Dozens of newspapers across America, including the Sporting News and Sporting Life, splashed the picture across several columns. Still, some Philadelphians remained unimpressed. Over the next few days, Cobb received several threats including a “black hand letter” advising him that he would be shot by a sniper if he ever dared take his position again at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.
The Baker incident helps us understand that the modern myth about Cobb being universally reviled in his day isn’t true. Connie Mack’s statement triggered more expressions of support than I can include here without redundancy. But the events of that season also yield clues about Cobb’s inner self. The wad of tobacco he took out of his mouth to use as a poultice, the curses he flung back at cranks who taunted him, the firmness he showed in his response to Mack, a man whom he like almost everyone else in baseball held in childlike awe—all of these things suggest that Cobb, at twenty-three, was losing his innocence.
• • •
Certainly, it would have been impossible just a season or so earlier to imagine Cobb walking somewhat unsteadily into the Euclid Hotel in Cleveland at about 2:15 a.m. after a dinner with a bunch of show business types, as he did nine days after the Baker incident, on Friday, September 3, 1909. The events of that dark morning are frequently presented as further evidence of Cobb’s racism—but they shouldn’t be because no one involved in the story was black. But more about that in a moment. Let us first sketch the agreed-upon facts.
On the afternoon of the previous day, the (pennant-contending) Tigers and the (thoroughly mediocre) Naps played to a rain-abbreviated tie. Detroit’s 14-game winning streak was still intact, though, the club was still in first place by a few games, and Cobb, who had averaged more than one stolen base per game during the streak, was hitting a league-leading .362—so on balance he couldn’t have felt too despondent. That evening he and several of his teammates went together to the Euclid Avenue Opera House to see George M. Cohan’s latest musical, The Man Who Owns Broadway, then working its way to New York City. After the show Cobb dined at the luxurious Hollenden Hotel with Vaughan Glaser, an actor and producer who had approached him about the possibility of doing a stage show in the off-season, and an actress from Glaser’s theater company named Fay Courteney, a soignée San Francisco brunette. (It’s likely that Cohan, who liked to hang around with ballplayers—and who bet heavily on baseball—joined the group, but that Cobb chose to keep him out of what became a messy situation. Cohan later said he had met Cobb and other Tigers that day, and that he considered him “a real Yankee Doodle boy of the only Yankee Doodle game and better than anyone they have around the red, white and blue ball lots.”) Cobb left the Hollenden at 1:30 a.m. he said, and went straight to the plainer Euclid.
There was considerable disagreement over what happened next. The Euclid’s manager, Fred Avery, said that Cobb was “roaring drunk” when he arrived, and couldn’t find his room. While admitting that he had begun to take a beer now and then, Cobb denied being intoxicated, and said he found a note at the front desk informing him that some teammates were playing poker and shooting craps in a room on the second floor, should he care to join them. He said he asked the bellhop to take him up on the elevator, but the kid said that considering the hour he could take Cobb only to his own room, on the third floor, and not to anyone else’s. They argued about this for a bit, and then the bellboy stalked off, or tried to. “As he turned away,” Cobb later told the Sporting News, “I seized his coat sleeve and said, ‘Hold on here. I’m a guest at this hotel and it’s your business to do what I ask you.’ ”
This tense exchange was merely the curtain-raiser. At that moment, Cobb said, “the watchman or house detective came up, and wanted to know what I was doing. An argument started between us which ended with the watchman striking me behind the ear. We grappled and fell to the floor of the lobby. The other fellow had his finger in my left eye and I could not get away. I was afraid he was going to ruin my eye. I had one hand free, and finally got out my silver penknife and raked him across the back of the hand with it. Then I got loose.” In an interview given separately to the Chicago Tribune, Cobb added, “as he backed toward the grill room entrance he drew a gun and covered me. Holding the gun in one hand, he walked up and struck me several times with his billy. He asked the clerk who I was and the clerk said he didn’t know.”
The forty-seven-year-old watchman, George Stanfield, told a tale even more Grand Guignol:
When I came to the elevator I found that Cobb had struck the elevator boy. He began calling me vile names. I struck him. We sparred, and then my foot slipped and I fell, striking my head against the elevator grating. Cobb was on me in an instant saying, “I’ll kill you now.” I felt the sting of the knife. The blood welled up from under my collar from a deep cut on my shoulder. It dripped down into my eyes from a gash in the scalp. Through the blood I saw his hand descending to my face, and I threw up my left hand to shield my face. The knife blade passed clear through it. I threw him off and started backing away, flourishing a gun. I seized my club from the hotel desk and struck a blow that brought him to his knees. I struck him again and he raised his hands above his head and begged me not to kill him.
In the game he played about twelve hours later, Cobb, swollen and barely scabbed over, was 3-for-4 against the Naps’ journeyman righty Cy Falkenberg—but that is a mere fun fact. The more important question is, Did the Euclid Hotel incident have racial overtones? Do those fights reveal Cobb’s virulent bigotry, as has long been alleged?
In Charles Alexander’s 1984 Ty Cobb and Al Stump’s 1992 Cobb: A Biography, as well as virtually every other book, article, Internet posting, or doctoral thesis about racism in sports of fairly recent vintage, the Euclid bellboy and George Stanfield are described as black or, when a white author wants to drive home his sensitivity, African American. But how do we know their race? In none of the several hundred accounts that appeared in newspapers across the country in the days following the incident is the bellboy’s full name given, and not once is he referred to as a Negro. Can we assume that all bellboys of that day were black? Common sense, old photographs, and federal census records tell us no, we cannot. Sifting through the latter I found a white teenager who lived a few blocks from the Euclid and gave his occupation (in 1910) as bellboy. Even if George H. Skelly, as he was called, is not the kid that Cobb argued with, his existence confirms that there were white people in the trade. That the Euclid’s bellboy wasn’t black, though, we can be all but certain because no one at the time said he was.
Anyone familiar with early-twentieth-century journalism knows that the word “Negro” was then considered a flavor-enhancer beyond compare, a semantic spice stirred into stories and headlines at every opportunity. NEGRO ASSAULTS WOMAN beat WOMAN ASSAULTED six ways from Sunday. TRAIN KILLS NEGRO was inarguably better than even the not-bad DEATH ON THE RAILS. In secondary references the black person might become a “coon,” “pick” (or “pickaninny”), “darkie,” or “Ethiopian,” even in the mainstream press. When Cobb had his run-ins with groundskeeper Henry Cummings and street worker Fred Collins, the papers could not stop reminding readers that those fellows were not Caucasian. But in the sea of clippings that mention the bellboy at the Euclid there is, as I’ve said, nary a “Negro.”
But what of George Stanfield? If we can be 98 percent certain about the junior member of the night staff, the watchman is a sure thing. Not only was Stanfield never referred to as a Negro by the newspapers, his race on the federal census report of 1910 is given as white.
Yet Charles Alexander’s Cobb biography, published seventy-five years after the incident says that both the bellhop and the night watchman were black. I asked Alexander via email where he got his information about the Euclid pair and he said simply that it was in the contemporary accounts. But it isn’t. (He also in his book calls Stanfield “Stansfield.”) Worse yet, you will hear, as I have quite a few times (though not from Alexander), that Cobb stabbed to death a young black waiter in Cleveland fo
r “being uppity.” This is merely the original Euclid Hotel tale distorted almost beyond recogniton after numerous retellings.
Once news of the assault broke, midway through a doubleheader on September 4, reporters mobbed the clubhouse at Cleveland’s League Park in pursuit of Cobb, but after the Naps beat the Tigers in both ends of the twin bill, Hughie snuck him out a side door, and he and his teammates boarded a train for St. Louis. There once again we see Cobb thriving on—or at least in the midst of—adversity. On September 5, he was indicted by a Cleveland grand jury on the not insignificant charge of assault with intent to murder and Stanfield announced he was suing him for $5,000. That same afternoon, in the third inning of the first game against the Browns, Cobb, though still bandaged heavily, walked, stole second and third, and came home on a bobbled infield grounder; five innings later he scooped up a sinking liner and without breaking stride drilled the ball home to nail the sliding runner as the Tigers beat St. Louis 5–1.
• • •
Before he could get back to Cleveland to face the justice system, Cobb had Philadelphia, and Frank Baker, to deal with. The first people to enter Shibe Park on Thursday, September 16, for the Tigers’ first game there since the Incident were 400 policemen, sent by the city to provide extra security. No one was being casual about the threats to Cobb. Visiting teams usually put on their uniforms in their hotels in those days, and rode to ballparks in open wagons or buses known as “tally-hos” as a way of publicizing the game, circus-train style. Feeling that practice was too dangerous under the circumstances, Jennings had his men dress in mufti and travel in taxis and cars to the A’s new stadium, where Connie Mack was letting them share his locker room. (Cobb’s car had a motorcycle escort.) The Tigers manager asked the players to assemble at noon (the game was scheduled for 3:30) in the lobby of the Aldine, but when he came downstairs he found them in the hotel’s music room, pluckily practicing what Jackson called “a little ragtime chorus” to keep their spirits up. Hughie made a brief speech about “the seriousness of the situation” and told them that they should be on their guard, even though their hosts had banned the sale of soft drinks (beer was never available) to minimize the number of flying bottles.
To almost everyone’s surprise, loud applause greeted Cobb when he stepped on the field for pregame practice. It came not from the lowlifes in the 50-cent grandstand seats, the Detroit Free Press assured its readers, but from the people of obvious breeding in the dollar-a-seat upper tier. Overall, the mood remained tense, though. Before the game started, Davy Jones got into a shoving match with A’s outfielder Danny Murphy, and the two had to be separated. Feeling the stares of the more than 27,000 who turned out despite a steady drizzle, Cobb looked jumpy and was, leaping a foot or two in the air when a car on the street backfired while he was standing in right field, trying to seem nonchalant. He went hitless in four trips to the plate that day, striking out twice—once, in the third inning, with the bases full. Jackson attributed his bad game to his “high nervous tension. No ballplayer who had read so much and heard so much about what was to be done to him on a certain day, who had received in his mail a dozen threatening letters, and who could look around a ball field and see several hundred extra policemen there to protect him, could be expected to go up to the plate and concentrate his entire attention upon the game.” Referring to the final outcome—a 2–1 victory by the A’s that brought them within three games of the league-leading Tigers—he concluded, “the trouble Connie Mack started cost today’s game.”
The Philadelphians couldn’t come to a consensus on how to treat Cobb. That evening, hundreds of them gathered outside the Aldine Hotel and did their best to look like an angry mob, but when at twilight Cobb sauntered out for his evening constitutional, cigar in hand, the crowd parted and allowed him to walk through unmolested. He himself once said, “I always find that I have less trouble with people when I’m in street clothes.”
The next day even the sight of the old-school Tigers uniform—they were the last club to abandon the chippy-looking standup collars—failed to set the locals on edge. The audience of almost 28,000 was cheerful, even silly. In the bleachers, men engaged in the boyish fad of gleefully demolishing each other’s straw hats. Some 200 boaters were destroyed, said one paper. Down on the field, Cobb seemed to exhale. He bunted for two hits and knocked in a run with a sacrifice fly. After he stole third in the first inning, Baker shook his hand to show that he had no lingering resentment, and Shibe Park shook with cheers. In the fourth inning, Cobb made a spectacular fielding play on a “line fly” hit by Harry Davis. “He could not locate the ball until it was just about to pass over his head,” Jackson wrote. “Then he jumped into the air, grabbed the ball with one hand and came down against the crowd, clinging to the sphere,” and saving a “sure double.” After that, not even the Tiger’s 5–3 win could sour the mood. When the game was over, hundreds charged onto the field to pat Cobb’s back and shake his hand. Baker told the reporters that his injury had been exaggerated and that he never really had a problem with the Tigers star.
Cobb would manage only two hits over the next two games, both of which the A’s won. The crowd at the first of them, played on a Saturday, was given as 35,000, which if true made it one of the largest ever in Philadelphia. No one misbehaved and nothing especially interesting happened that day, or until the fourth inning of the Monday finale, when Cobb, in the process of stealing second, slid hard into shortstop Jack Barry and badly sliced his left leg. There was a moment of silence. Then as Barry limped off the field to get stitches—he would be out for the rest of the season—he gestured to show that he held no grudge against Cobb, and that he considered the injury an accident. The crowd erupted and Cobb stood sheepishly, receiving their ovation. Their attitude toward him would change, and change again, over the years, but in the meantime Cobb must have felt whipsawed after a long weekend that he had started out as a marked man.
Christy Mathewson was probably as popular as Cobb at the time, but no one was simultaneously as popular and unpopular as young Tyrus. In every American League city except Detroit he was at once the dreaded enemy and the biggest draw. He created both internal conflict—should I boo this fellow or appreciate him?—as well as arguments between two separate cranks sharing the same stadium armrest. Ultimately, though, you had to give Cobb his due. In 1909, making good on his pledge to improve on his league-leading batting average of .323 the season before, he had not only his best year to date, but the best year anyone ever had in the history of organized baseball. He topped both leagues with a .377 average, and led the AL in hits (216), runs (116), runs batted in (107), stolen bases (76), home runs (9), and total bases (296). He was also—along with Sam Crawford (.314) and pitchers George Mullin (29–8, with a 2.22 era), Ed Willett (21–10; 2.34), and Ed Summers (19–9; 2.24)—a piston in the engine that kept the Tigers in first place for all but a few days of the 1909 season, and powered them to their third consecutive pennant.
• • •
The Tigers played the Pirates that year in the kind of World Series that sets up well for hungover sportswriters because of its obvious parallels. You didn’t have think too hard to see that Pittsburgh was, if anything, even more dominant in the National League than Detroit was in theirs, winning 110 games that year to the Tigers’ 98. In Honus Wagner it had a marquee star who had almost all of Cobb’s ability (and none of his charisma). It even had a resident bad boy in outfielder-manager Fred Clarke, who got arrested a few days after Cobb’s Euclid Hotel fight for running into the stands at Forbes Field and pushing a fifty-two-year-old heckler down a flight of concrete stairs. (The papers referred to it as “another Cobb case.”) The scribes hyped the Cobb-Wagner showdown as if it were the Jack Johnson–Jim Jeffries fight that everyone wanted to happen. If you believed the advance stories, this series wouldn’t merely decide the world championship, it would settle the question of who was the game’s best player.
In the end, the most interesting thing the public learned was that seven
games do not necessarily a memorable Fall Classic make. The Tigers somehow pushed the Series to the limit without ever seeming like they believed they could win it, constantly clunking up from behind, like a horse cart trailing behind a car in heavy traffic. Crowds of diminishing size sat in 30 degree dampness watching games played out with the inevitability of the Oberammergau passion play, or so it seems in retrospect, the vantage point from which baseball can best be tortured into something like narrative coherence. Almost nobody was at his best. The Pirates made 12 errors along the way, the Tigers 17. The umpires made bad calls and, even though there were four of them on the field simultaneously for the first time, at least once had to seek the testimony of spectators about where a ball landed.
Detroit’s real problem turned out not to be Wagner, though he batted .333, but a rookie right-hander named Charles Benjamin “Babe” Adams, whom Fred Clarke named as the surprise game one starter. (“It was expected Clarke would use his number-one pitcher Howard Camnitz,” Fred Lieb wrote, “but the Kentucky Rosebud was just recovering from an attack of quinsy.”) In the first inning of the opener the Missouri farm boy—who’d gone 12–3 that year, with an ERA of 1.11—appeared nervous, walking Davy Jones and Cobb—but he got a grip and held Detroit to six hits in a complete game 4–1 victory. With Bill Donovan pitching in game two, the Tigers won by a score of 7–2 as Cobb stole home to cap a three-run rally in the third inning and later singled. In game three Cobb had a single, a double, and two RBI, but Wagner had three hits, three RBI, and three stolen bases as the Pirates retook the lead in the Series with an 8–6 win. George Mullin evened things up again in game four by throwing a five-hit shutout in which Cobb had a double that knocked in two runs (final score: 5–0). In game five Adams threw another six-hitter and, aided by Clarke’s three-run seventh-inning homer, again beat Detroit, this time 8–4.
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