The next time the Tigers came through New York, in July, many predicted that Yankee fans would try to seek retribution on Lucker’s behalf. They needn’t have fretted. Nothing ugly occurred, but thriving in the uneasy atmosphere, as usual, Cobb reached first via a single in the first inning, then came all the way in to score when Crawford singled behind him—it was the first of Cobb’s four hits that day. A week later, returning to the scene of the strike in Philadelphia, he had seven consecutive hits over the course of a doubleheader, and left town batting .430 for the season.
• • •
From a financial standpoint, at least, Cobb was now becoming comfortable. That autumn, he would ask for $15,000 a year, and then, after holding out until the second week of the 1913 season, sign for $12,000, which still made him the highest-paid player in the game (Lajoie’s salary had dropped to $9,000). Feeling himself to be beyond grin-and-grip appearances at state fairs, and touring theater companies, he became instead, for the most part, an investor. He would still do a little barnstorming under the right circumstances, and lend his name to products such as a tonic called Nuxated Iron, but basically his off-season “activities” now centered around owning stock—in the Augusta Chronicle and Coca-Cola, and, before long, on the recommendation of the important men he was meeting in Detroit, General Motors as well, investments that over the decades made him rich. At twenty-six, he was a director of the First National Bank of Lavonia, Georgia, and a partner in a sporting goods retailer, W. B. Jarvis, that had stores in Detroit and Grand Rapids. He was also acquiring farmland in south Georgia and residential real estate.
His mother, Amanda, considered him a success, and said as much. “I am not so proud of Ty for the name he made for himself,” she told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times in July of 1912, “as I am that he grew up, left home, made hundreds of new friends and always remembered me. Every opportunity he gets he likes to send me some little greeting and he likes to run home whenever he gets a vacation.” In April of 1913, Ty and Charlie would buy a two-story house just off Walton Way, near what is now the main entrance to Augusta State University. Out back it had a stable for a horse or two and kennels for his beloved hunting dogs. It was not palatial, but it was handsome and airy, a sign to himself and the world that he was more than just another ballplayer. From certain angles, his life there looked idyllic. “He hunts, he shoots, he plays poker and he reads, all very much after the style that he plays baseball,” said a profile of him that ran in the Boston Globe. “His wife is a Georgia girl and they have two children, a boy and a girl.” On a typical off-season morning, Ty would linger over the morning paper, smoking a cigar, preferring not to be disturbed, then spend a couple of hours playing with his and the neighbor’s kids. (When I visited the house in 2011 with Don Rhodes, author of Ty Cobb: Safe at Home, an Augusta-centric biography, the current owner showed me the termite-scarred remains of a child-size baseball bat dating back to Cobb’s time that she had found behind the furnace.) Yet the externals of Cobb’s life could be misleading, especially if they suggested true and deep contentment. He was always at least a bit anxious about one thing or another and no wonder. Newsworthy stuff kept happening to him.
On August 11, 1912, as he and Charlie were rushing from their home in Detroit at 103 Commonwealth to Michigan Central Station to catch a train for an exhibition game in Syracuse, New York, their open Chalmers was set upon by three hoodlums. The men were, Cobb said, “partly under the influence of liquor” and carried knives. As the car was traveling down a quiet side street, the men hopped on the running board and in some hard-to-place foreign accent, Cobb later said, demanded money. A struggle ensued and Cobb was stabbed on the shoulder. His wound wasn’t serious but somehow the Detroit News got wind of the incident and blew it up into something worthy of a special edition. For an hour or so that evening, newsboys were standing on Detroit street corners hollering “Extra! Extra! Ty Cobb Is Dying!” “The murder of a president or a report that an alderman had refused a bribe scarcely could have upset things more,” said the rival Free Press.
Laughing about it on the phone from Syracuse, Cobb told the Free Press that the men had quickly realized who he was, got scared, and ran away. Was it really as simple as that, though? Some speculated that the men were goons hired by Tom Foley to punish if not kill Cobb for what he’d done to Lucker. Others said it had something to do with a dispute between Cobb and a clubhouse attendant known as Scabby over a craps game. Cobb himself confused the issue by telling the Syracuse Post-Dispatch a much more self-aggrandizing tale than the one he’d told the Free Press, one in which he had his three attackers subdued and begging for mercy.
Nor do the accounts of the mugging end there. Decades later Cobb’s ghostwriter and biographer, Al Stump, came up with two more, one for each of his Cobb books. In the latter one, written when Cobb was no longer around to dispute things, he claims that Cobb told him that he chased down the ringleader of the trio and pistol-whipped him with the Belgian Luger that he always carried. Cobb “slashed away until the man’s face was faceless. Left him there, not breathing, in his own rotten blood,” Stump wrote in his inimitable style. “Cobb believed he killed this mugger. A few days later a press report told of an unidentified body found off Trumbull in an alley.” In 1996, two years after Stump’s book came out, however, an ex-Syracuse prosecutor and forensics expert named Doug Roberts investigated Stump’s claim of an unidentified body being found, and wrote, in an exhaustive piece published in the National Baseball Research Journal, that there had been no such “press reports” nor did the Wayne County coroner during this period process a corpse that could by any stretch have been one of Cobb’s attackers.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the attempted carjacking, or whatever it was, was that Cobb got off the train in Syracuse, went directly to the stadium, had his wound cleaned and dressed, and then got three hits in a Detroit victory over a team from the New York State League. From there the Tigers traveled to Manhattan for a game against the Yankees. Their luggage was lost, though, and they had to make do with borrowed New York road uniforms and, said the Free Press, “ill-fitting, unbroken footwear” hurriedly bought for the occasion or perhaps supplied by the Yanks. Playing in those cruel shoes, Cobb had two of the club’s three hits that day and in the field “killed off a couple of triples by the most remarkable catches seen in a decade.”
Faced with adversity, he produced gems. Was he the Peach or the Oyster?
* * *
* * *
PART THREE
* * *
* * *
— CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO —
STANDING ON TOP OF THE dugout, Cobb faced the cheering fans and—though he would need to say a few words to them, and at the age of almost thirty-two, still hated public speaking—smiled. His manager for the last eleven years, Hughie Jennings, stood, or rather, danced next to him, in his celebratory “Ee-Yah Man” style, his increasingly shaky hold on the team not a issue just then, his complexion, in actuality somewhere between “florid” and “jaundiced,” today striking one sportswriter swept up in the happy moment as a fine “healthy tan.” It was that rare thing for a team whose fate it had been for almost ten years to help form the pack behind the annual pennant winner: a feel-good moment. People cheered and applauded the two Tigers, even though this was the Polo Grounds, in those days after Hilltop but before the stadium, New York Yankees turf.
It was a strange time in baseball. The date was August 24, 1918, smack in the middle of both the influenza pandemic that would kill more than 50 million people around the globe, and America’s involvement in World War I, and for that summer at least the championship season seemed to many a trifling matter. “I don’t believe people care to see a lot of big, healthy young men on the field playing ball,” Cobb had said two months earlier, “while their sons and brothers are abroad risking their lives to conquer the Huns.” The U.S. government had two months earlier declared baseball a “nonessential industry” for the duration of the war, and th
e magnates were preparing to shut down the season early, by Labor Day, a move that they portrayed as patriotic, but which in fact had more to do with sagging attendance and a scarcity of good men as players signed up (or were drafted) for service and several minor leagues went bust.
The Tigers’ season would end (symbolically if not literally; there were actually two more games) with a squadron of military “aeroplanes” flying acrobatically over Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis and Cobb and George Sisler, the phenomenal young first baseman for the Browns, pitching. But that surreal finale was still a week away. On this hot and humid Saturday afternoon in New York there was a speech to be made, and between halves of a doubleheader against the Yankees, Cobb clambered atop what is every ballpark’s natural podium to say his piece. At the sight of him and his manager the crowd first stood and gave a prolonged ovation, then, sensing he was not a commanding speaker, quieted itself. “We all have to help the war effort!” Cobb said in his high-pitched voice. “We should all buy war savings stamps—I’ve just bought $250 worth myself!” Then, once their cheers subsided, he gave them even bigger news: he had enlisted in the Army, he said. He would have not just some show job like coaching the baseball team, but would work in the “hazardous gas and chemical division,” an outfit more dangerous than the infantry. He expected to be in France by the end of October. There was a very good chance, he added, that whatever happened to him Over There, fighting Fritz, they might never see him in a baseball uniform again.
One imagines a moment of silence—this was a surprise that needed a second to sink in—followed by a lusty roar, not just for his bravery but for the spectators’ own good fortune. Baseball fans are always delighted to stumble upon a historic moment, like Merkle’s Boner or Ruth’s Called Shot. Now the 8,000 in attendance that afternoon could someday proudly say, along with five or six million other baseball fanatics, “I was there when Cobb retired.”
Apart from being a rare joyous interval for the jungaleers, it was for Cobb an even odder juncture, a time when he faced no opposition—not from his fellow players, a front-office father figure, a stodgy league president, a perfidious press: not even from a grandstand full of Yankee cranks. “The crowd cheered and yelled as lustily as it ever did for one of Ty’s long drives,” said the Milwaukee Sentinel. It was not, as things turned out, the end of an era—it was not even the interruption of a career—but it made perfect emotional sense to think that it might have been. There was a certain logic to the idea of him exiting the stage now, after thirteen seasons. He was, as much as anyone ever is, a fully formed man, and a baseball player with nothing left to prove, as well as a wee bit past his prime. In the six seasons since Cobb had charged into the stands at Hilltop Park to beat up an obnoxious disabled man much had happened in his life, but little had changed fundamentally.
As Fred Lieb, the Herodotus of the Detroit Baseball and Amusement Co., writes in The Detroit Tigers, “The season of 1913 was pretty much a duplicate of 1912, another sixth-placer, with the percentage dipping from .451 to .431. . . . Cobb again provided such artistic success as there was. He won the batting crown for the seventh successive season. Again it was a tussle with Joe Jackson, and at the finish Ty led by the usual margin. . . . Cobb wound up with .390 to the shoeless one’s .373.” (Jackson would be his main rival for the batting crown from 1911 to 1920.) A more telling stat, however, was that Cobb finished third in stolen bases that year (with 51), behind Clyde Milan of Washington (75) and Philadelphia’s Eddie Collins (55). The decline can be explained in part by leg injuries. He jammed his right knee while running the bases in late June at League Park in Cleveland, and soon afterward in Chicago shortstop Buck Weaver came down on the same swollen joint with his spikes, putting Cobb on the sidelines except for pinch hitting duties for the next week. (Trying to ease himself back into the lineup, he convinced Jennings to let him play second base, but after one game, in which he made three errors on five easy chances in a loss to the Athletics, the experiment was abandoned.)
Another factor in the steals decline was that his season didn’t begin that year until April 30, owing to a months-long salary squabble marked by bitter public statements. Navin, knowing that Cobb hated being depicted as a troublemaker, told the press in mid-April that the dispute was over discipline, not money.
Mr. Cobb did not make baseball; baseball made him. A player cannot be bigger than the game which creates him. To give in to Mr. Cobb now in his present attitude would be to concede that he is greater than the game itself, for he has set all its laws at defiance.
If Mr. Cobb doesn’t like a room a hotel clerk gives him he quits the club for a week. If he doesn’t like what a silly man in the grandstand yells at him he punches his face and is again out of the game. . . . If he doesn’t feel like practicing he stays away from the park. He believes that his greatness precludes his being subject to club discipline. I think Mr. Cobb eventually will recognize his fault—until he does there can be no understanding between us.
At first Cobb said “I shall make no comment” about Navin’s accusations, “which were meant to mold public opinion against me.” And for a few days he stayed mum and kept up his regular schedule, which that spring had included a bit of barnstorming in the South with a team of “All-Stars,” and community-service events like a dinner for the Animal Welfare Committee of the Twentieth Century Club, and an appearance at the state prison in Atlanta with opera singer Enrico Caruso. He must have been brooding about Navin’s characterization of him, though, because before long he issued a lengthy, signed statement that accused the owner of “blackening my name as a ballplayer.” In it Cobb claimed that he was hardly the only Tiger who missed an occasional practice and asked why if his alleged offenses had been so disruptive to the team’s spirit was he not punished at the time they occurred. Cobb got support in his position from members of the U.S. Congress, particularly Representative Thomas Hardwick of the Augusta area, who criticized the Tigers for not showing the Georgia Peach the proper respect, and, more significant to Navin and his fellow magnates, vowed to revive dormant antitrust legislation that could, if passed, lead to a radical restructuring of major league baseball. Not long after Hardwick made that threat, Navin broke the stalemate by inviting Cobb to meet with him in Detroit to settle the matter, just as he had done five years earlier. Sitting face-to-face, the two took only a couple of hours to come to terms, and when Cobb signed his contract for 1913 he said, “This will be my last holdout.”
It turned out to be a dreary year for Cobb, one in which he frequently despaired over the mediocrity of the club, and fantasized about being traded to New York, Boston, or Philadelphia—and did a lot of sighing. On a rainy June afternoon in Syracuse, where the Tigers had gone for their annual exhibition game against a team from the New York State League, he was described by the Free Press as holed up in his hotel and “spending most of the day writing letters in the seclusion of his boudoir.” Yet by the end of the season he had worked his way through the gloom and he and Navin were as solid as they had ever been. When one day Navin opened a letter from Washington manager Clark Griffith and found a check for $100,000 and a note saying, in effect, All I want for this is Ty Cobb, Navin wrote back to say his star was not for sale. After Cobb signed a $15,000 contract for 1914 that December, he wrote Navin something that sounds a little like a love note:
Since our talk in New York [where they both went to watch the A’s-Giants World Series], where we came to understand each other so well, I have only one thought in mind, how foolish I think I have been ever to think of leaving Detroit to play on some other team. I am entirely satisfied with the conditions under which I am playing in Detroit, due to your generous treatment, and I hope that I shall remain with the Tigers as long as I am able to play the game. I am absolutely satisfied with Detroit. I like the city, the fans and the management of the club. My treatment by the owners of the club has been of the very best and I want the fans to know that I am loyal to them and to you. You undoubtedly have seen several stories in th
e papers recently about trouble between me and the club, but I don’t know how they originated. The offer you made me in New York has greatly pleased me and I want to take this opportunity of thanking you. Please give the letter, or any part of it to the press. Go as strong as you want with it and I’ll stand back of every word.
Was this a sign of a kinder, gentler Cobb? Was he finally mellowing? Not yet. For the duration of his career, he never stopped getting into scuffles (or worse), unable as he often was to ignore even the slightest hint of provocation. In late August of 1914, for example, he barged into the Senators’ clubhouse after a game at National Park, and a few moments later found himself in a furious “grappling contest” with Washington pitcher Joe Engel. The Tigers tried to pass it off as “friendly” roughhousing, but Engel needed five stitches after Cobb “forced him heavily against one of the doors of a locker,” said the Washington Post, and neither combatant would subsequently comment on the affair. It was probably over something that had happened that day on the field, though; most of Cobb’s spats fit with the tit-for-tat testiness that marked those deadball days. Two weeks after the Engel episode, back at Navin Field, he slid so hard into White Sox third baseman Jim Breton that he almost knocked him unconscious—a payback for the day before, when Breton, an ex–football player according to the Pittsburgh Press, tackled and held him down while he was trying to round the bag and run home. That was the way the game was played. No hard feelings. Most of the time.
Ty Cobb Page 32