In late May of 1910, while the Tigers were in Washington for a series against the Senators, Cobb was feted at a White House dinner by President William Howard Taft’s top aide, the Georgia-born Archie Butt. (Cobb brought as his guest Tigers third baseman George Moriarity, who during the 1935 World Series as an umpire would distinguish himself by stalking over to the Chicago Cubs dugout and threatening to eject the entire team after some players had made anti-Semitic remarks to Tigers star Hank Greenberg.) The next day Cobb broke his rule about forgoing the midday meal to lunch at the Capitol with Vice President James S. Sherman. “If I don’t do well this afternoon it will be chargeable to this delicious strawberry shortcake!” he joked, and one can imagine his teammates rolling their eyes and pretending to gag as they read the quote in the next day’s paper. But unless a fellow Tiger made peace with Cobb’s special status and Cobb’s willingness to reap the benefits of it, it could be a very long season. Following the luncheon, President Taft sat in a steady rain to watch Detroit beat his hometown club 5–1. All of the players lined up to shake Taft’s hand after the game, but only Cobb got a back-pat and a “Warm congratulations, Ty” from the president.
Of course, only Cobb, who got two hits that day, was hitting .370 something at the time.
Cobb’s role on the team started changing in 1910, as the Tigers dropped back in the standings and it became increasingly clear that the dream of a fourth consecutive pennant was slipping away. It would be an overstatement to say that he began to usurp Hughie Jennings’s duties, but he did begin to lose faith in the manager and, without discussing it with anybody, he assumed responsibility for giving signals for the hit-and-run play and the bunt when he was at the plate. If this bothered Jennings he as usual avoided direct discussion. We do know that it bothered Davy Jones, by now the Tigers regular left fielder and leadoff batter, who grumbled at the idea of taking orders from someone who was ostensibly a peer while the manager stood off in the coaching box, mindlessly yelling “Ee-Yah!” Matters came to a head at Bennett Park on August 2, 1910, as Jones told Lawrence Ritter when the author interviewed him for The Glory of Their Times more than fifty years later:
We were playing Boston this day, and Ray Collins was pitching against us. Cobb never did hit Collins too well, so the idea of being in a slump and batting against Collins too didn’t go down very well with Ty. He’d just as soon sit this one out.
In about the third or fourth inning of this game I got on base and Ty came up to bat. I watched him for the hit-and-run sign, like I always did, but he didn’t flash any. Then suddenly, after the first pitch, he stepped out of the box and hollered down to me, “Don’t you know what a hit-and-run sign is?” Yelled it right out to me.
Jake Stahl was the Boston first baseman and he said to me, “Boy, any guy would holler down here like that is nothing but a rotten skunk.”
But I knew Cobb, so I just ignored him. Those were his ways, that’s all. Well, the second pitch came in and curved over for strike two. And was Cobb ever mad then! He went over and sat down on the bench and yelled, “Anybody can’t see a hit-and-run sign, by God, I’m not going to play with him.” Meaning me.
He just sat there and wouldn’t play. They had to put in another batter. All he wanted, of course, was to get out of the game because he couldn’t hit that pitcher. That’s all it was, and I was the fall guy. He put the blame on me.
The true story is not quite as good as the way the nearly eighty-year-old Jones remembered it. A dispute about signals did occur, along with some yelling, but newspaper accounts show that Cobb did not walk off the field but played until the end of the game, going 0-for-4 as the fourth-place Tigers lost to Boston 4–3. Immediately afterward, however, he did announce that he would no longer take the field for the Tigers if Jones was in the lineup and, following an off day, he failed to suit up for the next game (which the Tigers won 4–2). Officially he had “stomach troubles” just as officially he had suffered from a toothache a few weeks earlier, when for reasons unknown he didn’t arrive at Shibe Park until the third inning of a game against the A’s. Jennings said he was angry about Cobb’s behavior, but as usual he said it to the press, and not Cobb—which only reinforced Cobb’s impression of him as a weak leader.
It again fell to Navin to mediate the situation, which was more complicated than it may have seemed, since Davy Jones himself was a grouch and “not the most popular man on the team by any means,” according to writer E. A. Batchelor. Navin and Cobb met at the team office, perhaps as the game of August 4 was being played, and talked at length about a situation that besides Jennings and Jones, also involved Sam Crawford and shortstop Donie Bush, both of whom Cobb had been riding hard, in the manner of an overbearing manager, as the team struggled to find its old form. Navin later told Jones that he gave Cobb a stern lecture about getting back on the field or facing a suspension, and that Cobb immediately fell in line. That’s probably not what really happened behind the closed door of his office, but it was, as Navin knew, the story Jones wanted to hear. What Navin actually said to Cobb that day we’ll never know, but we can deduce from hints he dropped that he shared his star’s disenchantment with Jennings, as eventually would several other players on the squad. Most likely he and Cobb bonded over their feelings, and agreed that for appearances’ sake, Cobb would say that in his desire to win he had overacted, and would henceforth get along better with his manager and teammates. That in any case is what Cobb did tell the reporters on his way out of Bennett on August 4.
Once again, though, Jennings didn’t seem able to take a hint from Navin about the way he wanted Cobb to be handled. When the petulant star showed up on Friday, August 5, just minutes before the first pitch was to be thrown, and dispatched the trainer, Harry Tuthill, to tell Jennings that he was available to play, Jennings sent Tuthill back with the message that Cobb’s services were not required that day—“whereat many Tigers chuckled with glee” said the Boston Globe. Whatever side you were on, it was a silly argument that was going to be settled sooner rather than later—and was the next day with Cobb going back into the lineup and issuing an odd “open letter” to the newspapers. In part it read: “I realize I am not above making mistakes. If some of my critics who have been roasting me in the paper [for causing dissension] would work as hard and as honestly as I do they would find out the real facts connected with the recent trouble on the team and would not be misguiding the public. As for dissension in the club, I can only point to our recent victories, and when the end comes the fans will find the Detroit team there.”
The truce was uneasy, but uneasy was Cobb’s default mode. The day he returned to the lineup following his blowup with Jones he had two hits and a sacrifice fly and stole a base. Cobb would always thrive in situations where serenity was scarce and tension palpable. Stress seemed to help him focus. He loved coming to bat with the bases full, he told the New York Times in 1910, because “the pitcher is worried, the infielders are guessing, and when you hit the ball the flying base runners rattle and disconcert the men who are trying to handle it.” In his early memoir Busting ’Em, he said it was easier to work out of a batting slump on the road “because I like opposition, and I can get myself straightened out with the crowd hooting me for failing to hit.” By that standard, he must have enjoyed 1910 immensely, because he and almost everyone around him seemed out of sorts all season. Near the end of May he told J. Ed. Grillo of the Washington Star that because of key injuries and odd bounces it did not feel like the Tigers’ year—and predicted the A’s would take the pennant. “Fate seems to have decreed that no team should win four pennants in a row,” he said morosely.
But just because Cobb felt more comfortable leaning into a figurative headwind didn’t mean that the stress wasn’t also wearing on his body and mind. As the season wore on, he complained of malaria symptoms, “a slight attack of liver trouble,” and “a generally run-down condition,” all which, said the Free Press, was contributing to a weakness of his eyes. By late August the problem was fairly seve
re. Told by an eye specialist to rest, he missed a four-game road trip to Cleveland in early September, and when the Tigers returned they found him wearing smoked glasses (though not while playing) for an inflammation of the nerve in his left eye. He also suffered, he was told, from significant nearsightedness in the right eye. Despite these problems—or, knowing Cobb, perhaps because of them—he was at that juncture hitting around .380.
And yet with Nap Lajoie having one of his better years, .380 wasn’t enough to put Cobb in the lead for the major league batting title, and the Chalmers Trophy—a $1,500 Chalmers-Detroit 30 sedan—that, for the first time, went with it. For most of the 1910 campaign, Lajoie, who at thirty-five still had his fluid swing and liquid stride, had been hovering at around .400. Since the Frenchman (who was actually born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island) had, in 1901, hit .426, any kind of freakish number seemed possible for him, and Cobb (who already owned a Chalmers car, a present from the company for driving it in a “Good Roads” promotion the previous autumn) intimated that he had resigned himself to finishing second and breaking his string of three consecutive batting titles. It would have been no shame in losing to Lajoie, who had hit above .300 all but once since he started with the Phillies in 1896, and who was such an outstanding all-around player that the team had changed its name from the Bronchos to the Naps. In the final weeks, though, things got exciting. Lajoie started to fade, Cobb, who was twelve years younger, surged, and, with only one game left in the season, he led Lajoie .383 to .376. (Or at least those were the numbers everyone was working with. Statistics in those days were kept by the sportswriters, who would then run them by the league offices for certification, with a sometimes weeks-long wait before they became official. Changes in the initial numbers, based on errors of mathematics or observation, were not uncommon.)
With the newspapers focusing on the dramatic Chalmers race, and pressure mounting on the leaders, both Cobb and Lajoie acted ignobly, to varying degrees. The former sat out the last two games of the season; although several different reasons for his early retirement were proffered by him and Navin, it was presumably a way of preserving his lead. Lajoie, meanwhile, participated in perhaps the most blatantly dishonest doubleheader in the history of major league baseball.
The Naps played the final two games of the season against the Browns on Sunday, October 9, at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. Normally, it would have been a meaningless twin bill—Cleveland was in fifth place, the Browns last in the eight-team league—but because of public interest in the contest for the Chalmers car, instead of about 1,200 people the games attracted more than 10,000. St. Louis must have contained a good number of optimists because if the local bugs expected to see Lajoie overtake Cobb, they were hoping for a near-miracle. By the lights of the press box mathematicians, he would need at least seven hits to win the batting title.
In his first time up that day, Lajoie hit “a screaming three-bagger” over the head of center fielder Hub Northen, said Red Nelson, the Browns’ rookie who had served up the pitch. Few noticed it at the time, but third baseman Red Corriden, another rookie, had been playing so far back against the right-handed-hitting Lajoie that he seemed more like a second left fielder. He said later that his manager, Jack “Peach Pie” O’Connor, had told him that the Frenchman would “tear your head off with the line drives” if he stayed any closer to the bag.
It was a dubious strategy to stick with, though, for while Lajoie was certainly no pitty-pat hitter, when he came up again and saw where Corriden was standing, he promptly pushed a bunt toward the left side of the infield and easily beat the throw to first by the oddly slow-moving Bobby Wallace, probably the league’s best defensive shortstop. Again no one thought too much of the play, which could have been seen as just Lajoie being a smart hitter. But thereafter things got strange. On his third trip to the plate, Lajoie, and everyone else, saw Corriden playing in that same distant spot, and this time the Frenchman dropped another bunt along the third base line, and reached first without Wallace even making a throw. His fourth time up he looked out at the same defensive formation, laid down another bunt and yet again had a single. It wasn’t just the way the fielders were lining up; the pitches he was getting seemed curiously easy to hit. Had Nelson even been trying to throw the ball by him? “I used some curves when Lajoie was a bat,” the pitcher said later. “But he hit them easier than the straight ones.”
Nap went 4-for-4 in that game, though the Browns won it 5–4.
The second game was more of the same thing. Lajoie got up five times and reached base safely on every single occasion by pushing or tapping the ball in the direction of Corriden, who never once crept in from the outfield grass. In his next-to-last at-bat, Lajoie drove in a run with his “hit” and so under the scoring system then in place he was credited with a sacrifice and not charged with an official at-bat. For the day, then, he was 8-for-8, raising his average to .384, .001 higher than Cobb’s. After the game, won by Cleveland 3–0, Browns players slapped Lajoie’s back and fans poured from the stands and tried to carry him away. A quick press box check of the records revealed that no one had previously gotten more than seven hits in a doubleheader—and seven of Lajoie’s eight hits were bunts! As Jon Wertheim wrote in a Sports Illustrated piece commemorating the 100th anniversary of the bizarre incident, “Then as now players might go an entire season without logging seven bunt singles. Lajoie had seven in one afternoon.”
Lajoie later said that he received a telegram of congratulations that evening signed by eight members of the Tigers. He never revealed their names, but presumably none was Ty Cobb. The story of the 1910 batting race has often been used to make the point that Cobb was widely disliked, and that many of his own teammates, as well as the St. Louis Browns, were pulling for Lajoie. But is that true? Cobb certainly was not as widely beloved among ballplayers as Lajoie, who, though he had a temper—I’ve already mentioned the famous fight with Flick, and he once spit tobacco juice into an umpire’s eye—also had the decency to be not quite so outlandishly good as Cobb, and therefore to not attract so much attention, which he could in turn be resented for. Sports in 1910 still bore traces of nineteenth-century notions about honor and manliness and team play that, for some people, made standing out as an individual problematic—it was a little like standing out in Garrison Keillor’s not-so-imaginary version of small-town Minnesota. The president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, thought that ball-carriers in football ought not search for holes in the line that could lead to gaudy breakaway runs, but should do the modest, gentlemanly thing and plow headfirst into the nearest man-pile. (Eliot also didn’t like baseball because he believed curveballs and other deceptive pitches to be unsportsmanlike.) Cobb stood out on purpose—it was an essential part of his “psychological” approach. Meanwhile the Frenchman was by all accounts avuncular and unpretentious—he wanted you to call him Larry; he carried a needle and thread to repair his (and other people’s) clothes, and if you sat next to him on the bench, he might talk to you about his chicken farm. Probably even Cobb would have conceded that Larry was more likable than he.
But, Cobb aside for a moment, it was almost certainly not a universal outpouring of love for Nap Lajoie that led to the spectacle at Sportsman’s Park. One must also consider that many people, including players, gambled on baseball in those days, and that the Chalmers race was a hot proposition with bookmakers from coast to coast. (Peach Pie O’Connor told the press he was leaving town soon to attend—and bet on—the World Series.) Many thousands likely wagered on who would win the car. Given how far behind he was, one could probably have gotten excellent odds on Lajoie on the morning of the doubleheader, and as the Browns would demonstrate, if rather ham-handedly, they had great influence over the outcome of the race. It would be naive to assume that money didn’t play a larger role in the Chalmers scandal than anyone’s pro-Lajoie, or anti-Cobb, feelings.
The wonder was that the Browns were so obvious in their cheating. First to complain were the St
. Louis reporters who witnessed the game. Ernest Lanigan, a writer for the Sporting News (and the leading baseball historian of the day), said, “If President [Ban] Johnson does not order an investigation of the way Napoleon Lajoie secured eight hits in eight times at bat, it will only be because . . . the big monarch believes that the Browns had a right to do whatever they desired fair or foul to deprive the king of batsmen of his just deserts.” The Missouri racetracks, he noted, had been closed for less crooked behavior. Billy Murphy, sports editor of the St. Louis Star, said he was sure that Browns manager O’Connor was aware of the frame-up “and winked at it.” The chief umpire on duty that day, Billy Evans, said that he had picked up on rumors in the previous weeks “that Lajoie was being helped to win the batting prize. I have heard that the pitchers of various clubs were out to get the auto for Larry, that they would put the ball in the groove for him, with nothing on it, whereas Cobb would be asked to swing against the best stuff they had in stock. It sounded plausible, but I can truthfully say that not until yesterday have I seen Lajoie helped out.” One of St. Louis’s many shoe companies, Hamilton Brown, thought the home club’s offenses so egregious that it offered to contribute “a large portion of the cost of an automobile to be presented to Cobb.”
O’Connor’s explanation was surpassingly lame. “Lajoie outguessed us,” he said. “We figured he did not have the nerve to bunt every time. He beat us at our own game.” Proclaiming his innocence, Lajoie got off a telegram to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “After I made my first hit, a clean drive to center for three bases, the St. Louis men played deep, expecting me to pound the ball out every time. I fooled them right along. The pitchers did their best to deceive me, I am certain.” He also said that his “sacrifice” at-bat should in all fairness have been scored as a base hit, giving him a total of nine for the day.
Ty Cobb Page 28