide (“which I invented because of my small ankles”), the headfirst (which he never completely abandoned), the Chicago slide (referred to by him but never explained), the first base slide, the home plate slide, even one called the cuttlefish slide, so named because he purposely sprayed dirt with his spikes the way that cunning squidlike creature squirts ink. Coming in, he would always watch the infielder’s eyes to see which side of the bag the ball was headed toward, and then try to slide the other way. A lot of his energy went into avoiding contact, which could of course facilitate a tag. Contact could not be avoided, though, in one of his biggest (but now largely forgotten) innovations, the slide into first, which he liked because as often as he employed it, it somehow managed to retain the element of surprise.

  To some infielders, Cobb was like a shape-shifter who didn’t approach but mysteriously appeared at the base they were charged with defending. Umpire Billy Evans said that Cobb was the only runner he ever saw who didn’t slow up even slightly while transitioning from a flat-out run to a slide. Cobb said that the key was to slide with a kind of glee, or at least the appearance of glee—“like you enjoyed the act of sliding.” This was, he admitted, particularly hard to do in the early part of the season, when each slide scraped a swatch of skin from his legs—skin that would grow back tougher, he believed, and make sliding in the home stretch of the season less painful. Yes, sliding pads existed in Cobb’s day but whenever a reporter recoiled at the sight of his bloodstained uniform pants, and asked the inevitable question, he would say, “I do wear pads sometimes, when the pain becomes too much, but I try to do without them because the blame things retard my speed.” Speed of course translated into force. “It was no fun putting the ball on Cobb when he came slashing into the plate,” said Wally Schang, who caught for almost every American League club. “But he never cut me up. He was too pretty a slider to hurt anyone who put the ball on him right.”

  All the pretty slides and steals—897 lifetime, a record that stood for almost fifty years before it was surpassed by Lou Brock, then Rickey Henderson—all the crazy dancing off the bags and even crazier shouts to catchers that he was going on the next pitch . . . “I’m going, I’m going, watch me, oh, yes, I’m going!” (and then in fact did)—all that spoke to his core mission of, as he said many times, “creating a mental hazard for my opponents.” He preferred, if possible, to defeat you without touching you, to puncture hopes, not hides, and in that way score runs (like the four he scored in Philadelphia on July 12, 1911, without getting a single hit). “I don’t know how many times I tagged Ty out at second base,” said Roger Peckinpaugh, a shortstop for several AL clubs, “yet he never so much as spiked me. On his slide to second, he’d usually throw his feet out toward center field, and try to grab the base with his hand. I’ll never forget the feeling, though—just knowing that guy was taking that big lead off first and would be coming at me any second.”

  This brings us to the subject of intimidation. To watch Cobb for just a few innings was to see that making opponents worry—about pain, embarrassment, or baseball setbacks: the possibility of a run scoring or a man advancing—was the most important part of his game. Intimidation doesn’t much sweeten the atmosphere on the diamond, it is true, but as a tactic it does have the advantage of working. Said Steve O’Neill, a longtime catcher for the Naps: “Our infielders didn’t want any part of those spikes and they gave Cobb too much of the base.” Exactly. “When a player steals a base he immediately unsettles the other side, the pitcher especially,” Cobb said. “He gives his club a psychological advantage.” Boston southpaw Ben Hunt agreed. “You have to watch the bases awful close on Cobb, and when a pitcher does that he is less effective. On an infield out Cobb makes his two bases right along. Even if you get a throw to the bag ahead of him, you aren’t sure of putting him out, for he dodges the basemen and slides around or under in a majority of cases.”

  While it is relatively easy to find examples of men who, in the heat of battle, cried out that they were spiked by Cobb and demanded his expulsion or suspension, rare to the point of nonexistence are the more reflective quotes from peers who describe him as sadistic or a “near psychopath,” as Bill Bryson called Cobb in his recent book One Summer: America 1927 without the slightest bit of supporting evidence. Bryson should have dipped into the archives, which, over and over, yield attempts by less-renowned opponents to draw a distinction between tactics and terrorism. “Cobb was the roughest, toughest player I ever saw, a terror on the base paths,” said Shotton. “He was not dirty, though. I never saw him spike a player deliberately. But if you ever got in the way of his flying spikes, brother, you were a dead turkey.”

  “As long as I watched him play, no one can convince me that he went out of his way to hurt anybody,” said Urban “Red” Faber, who pitched for the White Sox from 1914 through 1933. “He wanted an open shot at that bag and if you were in his path, that was your hard luck, and if you had the ball he’d try to knock it out of your mitts. I don’t see how you can argue against that kind of base-running method, especially if you had the desire to win that Cobb had.”

  Yet people did argue against it, even in Cobb’s day, calling him the “Dixie Demon” and “dangerous to the point of dementia.” Which at first was fine wit
h Cobb. “I liked it when my opponents thought I was a little crazy,” he admitted. Then he realized he couldn’t turn off the criticism, or slow its momentum. Until the end of his days he felt dogged by the label “dirty player.” Why was the reputation so hard to shake?

  For two reasons, I think.

  First, the public and the press of Cobb’s era displayed a giddy fascination with spikes that wasn’t shared by the men who laced up their six-pronged, kangaroo-leather booties every day and went, as it were, to the office. Spikes were generally afforded a far too important role in the daily business of baseball by that first generation of modern followers, most of whom had come of age in a time before they might have encountered them personally—in a time, that is, before scholastic sports—and thus viewed them with excessive wonder. “That baseball will soon be the most dangerous of games unless a means is found to do away with spikes is the opinion of many experts,” said the Newark Evening News in 1909—a year when twenty-six men died playing organized football. Hard-bitten rank-and-file deadball men, men like “Rawmeat” Bill Rodgers and Pearce “What’s the Use” Chiles, didn’t see spikes as intrinsically evil—at once vaguely Jules Verne–ish and menacingly medieval—the way many civilians did. To professional players, cleated shoes were pretty much just another piece of locker room jock-junk, a tool that had the potential to be misused, but ultimately no scarier than a ball or bat, either of which, after all, could kill you.