Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  When Cobb was finally pulled off his victim and escorted back to the field by teammates, the crowd cheered—not for the handicapped patron, but for him, a member of the enemy camp. And even though Silk O’Loughlin promptly threw Cobb out of the game, as he knew he must, the ump seemed sympathetic and let him stay on the bench in violation of the rules for a few innings. No other fan seems to have come to Lucker’s aid, or in any way consoled him. Lucker himself said that the first person to arrive at his seat was a man from Ban Johnson’s office, who urged Lucker not to have Cobb arrested. Johnson happened to be at Hilltop Park that day and when the ruckus broke out, he immediately dispatched a minion named O’Neill to make it clear to the spectator that his supposedly family-friendly league wanted to take care of things without involving the authorities. What, if anything, Lucker was promised for not pursuing criminal charges, we don’t know, but O’Neill soon escorted him from the stadium. “I was told that Johnson planned to take immediate action [against Cobb],” Lucker said later, “and I thought it best to let it go at that.” The victim, though he “looked like he should be taken to a dressmakers to be sewn up” in the opinion of the Philadelphia Herald, was composed enough “to give a sketchy history of Cobb’s ancestry” to anyone within hearing distance on his way out.

  The game resumed and the Tigers won 5–1.

  That hardly ended the matter, though. As with previous Cobb controversies, the Lucker incident became table talk and tavern talk for much of the nation. In the newspapers, Tom Foley defended his employee, saying he had always been a “quiet fan.” Lucker kept changing his story, at first agreeing with Foley, then saying to the New York Sun that he routinely “kidded the ballplayers from his accustomed seat in the leftfield bleachers” but “had always gotten along with Cobb”—and then amending that statement to note that ever since they were boys together down Georgia way he and Cobb had “never harmonized.” Cobb told the Sporting News that he had known and been abused by Lucker since the previous season.

  Last summer I remonstrated with him and advised him to pass me up—that I was only human and trying to earn my living out there and I could see no justice in his attacking me. His remarks then were insulting but not obscene. As soon as the man got into the park yesterday, he went after me. He did not wait for the game to begin but he started as soon as we started batting practice. I walked to the other side of the field and tried not to hear him. [Donie] Bush asked him to stop, but it did no good. Finally I went to him and asked him to lay off me and when I spoke to him he cut loose with a flow of the worst talk I have ever heard. Then I lost my temper, jumped into the stands and let him have it. I am sorry for the effect such an incident had on the game and because of my family. A ball player, however, should not be expected to take everything, as we have some self-respect, and cannot endure more than human nature will stand for. When a ballplayer can’t take it, how can they expect women to do so, who attended the game by themselves or with their husbands?

  Johnson did move quickly (if somewhat vaguely), announcing the following day that he was suspending Cobb for an indefinite number of games and fining him an amount to be determined. Cobb said the penalties, whatever they were, were unfair—“A great injustice has been done to me and I should have been given an opportunity to state my case.” (Again, the matter of Lucker’s handicap seemed moot to everyone.) Quite a few people agreed with him, especially in his home state and adopted city, but beyond those places, too. On May 16 he received a telegram signed by both of Georgia’s U.S. senators and all of its congressmen: “As Georgians, we commend your action in resenting an uncalled for insult.” In Detroit, Cobb’s latest troubles were the top story of the day. Mayor William Barlum Thompson said, “Cobb was perfectly right in resenting with his fists insulting remarks made from the stands.” William F. Connolly, a well-known Detroit political figure, called Ban Johnson “un-American” for denying Cobb his paycheck without a hearing, while Judge James Phelan dismissed the league president as a “swell-head.” One of Cobb’s most impressive defenses came from Hugh Fullerton, an influential sportswriter then with the Chicago Tribune: “Ty Cobb goes around the circuit year after year, singled out as the special mark by every violent fan, and he has learned to endure almost any kind of abuse possible. If the epithets and accusations made by the Highlander fan toward Cobb was half as bad as the Detroit players claim, it was a cause for violence. The wonder to me is that other spectators could sit and listen without taking a hand in it and beating up and throwing out the person using such language.”

  From other quarters, though, came sentiments much less Cobb-friendly. Preachers and teachers and newspaper editorial writers denounced him, sometimes vehemently, for his impulsive reaction. One could tell, by listening to this side of the argument—the “parental” point of view, let’s call it—that the role of the baseball player in society had changed. Over the past decade they had stopped being perceived as carnies and lowlifes from whom little was expected—Don’t lay around the house like a ballplayer, Eddie Cantor’s grandmother had told him—and were now thought of as role models, honor-bound to set an example for their youthful admirers by doing the right thing: in this case, turning the other cheek. Ironically, Cobb himself had more than once welcomed the “higher class of men” he saw streaming into the major leagues and pushing out the less serious player of his youth. Now the New York Times and other arbiters of public morality were condemning him—the man who led the league in presidential back-pats—for being no better than baseball’s vanishing Neanderthals. The Times was especially tough on Cobb in the wake of the Lucker affair. “When he hears the cheers from the multitude in the bleachers he is not offended,” its editorial said, “but when a few call him unpleasant names he takes the law into his own hands, because the league does not employ uniformed men to whip the offenders or shoot them.” The paper called Ban Johnson “brave” for banning Cobb and said “cordial praise is due him.”

  Leave it to a Goody Two-shoes like Christy Mathewson to come down somewhere in the middle, stating a balanced, conventionally wise position that might have gotten him elected commissioner of baseball (if such an office had existed) or governor of Pennsylvania (his home state) but did not necessarily contain much true wisdom. “Of course Cobb is a high-strung individual, who is more likely to resent remarks made to him from the stands than most players,” the Giants pitcher said, “but still the epithets that are applied to some of the fellows in some cities, especially those where no regular police are stationed, should be stopped. I, personally, think it is rather foolish to strike a spectator; not that some of them don’t have it coming to them, but the player invariably is the sufferer.” With all the hemming and hawing he had to do, it must have slipped Mathewson’s mind that in 1905 he’d punched a smart-alecky “lemonade boy” at Philadelphia’s National League Park, splitting the lad’s lip.

  Still, without knowing it, he was, in this statement, articulating a policy that would be invoked down through the decades every time a player and a spectator tussled. What happened in 1922, for example, when Babe Ruth chased a heckler through the aisles of the Polo Grounds and then, failing to catch him, stood on the dugout roof and challenged any fan in the stadium to a fight? Or when Ted Williams, on several occasions in 1956, spit at Boston fans? There was no hearing. Nobody asked what had gotten those famous men so angry, and over how long a period of time the provocation had dragged on. No, Ruth and Williams were simply and summarily punished. The customer is always right; the ballplayer, already overly favored by fortune, should have known better, always.

  Cobb’s Tigers teammates, however, were having none of that nice-sounding, politic stuff. In 1912 the ballpark was still a bit like the Wild West, with a code of conduct to govern relations between spectators and players very much a work in progress. The latter, believing they were evolving faster than the former, wanted owners to increase police presence in stadiums to control the behavior of the sometimes barely civilized cranks. Since they rarely initiated the h
arassment, they considered themselves the aggrieved parties and saw no reason to settle for the magnates’ feeble attempts at crowd control, which usually amounted to scheduling an occasional Ladies Day in hopes of diluting the testosterone. Ballplayers of that day were rallying around the issue of rowdyism more readily than even the hated reserve clause. There was no way Cobb’s teammates would stand for his being punished while Lucker thumbed (or somethinged) his nose at them. They were behind him from the moment he hopped the rail.

  Before that, actually.

  The story that Cobb was hated by his fellow Tigers, even long after the hazing stopped, has continued into the present, but in fact by 1912 his teammates had more or less learned to live with the idea of a resident superstar and with the reality of Ty in particular. They had come to realize that for their own mental health, they just had to accept that he’d always be drawing lines in the sand, overreacting and generally making things more complicated. His saving grace was that what he wanted for himself—the chance to opt out of spring training, for example—he wanted for everybody. A month before the Lucker incident, the team had checked into the Chicago Beach Hotel and he had promptly announced that he did not like his room, on account of its being too close to the railroad tracks out back. The noise, he said “upset my nerves—I am almost sick.” The management offered to make a change, but said a quieter room would not come open for seven hours or so—which only displeased Cobb further. Hughie Jennings offered to put him up, by himself, in any other hotel of his choosing, but Cobb rejected that solution, saying he wanted the whole team to pull out of the Chicago Beach so they could be together and at a quieter place. When Jennings declined to do that, Cobb stormed off and did not show up for the next day’s game against the White Sox, which the Tigers lost 12–7. Such bouts of brattiness were unprofessional and inexcusable, but they came packaged with a league-leading batting average and a style of base running like nothing previously seen, and if you didn’t excuse them what could you do? Besides, a good many of the less jealous players actively liked Cobb.

  In December of the previous year, about ten teammates had gone as a group to see him perform in The College Widow in Detroit, and after his curtain calls, while the rest of the audience was still present, they presented him with a “handsome traveling bag” as a token of their admiration for his mind-boggling 1911 season. All of those present and a few others, back home for the winter from various far-flung states—a group that, significantly, included Davy Jones and Sam Crawford—had contributed to the gift’s purchase. Pitcher Bill Donovan, the designated speaker, told a sheepish-looking Cobb that he hoped the suitcase “contained a lot of hits” and added “if Ty only runs the bases and cracks the old baseball in 1912 as well as he wins the college widow the American League pennant will float over the new Bennett Park next fall!”

  The possibility that the team as a whole would sit out in support of Cobb came up among the players as soon as Ban Johnson’s suspension came down, and they discussed it openly with the press. “The stand of the Detroit players has put to rout all talk of dissention in the ranks of the Tigers on account of the jealousy of Cobb,” said Sporting Life. Navin let his players know he agreed with them in principle, but he pleaded with them not to interrupt the season, saying that because he had just built a new half-million-dollar stadium he was in precarious financial straits. He needed the cash flow, and wanted desperately to avoid the $1,000-per-game fine that the league would impose on the club if it failed to follow the schedule. The Tigers took the train to Philadelphia, where on Friday, May 17, they played and beat the A’s 6–3 without Cobb in the lineup. Navin tried to assure the press that the moment of crisis had passed and that the problem could be solved via calm discussion. But even as he articulated this position, speaking to reporters, one paper noted, with a “very broad grin,” he and Jennings, with some help from A’s manager Connie Mack, were scouring the vicinity for sandlot and schoolboy players who might serve as strikebreakers if the Tigers walked out. The likelihood of that happening only became greater as the hours passed. On Friday night, the players, following another meeting, sent Ban Johnson this telegram:

  Feeling Mr. Cobb is being done an injustice by your action in suspending him we, the undersigned, refuse to play another game after today until such action is adjusted to our satisfaction. He was fully justified in his action as no one could take such personal abuse from anyone. We want him reinstated for tomorrow’s game, or there will be no game. If players cannot have protection, we must protect ourselves.

  Beneath this were the names of Crawford, Jones, and sixteen others—more than twice as many, by the way, as had signed the telegram of congratulations to Nap Lajoie for winning the “Chalmers Trophy” two years earlier. “We will stick together and win out,” Cobb told the papers.

  More than 20,000 came out to Shibe Park the next day, Saturday, May 18, to see what would happen. The Tigers, including Cobb, trotted out for batting practice. After a few moments, their first baseman Jim Delahanty asked the umpires, Ed Perrine and Bill Dinneen, if Cobb’s suspension had been lifted. When they replied that it had not, Delahanty waved his teammates off the field. Some went back to the hotel, some into the stands to watch the game between the Philadelphia Athletics and the “Detroit Tigers.” The first player strike in the history of major league baseball had begun.

  By virtue of their very appearance, the squad of substitutes, or if you prefer, scabs, that emerged from the Athletics’ clubhouse moments later struck a strong blow for organized labor. As noted by the future sportswriter Arthur “Bugs” Baer, who was among the twenty or so who suited up for the subs, “Any ballplayer who could stop a grapefruit from rolling uphill or hit a bull in the pants with a bass fiddle was given a chance of going direct from the semipros to the Detroits with no questions asked.” The ace of the ersatz Tigers was twenty-year-old Aloysius Travers, a seminarian who was not even the best pitcher on the St. Joseph’s College nine. Also on board was a thirty-one-year-old grifter who called himself Billy Maharg (a backward spelling of his real name, Graham) who in 1919 would become implicated in the Black Sox Scandal. It was, in other words, a crew of misfits worthy of a latter-day Hollywood sports comedy—and a Bad-News-Bearish film might have been made of the episode if only there had been the even slightest hint of something resembling a plot twist. But no, the fake Tigers didn’t score one for underdogs everywhere by beating the big bad big leaguers from Philadelphia. Nor did they, by dint of either wacky stunts, belief in their dreams, or old-fashioned self-reliance, come surprisingly close to carrying the day. Instead the future priest got shelled and found himself behind 8–0 after four innings, by which point a large portion of the crowd had requested a refund—and the man who wore Cobb’s (numberless) uniform, a future Philadelphia policeman named Bill Leinhauser, went 0-for-4 and had a fly ball bounce off his head. The final score was Athletics 24, “Tigers” 2.

  The game only added fuel to the debate. The editorial board of the Detroit Free Press thought the idea of the players banding together to protect themselves was just fine. “The Tigers were perfectly right in doing as they did in Philadelphia,” the paper said. “Ban Johnson has been inviting rebellion on the part of the ball players. Now he has it. . . . Only good can come from the affair.” The Sporting News came down forcefully on the side of the owners and blamed Cobb for the trouble. It called him “a natural insurrectionist, pre-disposed to take the law into his own hands.” The New York Times also weighed in angrily on behalf of management. Comparing the players strike to a mutiny of soldiers and then, somewhat less stirringly, to a mutiny of bank clerks, it said “The sole underlying cause of [the Tigers’ action] is the growing resentment of all authority and discipline throughout the world.”

  There was no Sunday baseball in Pennsylvania, but Ban Johnson called off the Monday game, then came to Philadelphia, where he assembled the Tiger players in his apparently spacious hotel room and told them they would each be fined $100 per game if they continued to strike. T
hey remained resolute—until, later that day, Cobb, saying he was concerned about their financial hardship, urged them to go back to work. On Tuesday, in Washington, they returned to the field and beat Walter Johnson and the Senators, as they were now called, 2–0. As part of the settlement negotiations, their fine was reduced to $50 per man for the Philadelphia game they had boycotted. Cobb accepted a ten-day suspension and a $50 fine and the league said it would “take measures” to protect the players. (Not happy with Johnson’s penchant for vagueness, an American Leaguer–turned–lawyer named Dave Fultz started the Baseball Players’ Fraternity later that year. Cobb agreed to serve as one of four vice presidents, a mostly honorary title that showed he backed the organization’s modest goals of increased security and more favorable waiver rules for those whose teams no longer wanted them. Partly because it failed to focus on the reserve clause, the biggest obstacle to a player ever earning his true market value, the BPT never gained traction and within a few years had disbanded.)