In Detroit, Navin called the incident “a raw deal” and the papers weighed in strongly in Cobb’s defense. While conceding that “some followers of the game feel that Cobb needs a warning against excessive self-esteem,” the Free Press, on its editorial page, said their hometown hero was “robbed of a hard-won prize by trickery” and called “the intentional poor fielding” “the worst blow ever dealt to organized baseball.” Should Cobb have played the last two games to underscore his superior sportsmanship? In an ideal world, yes, definitely, said E. A. Batchelor, who had taken over as the lead sportswriter on the paper after Joe S. Jackson’s move to the Washington Post. Batchelor explained that “the Peach had planned a motor trip to New York with friends” during those last two days of the long-long season, “and probably was as glad to get away from the diamond as is the ordinary man to leave his work after he had been sticking to it for a long time.” Whether he was “quitting” to preserve his lead in the contest was a question “nobody but his own conscience can answer.” And yet “whatever Cobb’s sins . . . all of this does not in the least mitigate the contemptible actions of the Browns in making it possible for Larry to fatten his average.”
Lajoie, not the most agile of arguers, seemed to grow testy under the strain. “So it looked suspicious to Navin, did it?” he said. “Well, he knows what he can do. He can take it before the league.”
A formal investigation did seem like a good idea, especially after the official scorer of the October 9 games, St. Louis Republic sportswriter E. V. Parrish, came forward to say that there was an attempt to pressure him into helping Lajoie.
In the first game, in which I gave Lajoie four hits for as many attempts [he wrote in the October 13 paper] the scoring was attended without incident, save that there was a continual procession to the press box for information regarding scoring which was given.
Harry Howell, former pitcher of the Browns, and now scout for the club, came to the pressbox. “How did you score that play?” asked he after Lajoie had batted [for the eighth of nine times that day].
“A sacrifice hit and an error,” I replied.
“Can you stretch it a point and make it a hit?” he asked.
“I could, but I won’t.”
Howell attempted to argue the correctness of the scoring.
A few minutes after he left, the bat-boy of the Browns came to the press box and handed me this unsigned note: “Mr. Parrish—If you can see where Lajoie gets a base hit instead of a sacrifice, I will give you an order for a $40 suit of clothes for sure. Answer by boy.”
After I arrived home from the ball game that evening my telephone rang.
“This is Mr. Lajoie,” the voice said. “I understand that you are having some trouble regarding my hits in today’s game.”
I replied that I was having no trouble. That it was other parties who were having the troubles.
“How many hits did you give me?”
“Eight hits in eight trips to the plate.”
“Don’t you think I should have had nine in nine times at bat?” was the answer.
My reply was that had I thought so I would have scored them as such.
“There is no chance for you to see nine hits?” came over the phone.
“Absolutely no,” I retorted.
After refusing an invitation to go to a hotel the conversation was cut off.
(Lajoie later admitted making the call.)
Cobb steered a careful course in his initial comments about the affair. “I was surprised when I read of the result of the games in the papers,” he said, “and I am sorry that either Lajoie or myself did not win the prize for the highest average without anything occurring which could cause unfavorable comment. I am not prepared to make any charges against either Lajoie or any member of the St. Louis team.” He added, though, that if Nap was awarded the car “under the current circumstances” he would “not be able to congratulate him.”
For the following six days the matter was in the hands of the American League. Ban Johnson summoned O’Connor and Corriden to his office for an interview. They showed up a day late, and only after the AL president had issued an ultimatum—and then, when interviewed separately, simply stuck to their story about Lajoie “outguessing” them. Soon afterward, the American League secretary, Rob McRoy, who was charged with double-checking the stats, delivered his report—and Johnson, on October 15, announced his verdict. Not surprisingly, he found that nothing untoward or illegal had happened in his well-run league. “A thorough investigation has satisfied me that there is no substantial ground for questioning the accuracy of any of the eight base hits credited to Player Lajoie of the Cleveland club by the official scorer in the double header on Sunday, October 9 at St. Louis,” he said. Furthermore, he said he was counting Lajoie’s so-called sacrifice as a ninth hit, for the rather specious reason that veteran St. Louis Times sportswriter H. W. Lanigan (Ernie’s younger brother) reported it as such in his paper that day.
So that meant O’Connor was vindicated and Lajoie had won the automobile, right? Actually, no and no. Behind the scenes, Johnson pressured Browns owner Robert Lee Hedges to fire the manager—who, tainted by the scandal that officially hadn’t happened, would never work in major league baseball again. Moreover the league president also announced that his man McRoy had miraculously found in the annals a game that had not been counted for Cobb: the second half of a doubleheader on September 24 in which he had gone 2-for-3. Thus, said Johnson, “their respective batting averages are a follows: Cobb, 509 times at bat, 196 hits, percentage .384944; Lajoie, 591 times at bat, 227 hits, percentage .3840948. [As the Chicago Tribune noted, Johnson got the math wrong; Cobb’s number should have been .385069.] Cobb thus had a clear title to the leadership of the American League batsmen for 1910 and is therefore entitled to the Chalmers trophy.” Matter settled, then? Not quite. Johnson’s declaration about a “clear title” was immediately followed by a request for company president Hugh Chalmers to provide cars for both Cobb and Lajoie.
This soon was done, and the rules were altered so that when Cobb won the car again in 1911 it was for being “the most important and useful player to the club and to the league” in the opinion of a panel of sportswriters, and not for simply having the highest batting average. Still, “looking at it from any angle,” Batchelor wrote, in 1910, “it is a nasty mess.” He didn’t know how right he was. In the late 1970s researchers Pete Palmer and Leonard Gettelson discovered that the September 24 game had not been overlooked after all, just entered mistakenly for the next day, but baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn declined to make a correction, which would have put Lajoie in the lead—assuming his numerous phony hits were also preserved in the record.
• • •
Cobb spent his twenty-fifth birthday, December 18, 1911, in Havana, Cuba, where he was touring with a barnstorming team of Tigers led by pitcher George Mullin. He had joined the group a couple of weeks late—he wanted to stick around in the States to see the auto races at Atlanta and Savannah—but once he got there (with his wife, baby son, and in-laws) he seemed to enjoy himself. He clowned in the outfield, pretending to bobble easy fly balls, and gratefully accepted a diamond-studded watch fob presented to him by awe-struck Cuban fans. The games he played in sound exciting. He was thrown out trying to steal second a few times by Bruce Petway, one of several black players from the American Negro Leagues who were rounding out the Cuban team that winter. Petway’s superb defensive feats led to stories about Cobb angrily vowing that he would never play against black players again, but those are unsupported by any contemporary news accounts and clash tonally with Cobb’s other quotes from the time, which, while not particularly diplomatic, praised the local weather and extolled his teammates for demonstrating the superiority of American baseball. The Tigers did go 7–4–1 while Cobb hit .370 in the five games he played. He had no reason to be angry and there is no evidence that he was.
— CHAPTER TWENTY —
ONE EARLY NOVEMBER DAY IN 1911, Ty Cobb was driv
ing through New York Central Park in the luxurious, open-topped Chalmers Model 30 sedan he had received for, among other things, hitting .420 that year, when something strange happened. Strange things happened frequently to Cobb, so it was probably with something like a world-weary sigh, or maybe a grunt of annoyance, that he pulled off the scenic speedway and onto a flat stretch of grass as a policeman who had swept alongside him on a motorcycle was indicating that he urgently must. What could be the problem? He had been traveling well below the posted speed limit, or so he thought. And yet as soon as he got out of the car he heard the cop say, “You’re under arrest!”
Did this Johnny Law know who he was talking to? He should have; Cobb was a true celebrity at that point. Although the Tigers had tailed off since they last won the pennant in 1909—they had finished second in the AL that year, but 131/2 games behind the Athletics—he had won the batting title every season since 1907. And since, like most ballplayers of his day, he looked seriously at whatever moneymaking opportunities came along, weighing each for the potential damage to his dignity, he seemed omnipresent, even in the off-season, thanks to all his projects and endorsements. Just a few days earlier he had “managed” the “Ty Cobb All-Stars” (basically a bunch of amateurs, semipros, and Germany Schaefer) in an exhibition game played against another fake team at the Polo Grounds, and now he was passing through Manhattan on his way to a performance of The College Widow that evening in Newark.
If the cop recognized him he was clearly not a fan. From the moment he dismounted his motorcycle, the man seemed to be spoiling for a fight. Cobb himself was not in a pacific mood that afternoon. During the run of his play, he got very little sleep and felt constantly irritable. “The theatrical life is too nerve-wracking for me,” he had told Batchelor when the Widow came to Detroit. “My health is suffering. I need to take a rest.” With him in this condition, any encounter with a provocateur was not going to end well.
• • •
A year is a long time in baseball. For both the Tigers as a team and Ty Cobb as an individual, 1911 had gotten off to an almost scarily good start. On an opening day that would have otherwise been remembered for a relentless, freezing drizzle, Cobb clouted an opposite field home run and his team beat the White Sox 4–2, the first of six consecutive victories. For the month of April, Detroit would go 13–2. “Tigers Perpetrate Another Massacre,” was a typical headline. Weirdly for the Tigers, things had been going smoothly since spring training, when, after another beseeching letter from Navin—“your failure to [attend] creates a feeling on the club, which was brought out in the papers last year”—Cobb actually made it to the new preseason site in Monroe, Louisiana, if a couple of weeks late. In the relaxed atmosphere there, he and Davy Jones talked things out and patched up most of their differences, though according to Navin, Detroit Daily News writer Paul Bruske almost ruined everything when he wrote that Cobb “ate humble pie” to effect the peace. “This will put [Cobb] right back on edge again,” the owner said in a testy letter to Bruske. “You know Cobb’s disposition as well as I do, and when he reads an article like that, he is ‘up in the air.’ ” Many were nervous when dealing with Cobb—but not Sam Crawford, who only grudgingly went along with Navin’s exhortations that he, Jones, Donie Bush, and Cobb should all play nicely together. Crawford was often shockingly frank with the press about Cobb, saying for the record that he was the cause of dissension on the team and that he cared only about his own personal glory and statistics. It was mostly a one-way feud, though; Cobb never seemed terribly bothered by him. It may have been Crawford’s status as the perennially second-best Tiger that fueled his anger. Even when he achieved his all-time-high batting average of .378 that year, Cobb’s .420 put him deeply in the shade.
• • •
To at least some degree, the ridiculously high numbers posted by Cobb, Joe Jackson (who hit .408 that year), and Crawford could be attributed to a new livelier ball that had been introduced, with purposely little fanfare, during the World Series of the previous autumn. Created for the American League by Benjamin Franklin Shibe, a sporting goods manufacturer and part-owner of the Athletics who was born in Philadelphia just forty-eight years after the death of the Founding Father, it had a rubber-coated-cork instead of a pure rubber core and it came off a bat like a jackrabbit, which is exactly what many people called it. (The Spalding Company quickly began making a similar model for the National League.) As Bill James notes in his Historical Baseball Abstract, run production in the AL in 1911 rose to 4.6 per game, up from 3.6 the previous season, and Cobb and Joe Jackson both had .400-plus seasons, the only time that barrier was broken (except for Cobb’s .409 in 1912) between 1901 and 1920. League officials and owners, who wanted to make the game more exciting, but without giving the impression they were resorting to artificial means, denied that the new ball was any bouncier, but Cobb complained that it was so souped up that it changed the game fundamentally—by hampering his ability to bunt. He could no longer deaden the ball enough, in his artful way, to beat it to first base, he said, genuinely concerned that the cork-centered sphere would put a serious crimp in his career. Somehow he adjusted, though, because on May 1, he was hitting .379, with four game-winning RBI and three homers—which except for the homers for him was typical.
The Tigers that spring seemed unstoppable, going 19–9 in May. On its editorial page the Free Press said they were “some baseball team” and, serving up the spicy synonyms like a Bennett Park wiener vendor, noted that “swats, bingles and wallops are as common in the jungaleers camp as dandelions in a shiftless neighbor’s front lawn.” As for winning their fourth “rag,” or pennant, that was no problem. Though “the season was still in swaddling clothes,” the editors said, “ginger and sand and heady ball playing will bring the Tigers to the tape [so surely] that second place won’t be worth fighting for.”
Cobb himself inspired a good deal of the giddiness. His fielding alone brought fans to their feet. At home against the Browns on April 23, wrote Batchelor, “he made two shoestring catches by diving headlong at the ball, each time rolling along on his ear after accomplishing the theft; he went back a mile to pull down one of Frank LaPorte’s welts and covered a lot of ground in snaring another drive by [Jim] Murray. Altogether it was the most sensational fielding performance that any one player would be likely to furnish in many weeks.” And yet despite such glove-work it was his batting and especially base running that made Cobb worth $100,000 a year to the Tigers, in the opinion of Sporting Life and others. In the same game in which he’d made those acrobatic catches, Cobb singled, went all the way to third on Crawford’s routine infield groundout, “easily beating [Pat] Newman’s hurried and inaccurate throw,” then trotted home on Jim Delahanty’s sacrifice fly. Two innings later, he turned a badly handled infield roller into a double, went to third on a fielder’s choice, and scored the tying run on a Delahanty single. (The Tigers would win in the 10th.) The following week at Bennett, Cobb and company made the Naps look, said Batchelor, “like the steamfitter’s Married Men’s nine.” Final score: 14–5. Cobb had three steals, including a swipe of home that succeeded despite the four Clevelanders who had him trapped in a rundown—until he spun away and slid across the plate, looking more like the Thief of Baghdad than the Georgia Peach. Against the White Sox on June 18, he led a Tigers comeback in a game in which they had been trailing 13–1, getting five hits in six at-bats including a triple and one of his slide-into-first-base singles that allowed the tying run to score. At the time he was in the midst of what would stretch into a record 40-game hitting streak—and batting .443.
Another game, another two or three hits, another Tigers victory: it happened with such regularity in the first part of 1911 that it almost sounds rote. Yet Cobb always managed to keep things interesting by mixing in a controversy or two. Even if he wasn’t the instigator, he seemed constitutionally unable to ignore a challenge, and thus a few pointed words could escalate into a tense situation in a few innings.
The Tigers’ v
isit to Shibe Park on June 8 was just such an occasion. Trouble started brewing in the first inning when Cobb and A’s southpaw “Gettysburg” Eddie Plank (who had been born in that Pennsylvania town a dozen years after the battle) got involved in some serious jawing. (What they were arguing about remains obscure, but Plank was a notorious dilly-dallier, and Cobb may have been telling him to hurry the hell up.) When Cobb trotted to his spot in right field in the bottom of the inning, the cranks took up their pitcher’s cause, whatever it was, and soon began to underscore their remarks by hurling discarded lemonade-stand lemons at him. Cobb, perhaps remembering that he had once stood in the same outfield and worried about being killed by a sniper’s bullet, took even more than his usual umbrage at this, and began to hurl the lemons back, applying a dollop of metaphorical mustard to each, so that they struck seats and spectators with an angry splat. Umpire Jack Sheridan, who was an undertaker in the off-season, and looked the part, calmly walked from behind home plate to the outer edge of the infield to express in sepulchral tones his sincere hope that the outfielder would return his attention to the national pastime. But Cobb kept slinging the citrus and by the end of the third inning, said the Washington Post, he “had to be grabbed by Sheridan and shoved to the bench before he would stop. This added to the crowd’s excitement, and to Cobb’s temper.”
The bad feelings festered until the sixth inning when Cobb, after getting his third hit in three attempts, stole second, then tried, a pitch or two later, to steal third. He was called out, but in the process briefly got his spikes snared in the blousy sleeve of his old friend Frank Baker. A gasp went up from the crowd and an angry—but unscratched—Baker, said the Washington Post, “grabbed Cobb by the legs and swung him around with much force.” Cobb, meanwhile, “naturally resented this and jabbed at Baker with his cleats.” For defending himself in this manner, said the Detroit Free Press, “Cobb was hissed and booed in the delightful manner Philadelphia has of showing its disapproval of anything that goes against the Athletics.”
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