Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Game six had the fewest witness—just 10,535 came to freezing Bennett Park—but the most suspense; after getting roughed up for three runs in the first inning Mullin settled down and pitched the Tigers to a tense 5–4 win. Cobb hit a double in that game that knocked in Davy Jones, but it was his last hit in the series. He was 0-for-4 in the final as Adams scattered his by now signature six hits and tossed a shutout, while the Pirates scored eight. Maybe Cobb’s ability to feed off adversity finally failed him. Perhaps that still festering mess in Cleveland weighed too heavily on his mind. Maybe he was worn out by the extra-long railroad route he and his wife Charlie had to take every time the scene shifted from Detroit to Pittsburgh and back, to avoid Ohio, where there was a warrant out for his arrest. But for whatever reason, it was another weak World Series performance for the game’s best hitter, who batted just .231.

  Did these annual fall fizzles bother Cobb? They must have, though because teams scatter as soon as the Series ends, and the scribes were probably hesitant to broach the subject in the first place, there are virtually no statements from him on the subject. The one disappointment about the 1909 series that he did discuss regarded a story that started circulating the following spring. In the first inning of the first game, it was said, Cobb, after being walked by Adams, shouted down toward Wagner, “Hey, Krauthead, I’m coming in on the next pitch!” And when he did slide in as promised, an angry Wagner supposedly tagged him hard on the face, dislodging several teeth. The story was fiction based on an incident that occurred four innings later, when Cobb, without verbal warning, stole second with a fade away slide and Wagner accidentally brushed his face with his glove, causing a split lip that had to be attended to by the team trainer (Cobb stayed in the game). Cobb and Wagner became friends during that Series and made the first of several off-season hunting trips soon afterward. Both denied that any taunting, or dental damage, had occurred that day in Pittsburgh, but for a certain kind of fan it was a feel-good story about a jerk who gets his comeuppance and thus was very hard to discredit. Indeed the tale was still being repeated in 1958, when an exasperated Cobb told the New York Times, “That story about me and Hans Wagner simply never happened. Yet only recently I met Wagner’s daughter and she looked at me like I was some kind of ogre.”

  If things you don’t do in the Series stay with you for decades, imagine the import of the things you do. Babe Adams’s postseason performance in 1909 was why, when he died in 1968, the town of Mount Moriah, Missouri, put a large black granite monument on his grave. He didn’t just beat the Tigers that fall, he broke their hearts. They came away feeling not like they had gotten closer than ever to being world champions but also like they could never surpass the best NL club. They’d lost their joie de guerre. Instead of praising Hughie for getting the team as far as he had, Navin groused about his manager to the press, saying (as owners do when they don’t know what else to say) that he hadn’t been enough of a disciplinarian.

  • • •

  Cobb couldn’t settle in for the off-season back home in Georgia until he dealt with the Cleveland case. When the news of it had first broken, Navin had told him to relax and focus on baseball, that the Tigers would take care of everything, including legal fees—and Cobb promptly sank back into the warm bath of special benefits that has been obligingly drawn for elite athletes ever since. (Edmund S. Burke, a former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and a prominent polo player, came forward to pay Cobb’s $500 bond.) Since the day he was charged in early September, his team of lawyers had labored to make the problem go away, but only partially succeeded. In return for $115, George Stanfield agreed to withdraw his civil suit and stop pressing criminal charges. The paltriness of the settlement, though, disgusted and enraged Ohio authorities, who vowed to prosecute Cobb with or without help from Stanfield.

  On October 20, Cobb returned to Cleveland for the first time since the incident—the Tigers had no games scheduled there after September 4—and pleaded not guilty to a charge of felonious assault. While maintaining his innocence, and telling the press that he had hurt himself more with his knife than he’d hurt Stanfield, he seemed something between exasperated and frightened about the effect the case could have on his on- and off-field lives. He thought his reputation as a heedless brawler was feeding off itself and taking on a life of its own. “The accidental spiking of Baker this summer was taken to make me out as a reckless, rowdy ballplayer, going around with a chip on my shoulder,” he told the Sporting News. “That spiking was accidental and nobody worried over it more than I did. Then this trouble came along and I’m upset. I wanted to go into the automobile business in Augusta this winter but now I’m so worried I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  At his sentencing a few weeks later, though, his mood appeared to have shifted. Now he seemed cocky, perhaps because a deal had been struck for him to plead guilty to a (much) lesser charge of simple assault. To the chagrin of his lawyers, Cobb, while on the stand, pulled out the silver penknife that he had used in his fight with the night watchman—he’d been allowed to keep it, rules about evidence being somewhat looser then—and, while extolling its virtues, proudly held it aloft for all to admire. When the judge gaveled down a $100 fine, Cobb patted his pockets and said he didn’t have that much money on him, but (should one assume a wink here?) he would surely drop by and make good on the debt the next time the Tigers came through Cleveland the following season. His lead lawyer then jumped up and begged the court’s permission to send a check by messenger in a few hours.

  In an interview with the Detroit Times, Navin tried to frame the Euclid incident as an educational experience. “Cobb has a hot temper and, when provoked as he was, he simply let it run away with him as a whole lot of people would, when discretion would have been the better part of valor. He’s learning right along now how to master himself and I don’t think he will get mixed up in another affair of this kind.” (At another time, though, the owner said, “If Cobb were less impetuous, he would be less valuable to the club.”) Cobb, continuing to make light of things, said, with a smile, that he was through battling. “The next man that wants to fight me will have to be able to run faster than I!”

  Something was happening with Cobb at the end of his fourth full season. He seemed to be trying on different personalities to see how they felt—the old question of how to be in the world as a famous ballplayer—and for those around him it was hard at any point to gauge how much he was pretending. Maybe this was just a function of his getting older, and losing his innocence as he did. Or maybe the praise of lordly types like Charles Comiskey was starting to have an effect. Comiskey, the founding president of the White Sox, had recently written an article for the New York Times declaring Cobb the greatest player in history. “He plays ball with his whole anatomy—with his head, his arms, his hands, his legs, his feet—and he plays ball all the time for all that it is to him.” Cobb, sounding modest, called Comiskey’s piece “the greatest compliment I ever received in my life,” but it was difficult to shrug off such rhapsodies, if even you wanted to. Once he’d had a conscious desire to appear humble—if not to opposing pitchers, then to the public. “Many was the time,” he said, “that I would walk out to my position in the outfield with my head down and my shoulders hunched to show people in the stands that I didn’t have a swelled head.” Now maybe not so much.

  — CHAPTER NINETEEN —

  LITTLE DAVID SILVER AND HIS pal little Lester Elliott didn’t think Cobb was so difficult to deal with.

  When the Augusta, Georgia, YMCA held a dinner to honor Cobb in January of 1910, those two boys, both age eleven and sons of local merchants, proposed to work for free, as servers, so they could get close to their hometown hero. They got their wish and Cobb wound up shaking their hands, and when he found out how they’d finagled their way in, he insisted that they sit down and eat, and before the evening ended, said the Augusta Chronicle, he came by and “visited” with David and Lester for a while, in the relaxed Southern way, pulling up a c
hair and chatting with them at their table. Afterward, the boys were said to be “as happy as happy can be.”

  Cobb liked children, as most people do. This needs to be said because in his 1994 Cobb, Al Stump portrays his subject as a cackling skinflint who ignored kids’ letters and steamed the one- and two-penny stamps off the self-addressed return envelopes they had enclosed in the vain hope of a reply. Stump was heavy-handed and melodramatic with his imaginary details, but he had an almost unerring sense of what some readers would thrill to—namely, a monster in superstar’s clothing. It is, I must admit, a compelling idea, and a reputation for being a kind of seriously unfunny W. C. Fields has become a part of the Cobb myth ever since. The truth is less fascinating. The real Cobb treated young fans as they should be treated, often talking at length to the ones he met in person, and answering virtually every piece of fan mail, even if it sometimes took him a couple of months to get to a particular question or request. Photographs show him bobbing in a sea of children, pen in hand, smiling—a familiar sports hero pose that has been struck over the years by many. His standard speech to high school students contained these lines: “Whatever you undertake, do with all your might. Work hard, play hard. There is no discredit to being beaten by a stronger opponent, but you should see that there are none stronger than you, if that be possible.” When he was appearing in Atlanta with The College Widow in late 1911, and he heard about a local boy who wanted to see the show but couldn’t because he was seriously ill, Cobb went to the home of nine-year-old George Weyman, sat at his bedside, posed for family photographs and “promised to send him three balls which he has played in the big league games,” said the Chronicle. (Little Georgie bounced back and became a bond trader.)

  We know from letters sold at auction that when a child asked for his autograph, he would sometimes provide it (in his trademark green ink) along with a picture or brochure containing hitting tips, and a note of apology for including the unsolicited stuff. He would always say he was honored by the request. Letters Cobb sent in response to kids’ questions run as long as five pages. “I would not advise any boy to play big league ball unless he is sure of himself,” he would sometimes say, “and can withstand the temptations offered him every day.” To a boy named Tyrus Dahl he once wrote, “I am honored you have the same name as I and my only hope is that you will be able to live up under the handicap.” In 1953, while serving as a guest instructor at a baseball camp in the Ozarks, he struck up a mentoring relationship with a Canadian boy named Koosma Tarasoff, who he thought might have major league potential. Over the course of three years, Cobb sent him long, thoughtful letters about life and baseball and paid his way to his home in Menlo Park, California, to give him personal instruction. He eventually got the teenager a tryout with the Pittsburgh Pirates. It didn’t go well, and Cobb was “disappointed,” Tarasoff recalled in 2004, but his failure didn’t end their closeness. “Sure, I heard Cobb had a bad Irish temper, but he was a good human being and I think his actions show things.”

  • • •

  Cobb’s interactions with adults were without question more complicated and less consistently pleasant. Someone whose golden rule is “put up a mental hazard for the other fellow” is by definition not always going to be easy to be around. I suspect that if we were able to put the question to Tigers president Frank Navin of whether he was difficult he would say, “Definitely, no.” Then he would get back to us a short time later to say, “Actually, yes.”

  Navin was Cobb’s boss, the man who negotiated the Tigers contracts, and in their day (and beyond) Cobb had a reputation as a hard bargainer that was not entirely deserved. His salary holdouts raised eyebrows and made headlines, and his prolonged negotiation of 1913 would be characterized by decidedly harsh language on both sides, but the record shows that those things didn’t happen very often. We have already seen how, feeling contrite about hitting a mere .324 in 1908, he became an easy mark for a shrewd businessman like Navin and reupped without comment for what he had been paid the previous season. Most Januarys, salary talks between Cobb and the club were simply not necessary, and not just because the Dixie Demon could be surprisingly nonconfrontational. As stingy as he was, Navin understood that Cobb was by far the biggest draw in baseball, a man who had singlehandedly made the Tigers—still very much a small-market team—third in attendance in the American League. (Largely because of Cobb, he added 3,000 seats to Bennett Park in 1910, and would soon afterward build the new stadium.) Thus Cobb’s happiness was tied directly to Navin’s wealth.

  But the team president also had a sentimental side, as he’d shown when Hughie wanted to trade his favorite player and Ban Johnson wanted to exile him. He saw Cobb as a kind of surrogate son, a once raw recruit who had blossomed under his care into something special, and for that reason, too, Navin didn’t want to lose him. If Sam Crawford, the Tigers’ second best player, groused about Cobb getting special treatment at contract time, and lots of other times, well, there was not much Navin could do about that. (Crawford was still grousing fifty years later, even after Cobb pulled strings to get him into the Hall of Fame.) Navin cared less about offending others on the team than about keeping Cobb happy. (Batting away Charlie Schmidt’s complaints in 1909 he wrote, “Cobb drew more money than anyone on the team last year. He made a wonderful record and was entitled to what he got.”)

  “Ty Cobb Does as He Pleases, and Detroit Club Owner Grins” said one headline. The brief salary talks of January 1910 told the whole story. On that occasion, the boss, as an opening gambit, offered a three-year deal at $9,000 per, and the star reached for his fountain pen. The amount was more than ten times what the average government worker earned that year, and it made Cobb, at age twenty-four, the fourth-highest-paid player in baseball behind Nap Lajoie, a fourteen-year veteran who received $12,000, but had only a one-year contract, Christy Mathewson ($10,000), and Honus Wagner ($10,000). “I don’t know how long I’m going to be in baseball,” Navin told the Pittsburgh Press, “but I never expect to be lucky enough to pick up another Cobb. I am going to cling to him for as long as he stays in the game.”

  He would change his mind eventually, but not for quite a while.

  Not that Cobb didn’t try the boss’s patience. What could make him most maddening, in fact, was his base path habit of refusing to follow the script. In March of 1910, two months after he and Navin had their frictionless accord, something any reasonable observer would have thought was the start of a new era of harmony and cooperation, he dragged and then dug in his heels about spring training, telling the owner, through the press, that he had better things to do than go to San Antonio (to which the Tigers in 1908 had moved their preseason headquarters, because Navin was able to secure a nightly rate at the Menger Hotel of $3 per man). Cobb was philosophically opposed to spring training. “Training trips are useless for the baseball player who takes care of himself,” he said.

  For a man who is prone to taking on flesh or for players who do not keep themselves in condition over the winter, a training trip is all right, but there are any number of players in the big leagues to whom it is a detriment. They go south, and they take off more flesh than they really should. They work under a boiling sun, and they get tired out. When the time for the opening of the season comes, they are stale. For my part, I believe in doing light work throughout the winter and when spring comes a week with the team puts me in midseason form.

  Topping the list of preferable pursuits for him in 1910 was tending to his first child, Ty Jr., born on January 30 of that year. Such a priority was difficult for the team president to publicly dispute, but Cobb also said that he couldn’t leave his brand-new Hupmobile dealership in the hands of a subordinate, and would fine-tune his body—he’d been hunting and hiking in weighted boots the whole off-season as usual—by working out with his old team, the Augusta Tourists, and some “college boys” who were playing semi-organized games around town. That wasn’t good enough for Jennings, who told the press that he was upset by Cobb’s absence. P
rivately he told Cobb that, too, saying in a letter that “in justice to the club” he ought to do his best to reach San Antonio by April 1 (by which date he would be two weeks late). Cobb reluctantly agreed to the new deadline, then missed it. He didn’t catch up with the club until about a week later, by which time it had reached Indianapolis on its barnstorming tour north. His punishment for missing training camp? Don’t be silly. Navin had only just finished writing a check for $1,200 to cover legal fees in the Euclid Hotel case. Cobb had carte blanche.

  Some of his teammates resented this, of course, but they felt outnumbered. The whole world loved Ty Cobb, it seemed, except for fans in rival cities who loved to hate him, and some of those loved him best of all. Rare was the copy of Baseball magazine that didn’t have at least one story about the Georgia Peach. In the pages of Sporting Life, the sainted Nap Lajoie, a player’s player and a simple man who said, “I just wait for the ball I want and then hit it,” marveled at “the different method Ty uses in hitting against right- and left-handed pitchers, stepping into the delivery of one before the curve breaks, and waiting for the curve to show itself in the case of the other.” The first child ever born in the hamlet of Erin, Tennessee, to a couple called Dan and Dossie Cobb, was christened Ty Raymond; a Thoroughbred racehorse was named after him, as was a pretty fair trotter; a Jewish featherweight boxer born Samuel Kolb changed his name to Young Ty Cobb. It wasn’t until Elvis that another Southerner so captivated the entire nation.