Among major leaguers, only wide-eyed yannigans, having heard the (true) tales of Honus Wagner coming in high and hard, and Nap Lajoie spiking three men in one inning, ever fretted over how frequently spikes were deployed as weapons in the bigs. Which is why in 1908 a bunch of Tiger benchwarmers, led by starting second baseman Germany Schaefer, were able to get a rise out of some Highlander rookies by pretending to file their spikes on the top step of the Detroit dugout—a fairly common prank, first pulled by the Baltimore Orioles of Hughie Jennings’s day, and later by John McGraw’s New York Giants (Fred Snodgrass tells us in The Glory of Their Times), that was to live on in infamy (once a couple of credulous reporters wrote about it) and become attached to Cobb as the story in retelling got stretched and embellished. Cobb didn’t sharpen his spikes that day or at other time, and didn’t jokingly pretend to, as he would still be explaining fifty years later on television. In 1910, in fact, already starting to get tired of being smeared as a dirty player, he wrote a letter to Ban Johnson (which the Tigers subsequently released to the public) suggesting that major leaguers be required to dull their sharp new spikes with a file, and that every man’s spikes be checked for excessive sharpness before each game by an umpire. “This would be a good way,” he told Johnson, “to eliminate the accidents caused by spikes.”
The letter had roughly the same effect on Cobb’s reputation as the testimony of the ballplayers who came forward over the years to weave variations on Germany Schaefer’s seminal statement: “Cobb is a game square fellow who never cut a man with his spikes intentionally in his life, and anyone who gets by with his spikes knows it.” In other words, it didn’t help him. Nothing could, not even the testimony of the most renowned umpire of the day, Silk O’Loughlin, who said, “I’ve been on top of many plays in which Cobb was the runner and I never saw him cut anyone intentionally.” For besides the excitement engendered by spiked shoes, and the obvious appeal of an alleged nutcase who ran amuck within the cozy confines of the organized baseball terrarium, there was the vivid—and inconvenient—spectacle of people getting spiked. We don’t know how many there were exactly, but Cobb surely speared at least a dozen or so along the way—and I’m not talking here about accidents. He drew blood from his boyhood idol, third baseman Bill Bradley, and helped knock the A’s from the 1909 pennant race by spiking their promising young shortstop, Jack Barry, so badly that he missed a couple of crucial weeks. Ossie Bluege, a third baseman for the Washington Senators, remembered a time when he and his shortstop had Cobb hopelessly trapped between second and third: “I walked up the line toward shortstop with the ball in my hand, in a little bit of a crouch to tag him and he just threw himself at me with spikes in the air. He didn’t slide. He just took off and came at me in midair, spikes first, about four or five feet off the ground, so help me just like a rocket. He hit me in the upper part of my arm, and cut my shirt sleeve.”
Bluege made the play nevertheless. “I tagged him out, but I was so mad I was going to konk him with the ball while he was lying on the ground. Billy Evans was the umpire and I started to step on Cobb’s toes and Evans pushed me away and said, ‘Cobb you’re out, and out of the ballgame.’ The next day I was standing around the batting cage waiting my turn to hit when up walks Mr. Tyrus Raymond. Just as sweet as apple pie. He’s apologizing.”
“Son,” he said, “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“I’m alright,” I said.
“Good,” he said. Then the look in his eyes changed just a little, his face got mean, and he said, “But remember—never come up the line for me.”
The distinction was often too subtle to discern from a seat in the grandstand or a stool at a tavern where one might peruse an account of the previous day’s game, but Cobb’s spikings almost always came in the course of a larger and more philosophical dispute over right-of-way. “The base path belongs to the runner,” he steadfastly maintained, sending notice that anyone who stood in “my little patch” in front of the bag was liable to be run into or upended and in the process hurt in any number of ways, spiking included.
“Cobb never spiked anybody,” said Sam Crawford in The Glory of Their Times. “If the infielders get in the way, that’s their lookout.” Many—including infielders—agreed with him. “Ty was misunderstood,” said the well-traveled AL first baseman “Tioga” George Burns, a few years after Cobb had retired. “People always thought he was going out of his way to spike people, but when the infield doesn’t give the runner a piece of the bag to get into, he deserves to be spiked.” Forty years later, contemplating the photo of their violent home plate encounter that has so often been used to indict Cobb, Krichell would say, “In a way, it was really my fault. I was standing in front of the plate, instead of on the side, where I could tag Ty as he slid in. But out of that mix-up I learned one thing: never stand directly in front of the plate when Cobb was roaring for home. If you did, it was at your own risk.”
Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker said in 1910 that he was tired of hearing about Cobb “cutting down infielders while getting around the bases.” “Why didn’t he spike me when he had a chance in the world championship series? Simply because I know a base-runner’s rights and stay in my place.”
“Cobb slides hard,” Tinker went on, “and a baseman ought to know enough to give him room. In some of the games of our World Series with Detroit, Cobb slid into first and second so hard that he tore the bags out of place, and we didn’t give him any more room than was coming to him, either.”
That was the thing about Cobb that earned him the respect of the men whom he was barreling into: he didn’t ask for anything special on the base path, just what was his, and he, like his victims, would accept the consequences of an ensuing collision. “I didn’t get these marks riding elevators or sliding down banisters,” Cobb said, “with a chuckle,” in 1958 as he rolled up his pants cuffs for a New York Times reporter. “Even though I was referred to as a terror on the baselines, these scars proved the boys of my day gave as good as they received.”
“Cobb could take it,” said Charley O’Leary, the Tigers shortstop from 1904 to 1912. “When a fielder would give him an elbow or a knee, or knock him a half dozen yards, he didn’t come up crying or appealing to an umpire. No sir. Whenever they’d spike him, and they cut him many times, he didn’t get out of the game for a week or so. Nothing like that for him. He’d rush to the clubhouse between innings, doctor his injury himself [often with a wad of chewing tobacco, of which he had begun to occasionally partake], and then come dashing out on the field.”
Steve O’Neill of the Naps once favored Cobb with the greatest compliment a catcher can give. “He came home on a base hit and I was blocking the plate. I got him in the kidneys and knocked him out. When he came to he didn’t say a word. He just got up and limped out to his position.”
If you asked Cobb if he’d ever spiked anyone on purpose he would usually say no, definitely not, and that he was deeply proud of the fact. “I-am-not-a-spiker!” he said, emphasizing each word, in an interview he gave as an old man, wearing a ratty red bathrobe. Every once in a while, though, when he was in a more expansive mood, he would say yes, in fact, he had indeed spiked some men intentionally “but only three.” Then he would tick off the names. The strange thing was that each time he recited his list it was a little different. Over the years it included Hobe Ferris, Lou Criger, Cy Morgan, Billy Sullivan, Frank Isbell, Jack Warner, and Dutch Leonard—but only those three, understand?
At no time did he ever put John Franklin “Home Run” Baker among the men he had intentionally spiked.
— CHAPTER EIGHTEEN —
THE FAMOUS BAKER SPIKING INCIDENT, as it quickly came to be called, happened on Tuesday, August 24, 1909, a day of 90 degree heat, in a game between the Tigers and the Athletics at Detroit’s Bennett Park. It tends to verify everything said in the previous chapter about Cobb and the early-twentieth-century cranks in regard to base running, with the exception of the notion about him being a player people loved to hate. At some p
oint in the story, the action shifts to Philadelphia, where you didn’t have to be a visiting opponent to experience vitriol. They just hated you there, without necessarily loving to do so. This is the town where people later threw D-cell batteries at Phillies outfielder Dick Allen and snowballs at Santa Claus. In Philadelphia, a small but vocal minority of the fans hated Cobb plain and simple. They threatened to kill him for what he had done to Frank Baker, even though he hadn’t done very much. In the end their anger helped the story spill out of the sports pages and into the general conversation.
Connie Mack’s Athletics were one game up on the Tigers in the AL standings when they pulled into steamy Detroit in late August of ’09, though the Tiges were on a five-game winning streak during which Cobb was batting over .600. Navin and Jennings had recently revamped their team, sending Claude Rossman to St. Louis for first baseman Tom Jones and Germany Schaefer to Washington for Jim Delahanty—the infield that had brought the Tigers to their first World Series in 1907 was now completely gone. The Tigers were a less quirky, more businesslike team now, and it was going to be a crucial three-game series—all of which makes it hard to explain the home club’s behavior in the first inning of the first game, for which an above-average-size crowd of 9,700 had gathered. Judging by bemused contemporary accounts, neither Cobb nor his teammates seemed to be concentrating very intently. Davy Jones led off with a single, moved to second on a sacrifice bunt—then, with Cobb taking a pitch, inexplicably broke for third where he was, said Joe S. Jackson, “snared easily” by a peg from catcher Paddy Livingston to Frank Baker. Then Cobb walked, stole second—and just as inexplicably lit out for third as Crawford took ball four. Livingston’s throw had him out easily, but as Cobb slid in, twisting away from Baker, he scraped the fielder’s exposed right forearm with his right spike. Baker, who had a reputation for being “spikes shy,” had been standing a foot or so off the base, toward left field, keeping the running lane open, but then he leaned back awkwardly into Cobb’s “little patch” and wound up tagging him ahead of the base, on the shoe or ankle, as he simultaneously incurred the deadball era’s most controversial wound.
It was decidedly small and superficial, as controversial wounds go. Though the call had gone their way, Baker and Mack complained to the umpires about Cobb’s method of sliding, the former stomping around to relieve—or perhaps dramatize—the pain. No one was ejected, or even admonished; the A’s trainer trotted out and treated Baker’s cut and the game resumed a few minutes later with him seeming fine despite his bandage. In the end it was an exciting contest in which the Tigers came from behind in the seventh inning—with Cobb knocking in the tying run and scoring the go-ahead one—to win 7–6. (Baker was 0-for-4 for the day.) Jackson’s Free Press account led with the happy news that the Tigers and A’s were now tied atop the standings. He didn’t even mention the little brouhaha between Cobb and Baker at third.
That was hardly the end of it, though. Most Philadelphians, in those days before radio, didn’t hear about what happened until the next day, but when the reports trickled in the A’s cranks ran the gamut from annoyed to downright murderous. Baker, who like Cobb turned twenty-three that year, was a sweet dull farm boy from Trappe, Maryland, whom Connie Mack had found swinging for the fences of the Class B Reading Pretzels. Although he didn’t get the nickname “Home Run” until he hit two in the World Series of 1911, a year in which he led the league with 11, he was a Pop Anson–style power hitter who seemed well suited to help the improving AL franchise for years to come. Operating with a paucity of good information about the “spiking,” some A’s rooters became convinced that Cobb had practically disemboweled Baker with his “armored shoes,” as the outraged Chicago Tribune called them, thereby dimming their hopes for a third pennant. That was hitting a Philadelphian where it hurt.
No one was madder, or fake-madder, than Connie Mack, who the next day made a long, fiery speech to the papers about Cobb and how it was his “second nature to act mean on the ball field.” “I would not have him on my team for nothing,” said the man who had once overseen a raucous Pittsburgh Pirates club and would one day pay Cobb a sweet sum to play for him. “He boasted before the game that he would get some of the Athletics,” Mack went on, disingenuously. “He made good by spiking Baker and all but cutting the legs off [second baseman Eddie] Collins [whom Cobb had upended while stretching a single into a double in the seventh inning. Jackson had written that afterward “Collins was game and made no kick”]. I think he gets up in the morning with a grouch on and it sticks on him all day. Then when the game is on he gives vent to his feeling by making trouble. He may be a great player, but he is a pinhead in this respect.” After hearing Mack’s side of the story, and only Mack’s, AL president Ban Johnson dashed off a letter to Cobb saying he “must stop this sort of playing or you will have to quit the game.” The Chicago Tribune denounced Cobb on its editorial page, saying, “Everyone likes a winner, but there are ethics to be considered besides mere victory, and no action on the ball field can be more contemptible than the willingness to injure an opponent.” The venerable Boston Globe sportswriter Tim Murnane called Cobb “a butcher.”
Predictably, the Detroit press rushed to Cobb’s defense. Jackson said the A’s were “crybabies” and added, “the real players don’t run to the bench and tell their managers about the naughty boys every time they get mussed in a mix up.” Paul Bruske said that “Connie Mack made a tactical error—he put it into his players’ minds that they are in danger of bodily injury in the heat of such a series.” Jennings called Mack “a squealer” and noted he had a history of blaming others whenever his pennant hopes started collapsing. In 1902 he had accused St. Louis of using a “buzzer” (a signal for conveying stolen catcher’s signs from the scoreboard to the batter) when his team lost four straight to the Browns, and five years later he charged umpire Silk O’Loughlin with “crookedness” after the A’s lost a large lead in the famous 17-inning game that ended in a tie. “Now he makes one more holler by accusing Cobb of injuring one of his players,” Jennings said. As for Ban Johnson, “He ought to find enough to do looking after the basic league business. He has no right to criticize Cobb in the manner he has without first getting a statement from the player.”
The public was left to imagine what would happen when the Tigers next stopped in Philadelphia, about three weeks later, on September 16. In the meantime, Cobb’s statement came. “It was most ungentlemanly of Mack to go to the newspapers knocking me,” he said in an open letter published in a number of dailies and weeklies.
He goes around with the salve in one hand and a pile driver in the other and expects to get away with everything. Mack knows I have never spiked a man deliberately. And he also knows that the runner is entitled to the line. If the baseman gets in the way he is taking his own chances. When I slid I made for the bag. If the man with the ball is in the way he is apt to get hurt. But that is his lookout. He has no business on the line. It is a plain case of squeal with Mack. In Philadelphia [the 17-inning game] when they were seven runs to the good and we had no chance to win, both [Jack] Barry and Collins dove into Schaefer and tried to put him out. And Collins did get [Oscar] Stanage and put him out for a week. But we didn’t holler. That is baseball. If we get hurt, we take our medicine and don’t go around crying over it. Collins is all right. He tried to block me off Tuesday but I dumped him. He didn’t say a word because he knew that I was right. He goes into the bases the same way I do and he’s hurt as many men as I have.
Collins was notably silent as the controversy swirled, and some years later he admitted he didn’t support Mack’s sentiments. (“I want to correct the erroneous impression that Cobb deliberately went out of his way to spike opposing players,” said the second baseman. “It just wasn’t so. His spikes left their marks on countless players, but that was because he was such an aggressive, victory-hungry player. If anyone blocked his way a collision was inevitable. He was an elusive slider who frequently slid away from a tag rather than adopt football
tactics.”) Even Baker lay low and issued no statements as Cobb drew ardent endorsements from the Cincinnati Enquirer and Chicago Cubs owner Charles Murphy, who told a Pittsburgh reporter,
Connie Mack is sore, and you know what a sore man will say. Ty Cobb is not a dirty baseball player. No one ever observed his playing closer than I did during the last two world championship series, and if there had been anything of the “dirty” ballplayer in his makeup he surely would have brought it to the front then, when there was so much at stake. I never saw Cobb make a move that would lead one to believe that he even contemplated an act that wasn’t clean baseball. True, Cobb slides feet first, but that is one of the points of the game. He is not the only player who slides feet first and does it aggressively.
In the wake of those supportive words, the Detroit Daily News produced the ultimate defense of the city’s favorite son: a photograph of the disputed play taken just a few feet from Bennett Park’s third base. Action photos were relatively rare in those days, and seldom preserved a particularly auspicious situation, but this one showed Cobb’s unthreatening fadeaway slide in crisp detail, and it exonerated him completely. Frank Navin sent it to Ban Johnson with a testy letter:
All this talk about Cobb spiking base runners is “rot.” If you can tell me a player who has been put out of the game by Cobb during the time he has been with our Club, with the one exception of [Ed] Bradley, I will be glad to have you do so. . . . Fortunately, we have a picture of the game he made the wail about, and I am enclosing it. You will notice that Cobb is trying to get away from the base-runner [sic], and not sliding for him. Cobb is on the inside of the bag. Any of the players will tell you that Cobb makes a fall-away slide and does not slide directly into the bag at all, while if he had any intention of getting any player he would drive directly for him. I think a great injustice has been done to Cobb in this matter.
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