Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Almost miraculously, nothing else happened just then, but two innings later, with Cobb on third, he and Baker started “accidentally” stepping on each other’s toes, then shouldering each other, until coaches and teammates rushed over to pull them apart.

  By then it was a foregone conclusion that the crowd was fixing to erupt, and in the ninth inning, as Cobb caught the soft fly ball that ended the game with the Tigers up 8–3, “the bleachers on both side of the field belched forth a torrent of humanity,” the Free Press said, and the cranks, said the Post, “swarmed on the field and headed straight for Cobb, who came walking in slowly, and deliberately tossing the ball up in the air. The rest of the Detroit players ran out on the field and surrounded Cobb, and, aided by an escort of police, pushed and shoved the Southerner to the bench. It required some pretty rough work to keep some of the hot-headed fans back”—the Free Press said several Tigers were swinging their bats to carve a swath for Cobb—“and as Cobb was being taken through the gates a wild rush was made to get him. His bodyguard, however, was equal to the occasion, and no harm came to the Tigers’ demon outfielder.” The Detroit paper said it was only the cowardice of the Philly fans—who kept urging each other to strike Cobb, but who didn’t have the nerve to throw the first punch themselves—that kept the riot contained. “For lack of a match to start the conflagration, general disaster was averted,” Batchelor wrote. “Had one of the Tigers been struck there would have been standing room only in the Philadelphia hospitals tonight.”

  Tigers fans, who had been reading so much that summer about dissension in the ranks, must have been pleased by reports of their boys brandishing bats like swashbuckling swordsmen to get the star into a waiting cab. If there was anti-Cobb sentiment on the club, it could not be running too wide or too deep. Could the newspapers have been exaggerating the dissension supposedly wracking the Tigers? For the cranks it was a heartening thought.

  • • •

  And yet baseball is a game that, even as it intrigues and inspires you, will find a way to break your heart. As the 1911 season wore on, things fell apart. The pitching came back to earth and the Tigers’ rookie phenom, first baseman Del Gainer, could not stay healthy. Neither could Cobb, but while Gainer missed a long stretch of the season with a sprained wrist (an absence that corresponded with the start of the Tigers’ steep decline), the normally “gorgeous Georgian,” as the Atlanta Constitution called Cobb, muddled through with unshakable symptoms of bronchitis including a “hacking cough”—the prelude, he and some sportswriters believed, to typhoid fever. “He feels pretty punk every day,” said one paper. Cobb did miss a few games here and there, and was constantly in the care of doctors, some of whom he didn’t listen to when they advised taking an extended leave. On most days he was in the lineup, haggard-looking but a handful, still. “Though on the verge of an ambulance call, T. Cobb figured in the day’s doings,” wrote Atlanta scribe Fuzzy Woodruff on August 2. “He went to the plate three times, rapped out three hits, one of them being a home run, another a three-sacker, scored three runs, swiped two bases and having decided he had earned his pay, called for the doctor and went back to the hospital.” He told Gordon McKay of the Philadelphia Times that he could “hit the old pill all right, but when he got on the sacks he lacked the old steam and stamina.” This caused Woodruff to wonder in print, “what would have happened if Cobb didn’t have a few ailments tucked away in his southern system.”

  The statistics failed to bear out Cobb’s claim that he was sluggish on the base paths. In a scholarly article in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal in 1991, Larry Amman noted that while 1911 was not Ty’s best year by some definitions of the term—“His 1910 batting average of .385 was actually higher relative to the whole league, and the year of his greatest run production was 1917”—it “ranks as his best for hitting, fielding, and base-running combined. In the field he exceeded [Cleveland’s] Tris Speaker in total chances per game and in fielding average. On the bases this was Cobb’s most successfully daring campaign. His youthful energy combined with a mature baseball wisdom to produce a quality of play never seen before.”

  Yet Cobb alone could not pull the Tigers out of their tailspin. After starting the season 21–2, they won only 24 of the 40 games that constituted his hitting streak (which ended, without ever being noted by the local papers, on July 4, five games short of the major league record set by Wee Willie Keeler in 1897). Between July 20 and the end of August, Detroit went 15–24, a record that locked them securely into second place behind the eventual league-champion Philadelphia A’s.

  With the season over, Cobb turned to making money. His family was growing—his second child, Shirley Marion, had been born on June 2—and though he had no agent or manager to guide him, it seemed only natural that his .420 average and the acclaim that came with it ought to somehow be, as we would say today, monetized in some way beyond mere salary. He had a knack for making money: a $1,000 investment in cotton futures during a trip to New York City in September of 1910 had blossomed in only ten days time to $7,500. Nor was it difficult for him to find opportunities; people came to him. In short order, he signed up to “cover” the 1911 Athletics-Giants World Series with a series of partially ghostwritten articles for the Wheeler Syndicate of New York; lent his name to the J. K. Orr Company of Atlanta for their Ty Cobb model of high-button dress shoe; and he agreed to join the touring cast of The College Widow. As all these things show, though, it was still difficult to find special, classier projects—things more worthy of the man whom Sporting Life had recently proclaimed “King Tyrus the First.” That same year he had chatted (again) with President Taft, met the labor leader Samuel Gompers at a New York dinner staged in his (Cobb’s) honor, and had a post-theater get-together with New Jersey governor (and Augusta native) Woodrow Wilson, even managing to get off a little joke. (When a press member asked, “Why don’t you run for sheriff of Detroit?” Cobb said, “Can’t. I’ve stolen too many bases. They’d use that against me.”)

  No other ballplayers traveled in such rarefied circles—yet plenty of others dabbled in the same not terribly exalted off-season ventures as he was pursuing, and Cobb was left to wonder if, for him, anyway, the act of exhibiting himself upon the stage and all the rest wasn’t a bit unseemly. Every night before the footlights was not a triumph, the reviewers not always kind. When the sports editor of the Birmingham News, Allen G. Johnson, filled in for the paper’s theater critic and mocked his acting in the next day’s paper, Cobb got apoplectic. Giving in to an impulse that many performers have felt, and wisely suppressed, he fired off a letter to Johnson that seemed to presage the bluster of Donald Trump: “I am a better actor than you are, a better sports editor than you are, a better dramatic critic than you are, I make more money than you do, and I know I am a better ball player—so why should inferiors criticize superiors?”

  Though most of the write-ups he received for his acting were positive—if sometimes tinged with a slightly demeaning whiff of surprise—Johnson’s was the only one Ty responded to. More than most people, he focused on the negative, and in doing so could, in his darker moments, perceive anything short of a rave as a put-down.

  This was his problem with the cop who stopped him that day in Central Park, or rather it was the cop’s problem. We don’t know who said what first, but Cobb and the peace officer were soon trading blows—fighting so heatedly, in fact, that Cobb didn’t notice the man who popped from the bushes to snap their picture. It was only when the photographer told the combatants that they could stop, and the policeman suddenly begged for mercy, that the situation revealed itself for what it actually was: a publicity stunt, arranged by the producers of The College Widow, meant to capitalize on Cobb’s reputation as a brawler. The cop had been an actor, the photographer a press agent who planned to distribute the picture of Cobb battling a policeman to New York City area newspapers.

  The photo was never published, or even developed, it seems. No one knows why, but I suspect that the camera, rather than stayi
ng a camera, ended its life as a hat.

  “Don’t get Cobb mad,” Connie Mack said.

  If only a man named Claudius Northrup Lucker had heeded that advice.

  — CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE —

  OF MEDIUM HEIGHT AND MEDIUM weight with brown hair and brown eyes—according to his World War I draft registration card—Claude Lucker, as he was most commonly known, did not exactly cut an impressive figure. His most striking feature was his hands, which lacked the usual number of fingers. He had three on one hand and none on the other, a rather seriously mutilated extremity. He had lost the fingers and more while employed, circa 1910, as a pressman at the New York Times, and later, in an arbitration case, his representative blamed the accident on “the exacting and depressing nature of the work required of him.” Inexperience may have also been a factor; he hadn’t been in the printing trade very long. Previously Lucker (often spelled incorrectly as Lueker) had labored on the East River docks, steps from the boardinghouse where he lived on James Slip, within wafting distance of the Fulton Fish Market. Since the accident, though, he’d been handling miscellaneous assignments for a man named Thomas F. “Big Tom” Foley, a lawyer who held the title of sheriff of New York County.

  Foley was a Tammany Hall power broker who hired a lot of people to do a lot of politically expedient things. Whatever tasks the thirty-one-year-old Lucker did for Foley, he clearly made enough to survive and even splurge a little on extras, like a smartly cut suit, a rakish derby (judging from the one extant photo of him), and an alpaca coat, lightweight enough for early-season ballgames. That in fact is how Ty Cobb first came to think of him—as the loudmouth in left field with the alpaca coat.

  On May 11, 1912, the Yankees’ biggest crowd of the young season, announced at 20,000 (or 5,000 above the official capacity) came out to Hilltop Park in upper Manhattan to see Cobb’s first appearance in Gotham that year. (It was in 1912 that the scale tipped and “Yankees” overtook “Highlanders” as the sporting press’s preferred name for the franchise.) That Cobb was the main draw may be stated with confidence. While the Tigers were playing poorly—stuck in sixth place with a record of 10–13—he was as usual somewhere up in the stratosphere, leading the league with an average of about .370 and running as wild as ever on the bases. He’d been in an especially good mood since he quit The College Widow that winter several weeks before the scheduled end of the run—talking at length to interviewers and even pulling some pranks. One day in late April, when the Tigers were arrayed shoulder to shoulder for a team photo at the new Navin Field, a picture that was to be taken with a slowly rotating panoramic camera, he got the notion to scoot around the photographer while the lens panned, so that he would appear, looking perfectly composed, on both the left and right sides of the shot.

  Now, during a pregame ceremony during which he received his fourth Honey Boy Evans “World’s Champion Batsman” trophy from the minstrel Honey Boy Evans himself, he smiled wide, taking the rousing cheers as a sign that one of his big fears—that the public would be disappointed in him for leaving the sold-out Widow early—was for naught. It was hard to gauge the mood of the Hilltop crowd, though. About fifteen minutes later, when he was tagged out on the front end of a double steal, and exchanged heated words with Yankee third baseman Albert “Cozy” Dolan, Cobb was booed until the rafters shook. A few innings after that, when umpire Silk O’Loughlin simultaneously ejected Yankees manager Harry Wolverton, pitcher Jack Quinn, and catcher Gabby Street for repeated complaints about his calls of balls and strikes, the “wild-eyed hoodlums” in the crowd, said the New York Times, began to shower the umpire with “bottles and glasses.” The Detroit News said that Cobb “stood between [O’Loughlin] and the stands to spoil the aim of the throwers.” Nevertheless, two bottles barely missed O’Loughlin’s head and another struck him on the foot. Said the Times: “The game stopped and the umpire and ballplayers gathered around the plate and looked into the stand to see where the fusillade was coming from.”

  The best answer may have been “a place of despair.” The Tigers and Yankees were a dreary duo of second-tier clubs that season, destined to finish sixth and eighth respectively, and they looked it from the start. A mere 242,000 would come to Hilltop Park in 1912—only the St. Louis Browns would do worse at the gate—and far too many of those who did show up spent the day hurling missiles and insults in the general direction of the bad baseball, and otherwise demonstrating their dystopian angst. The ugliness of May 11 was just business as usual.

  Abusive fans were a hot topic in 1912. Players and spectators alike complained about a rise in rowdyism. You couldn’t bring women or children to the ballpark, many said, even in the supposedly family-friendly American League, without fear of their ears being singed by horrible language. Jack Fournier, a star with the National League Brooklyn Robins, came close to quitting the game because of the “ugly epithets” he had to endure. “Ballplayers should be protected from insult,” said Jim Callahan, manager of the White Sox, expressing a growing sentiment. “The gambling element is the one which usually indulges in this sort of abuse. Oftentimes a player has to exercise all his self-control to keep from going after his tormentors.”

  What exactly did the “mockers” and “knockers” holler? No doubt the usual four-letter words came up, along with bespoke disses fashioned from odd gossip scraps gleaned from the dailies. (“I hear your sister’s in town—guess I’ll be seeing her tonight!”) The Detroit News that year, curious to find the most common baseball catcalls, came up with these: “Hang crepe on your nose, your brain’s dead!” “Butter fingers!” “Bonehead!” “Solid ivory!” “Ice wagon!” “You’re a big swell-head!” “Stay out of them saloons and get some sleep!” and the ever-popular “You’re a dub!” (No, not dud, dub.)

  As quaint as these things sound today, they made grown men froth with anger. I’ve already mentioned how Pirates manager Fred Clarke pushed a heckler down a flight of stairs in midgame, and that Tigers skipper Ed Barrow once emptied a cuspidor on mouthy cranks. Such things happened often. It didn’t even make headlines when Phillies coach Kid Gleason, while on his way to the clubhouse after being tossed for fighting, chased down and assaulted a fan who had hit him on the head with a pop bottle. The usually mild-mannered Cy Young charged into the stands to challenge a crank who called him a quitter, and Giants third baseman Art Devlin beat up someone whom he (wrongly) thought had referred to him as a yellow dog. In his wonderful book Baseball: The Golden Age, Harold Seymour notes that Phillies pitcher Sherry Magee “knocked out a drunk who, after abusing him from the bleachers, followed him to the clubhouse to continue his insults” and reminds us that Rube Waddell also once hopped into the bleachers to beat up a “fan.” (Waddell, a strange, childlike man, was frequently bedeviled by spectators who, as he got set to throw a pitch, held aloft mirrors and puppies, both of which could purportedly mesmerize him.) Cobb himself had some experience in this area, having once, in 1910, gotten partway into the stands to confront a black spectator who had heckled him for several innings, saying what we don’t know, before police intervened and got him back on the field.

  Lucker was more persistent and more vulgar than the average heckler. No “You’re a big swell-head!” for him. The Tigers played the Yankees four times during that May series, and he was there for every game, apparently by himself, riding Cobb hard, using language that witnesses described as bigoted and obscene. Unlike some of Cobb’s other taunters, Lucker never focused on his Southern background, no doubt because he himself was a Southerner, born in South Carolina and raised partly in Georgia, as he said later, in his own defense, not far from Cobb’s hometown of Royston. At the same time, though, he attempted to pander to what he assumed were Cobb’s regional prejudices; a good number of his ugly assertions involved Cobb’s mother being a “nigger lover” and Cobb himself being “half black.” When Cobb responded, as he sometimes did, by shouting from the field for him to shut up and “Go back to your waiter’s job,” Lucker would say, “Go out and play ball, you co
on!” As soon as the Tigers trotted out for batting practice each day during their New York stay, the taunts would begin anew, and Cobb would steal a glance into the left field bleachers and see the alpaca coat (only somewhat unseasonable; the temperature hovered around 60 during the series) and sigh. As professional ballplayers knew, there were churls in every port, but Lucker was the loudest and the worst.

  By the fourth game, May 15, Cobb’s patience, a fine filament under the best of circumstances, was wearing thin. When he muffed a fly ball during fielding practice, and someone—“Not me!” Lucker later swore in an interview with the New York Sun—yelled “Hey, are you on dope?” Cobb, who usually “took the joshing good naturedly enough,” said Lucker, instead “got peevish right away.” No doubt, but if the star was out of sorts that day, it wasn’t because of his hitting. He had five singles in 12 at-bats during the series, an average of .417. The Tigers had won two of the previous three games. It was much more likely Lucker’s incessant nagging that had him on the verge of eruption.

  On his way out to right field in the third inning, Cobb stopped at the Yankees dugout and asked if Frank Farrell, the team’s co-owner, was around. He wanted to point out Lucker and request that he be removed from the park. But Farrell couldn’t be located, Cobb apparently preferred not to deal with lesser functionaries, and the game continued. As the fourth inning started, and the stream of invective continued, one of Cobb’s teammates, it may have been Davy Jones but we don’t know for certain, approached him and said something to the effect of “You can’t let that guy get away with this.” That bit of peer pressure, combined with whatever Lucker was shouting at the moment, was all the extra incentive Cobb needed. He ran down the third base line, hopped the low railing, ran up the stairs, and began punching and kicking his tormentor. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight under normal circumstances, with Cobb, at six feet and about 190 pounds, so much bigger than Lucker and a trained athlete at that, but considering Lucker’s disability, it was a pathetic spectacle for which there could be no excuse. Even if Cobb, in his fury, had failed to notice Lucker’s deformity, people in the surrounding seats yelled “He’s a cripple!” and “He has no hands!” Cobb’s oft-quoted response was “I don’t care if he has no feet!” The remark made no sense but did show that he heard what they were saying and was in control enough to, in a manner of speaking, converse. What strikes the modern reader is how small a role Lucker’s disability played in the subsequent discussion of the beating. No one seemed to give it much weight. Cobb continued to flail away. This wasn’t just a one- or two-punch affair. Lucker told the Sun that Cobb struck him “first on the forehead, then on the side of the head, then kicked [me] in the legs. He cut me with his spikes, tore a big hole behind my ear and cut my face in several places.”