Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Cobb never hazed youngsters in the aggressive, quasi-formal way that he himself had been hazed, but, like a lot of veterans he demanded that players know their place in the pecking order. Yannigans had better tread carefully around him, and anything less than outright reverence from a busher would be punished. Rutledge Osborne, a second baseman for the Wofford College nine, learned this lesson the hard way. When in early 1913, Cobb’s “Georgia All-Stars” crossed paths with the Wofford Terriers in Spartanburg, South Carolina, during a brief barnstorming tour, the cocky Osborne used the occasion to taunt and tease Cobb, in what seemed like an attempt to impress the hometown crowd. Cobb said little that day, but shortly thereafter, when Wofford and the “Stars” met up again in Greenville for a second game, he noticed Osborne on the hotel elevator—and dragged him off and into his room, where, the student later said, “he demanded an apology.” Instead, Osborne drew a pistol and in the ensuing melee he was beaten up rather badly, both by Cobb and some of Cobb’s teammates, who had come running when they heard the commotion.

  “The Hotel as Battlefield” could be the title of a chapter in a history of those days. Although ballplayers, because they fought and caroused more or less constantly, were usually limited to the second- or third-best place in town, one of Cobb’s most famous battles occurred at the luxurious Oriental Hotel in Dallas. It was in March of 1917, when the Tigers and Giants were playing a series of exhibition games in Fort Worth. The trouble started when Charlie “Buck” Herzog, the New York utility infielder, rode Cobb hard during batting practice for spending the morning on the golf course and showing up late. That night at the Oriental, where both clubs were staying, Cobb told Herzog “that he would do well to stay off me.” But the next day Herzog, who had a reputation for being irritating, resumed the goading, and in the third inning, after Cobb had singled, he attempted to steal second and “came in a little high” and spiked Herzog (who had been blocking the base path) in the quadriceps. The two rolled in the dirt a while, too close to each other to throw meaningful punches, until they were separated by teammates and dragged to their respective dugouts. But that wasn’t the end of it. A few hours later, while Cobb was having dinner at the hotel, Herzog, said the New York Times, “went over to Cobb’s table and notified the Detroit star that he would call on him in his room, and they would settle their differences.” The affair had the trappings of a duel. Both men even agreed to bring seconds—Giants infielder Heinie Zimmerman for Herzog; Detroit trainer Harry Tuthill for Cobb.

  The Times report is written so assuredly, and with such detail, as to suggest its (uncredited) reporter had a bedside seat:

  After a few words the belligerents threw off their coats and proceeded to dust off the furniture with each other. The result was a foregone conclusion, as Herzog weighs only 147 pounds while Cobb weighs not far from 200 pounds. Herzog was worsted in the encounter, Cobb knocking him down two or three times, cutting him up about the face, and dislodging a couple of teeth. Tuthill and Zimmerman watched the scrap, and when it had gone what they considered far enough they separated the combatants, who then shook hands and declared a truce.

  A few moments later, in the lobby, Cobb ran into Giants manager John McGraw, who “proceeded to give him a tongue lashing,” presumably about his behavior on the field that day. After listening for a few moments, “Cobb kept his temper and walked away” from the already legendary skipper without saying a word. Before he retired for the evening he told a group of reporters that he would not play against the Giants again that spring “because I don’t want to be the goat.” The next morning, with Jennings’s approval, he left to work out with the Reds in Cincinnati. “He is too valuable a piece of property to be brawling around with men who have less to risk,” said the manager, “and I am glad he is going to be removed from this atmosphere.”

  The Reds that year were being managed by the retired Christy Mathewson, who was writing a syndicated newspaper column on the side. As soon as Cobb arrived he interviewed him about the Herzog incident. Cobb said he was “extremely sorry” about what had happened. “I did not want to get in a jam with him and I didn’t want to hurt Herzog. I shouldn’t have minded but he got my goat and I lost my temper, and I realize I have a bad one, especially on the ball field.”

  Reading the accounts of a famous fight Cobb had with a Detroit grocer in 1914, one gets a sense of how close to the boiling point he always was. This drama unfolded on the evening of June 20, a Saturday, after a game in which Cobb had walked twice in four times up as the Tigers beat the visiting Senators 1–0. Arriving home from Navin Field with Washington manager Clark Griffith, Walter Johnson (by then a close friend of Cobb’s), and several other Senator players—who said opponents did not fraternize so much in those days?—he found his wife, Charlie, upset over an argument she’d had with one William Carpenter, proprietor of the Progressive Market, on nearby Hamilton Boulevard. She had called the merchant to say that a small piece of fish she had bought from his shop appeared spoiled. We don’t know how he responded initially, but his tone was not friendly, and when she replied that owing to his attitude she would not be shopping with him again he said, “I’m glad of it, because I don’t want your trade.” It was only a few minutes after Charlie told him this story that Cobb was standing in the Progressive Market with a .32 automatic revolver.

  Pointing to the telephone with his gun, he told Carpenter that he should call Mrs. Cobb and apologize. This much was done, but just as he was hanging up, and Cobb was calming down, one of the store’s butchers, Carpenter’s twenty-year-old brother-in-law, Howard Harding, walked in, saw what was happening, grabbed a meat cleaver, and ordered Cobb to leave. It is not clear whether he recognized his famous customer, but Cobb said, “he seemed to want trouble and I gave him what he was looking for.” After handing his firearm to a bystander, a teenage boy who worked in a neighboring store, he went outside with Harding and began trading blows. Cobb soon had Harding down on the sidewalk and was about to hit him again when Carpenter intervened, closely followed by the police, who led both combatants into a paddy wagon for transportation to the Bethune Avenue station. They were released later that evening. In an interview with the Free Press the next day, Carpenter could barely contain his outrage at the special treatment he thought Cobb was receiving. “If no criminal action is taken against him I’ll institute a civil suit, for slander, based upon the epithets that Cobb hurled at me,” Carpenter said. “I think it is my duty to the public to have Cobb suppressed, and I’m willing to do all I can to suppress him. He’s dangerous when he gets mad. I think he’s unsafe. He gets mad just like a child and he is just as easily soothed. He quieted right down when I apologized.”

  Many who know something about Cobb, but don’t know quite enough, file this incident under “hate crime” or “bigotry.” For this we can blame biographer Charles Alexander, who, just as he did with the Euclid Hotel brawl, gives the incident unwarranted racial overtones by describing one of the principals—in this case, Howard Harding (whom he calls Harold Harding)—as “a young black man.” How he came to think Harding was not white is difficult to say. The young man is never referred to as a Negro in contemporary accounts, and his race is noted with a legible W on federal census forms. Alexander’s errors have found many willing ears. We should not be surprised. Monsters intrigue us.

  At the police station Cobb was “released,” said the Free Press, “on the personal bond of W. G. Chittenden, one of the proprietors of the Pontchartrain Hotel.” Carpenter it seems was on to something when he spoke of favoritism. Detroit police commissioner John Gillespie said that while Cobb perhaps did not strictly speaking have a permit to carry the revolver he brought to the Progressive Market, he had the informal permission of the city to own the gun, based on his status and tendency of some people to pick on celebrities. It was that kind of thinking that caused Carpenter to press charges. On June 24, a warrant was issued for Cobb for disturbing the peace. The next day he pled guilty in Justice Court and paid a $50 fine, the max
imum. The laws of physics were harsher on him still: he had fractured his precious right thumb on Harding’s working-class head and would be out of the lineup for nearly two months. He said, as he usually did in such situations, that he felt “keenly disgraced” by his actions, and he apologized to his family.

  He might have also apologized to the club. During his absence, the Tigers, who had been in first place in late May, went 17–25 and dropped far out of the pennant race. Not everything had gone so badly in 1914 for Detroit. Thanks to Navin’s expert negotiating the team had repelled most advances from the Federal League, a rival outfit that was begun the year before, and before it went out of business in 1915 had succeeded in jacking up player salaries across the board while siphoning off 20 percent of the American League’s attendance. Not only did the Tigers not lose anyone valuable to “the Feds,” they acquired during this time two excellent Harrys, one an outfielder, the other a pitcher. Harry Coveleski, a tall southpaw from the coal-mining hamlet of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, had a meteoric rise with the Phillies in 1908, then developed arm problems that put him back in the minors. A complicated fellow, he was said to have a crippling aversion to the song “Sweet Adeline,” which when hummed by his opponents in a way that mimicked a trombone, the historian Fred Lieb tells us, caused him to come apart emotionally, the way Rube Waddell did when you showed him a puppy. By the time a Tigers scout spotted Coveleski playing for Chattanooga of the Southern Association in 1913 he had reinvented himself: now he was a rubber-limbed workhorse (he’d pitched 32 complete games for the Lookouts, winning 28 of them) with a crippling aversion to the song “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” Go figure. Before his arm went bad again, and all the mean tromboning overwhelmed him, he went 65–36 with a 2.30 ERA for the Tigers over the following three years.

  The other Harry, Heilmann, would last longer and prove to be a key figure in Tigers history. Navin heard about the nineteen-year-old San Francisco kid when he was hitting .300 for the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League, and signed him for $1,500 (the Beavers had signed him for a spaghetti dinner, so that was a step up). The plan was to have him replace Sam Crawford, who turned thirty-four that year and was getting slow and expensive, in right field. Heilmann, still an awkward adolescent, wasn’t ready to do that in 1914, but after a year or so of seasoning back in the PCL with the San Francisco Seals, he returned and became a pretty fair hitter for the Tigers—and then, over the next three years, he became a great one. “Slug,” as he was known, more for his lack of foot speed than for his home run production, hit above .390 four times for Detroit, including 1923, when he hit .403. Some said he had a tense relationship with Cobb, the only Tiger to exceed his .342 lifetime batting average. But in what amounted to a deathbed interview, given in 1951, shortly after Cobb had written him to leak the news that he had been elected to the Hall of Fame, Heilmann said it was Cobb’s coaching that transformed him from a .280 hitter into a star. “Cobb was a great teacher of batting,” he told H. G. Salsinger. “He taught me everything I knew. There was never anyone like him and there will never be another.” In time Heilmann, Cobb, and Bobby Veach would form one of baseball’s best all-time outfields, but not even the three of them could save the Tigers from finishing fourth in 1914.

  The enduring mediocrity of the Tigers did not tarnish Cobb, who was by then baseball royalty. “Ty Cobb is Henry Ford’s assistant in the job of keeping Detroit in the headlines,” wrote the syndicated columnist George Fitch. “Caruso couldn’t fill Detroit’s ballpark once in a lifetime, but Ty Cobb has been doing it for years.” He had come into the big leagues almost a decade earlier with what seemed like a shockingly naive—or maybe it was insane—style of play and in spite of peer pressure and direct advice to do things more conventionally he had modified his methods only sparingly—and achieved thrilling and unprecedented results. Special exceptions were for him the rule; he could get away with almost anything. Ban Johnson declared that his meager total of 345 at-bats that year was enough for him to qualify for the batting title, which he won, with an average of .368, for the seventh straight time. Nor was he done putting up big numbers. The next season, 1915, was arguably his overall best: he hit .369, knocked in 99 runs, and stole 96 bases. “I always regretted that I didn’t make it a hundred steals,” Cobb said. Such were his regrets.

  The only player who came close to overshadowing him (now that Honus Wagner, in his late thirties, had slowed drastically) was Tris Speaker, the center fielder for the Boston Red Sox. Speaker, who played a very short center, close behind the second baseman, was generally considered a better fielder than Cobb and was almost as good a hitter. He was a proven winner, too, having helped lead Boston to the world championship in 1912. What the pride of Hubbard, Texas, lacked was charisma. Boston Braves manager George Stallings once told Sporting Life that Speaker was “a greater baseball player than Ty Cobb overall—but not a star. In my opinion, a star is a player who makes his individual work stand out. Ty Cobb is a star.” Indeed in 1916 Cobb became the first ballplayer to be offered the lead role in a feature film. Lost to history now, Somewhere in Georgia, with a script by Grantland Rice, was a silent six-reeler that told the story of a Detroit Tigers rookie who gets kidnapped by a crooked bank clerk. Shot in a few weeks on Staten Island, it was not a blockbuster, but the film did demonstrate that Cobb had transcended baseball.

  Everyone in America knew who he was, and to prove it a newspaper in Syracuse, New York, asked its editorial cartoonist to draw a picture of a necktie and another of a corncob on the face of an envelope. The piece, with no other markings on it, was dropped in the mail and a few days later it reached the home of Ty Cobb in Augusta.

  — CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE —

  EARLY IN THE YEAR NOW under discussion—1915—a Detroit resident on trial for prostitution was asked by the judge if she could name the governor of Michigan, and when she lit up and hollered “Ty Cobb!” he banged his gavel and let her go. I mention this only because I wonder if Hughie Jennings, the manager of the Tigers, had a picture of this woman, or someone like her, leaving the Pontchartrain Hotel through a side door with team owner Frank Navin. How else to explain Hughie’s continuing employment? The club hadn’t won a pennant since 1909, his players groused about his dubious leadership skills (a problem tied to his drinking), and as far back as 1911 Navin could be heard making what sounded like pre-firing grumbles. “I’m not at all satisfied with the way things are going,” he told the sportswriters. “Jennings appears to have lost hold on his men. They seem to have no confidence in his judgment. Our pitchers have been handled poorly and the team has shown little science. In fact, under Jennings we have always won on the abilities of our players, rather than by strategy.” The only thing more ominous would have been the dreaded “vote of confidence” each skipper receives while his replacement is being fitted for his uniform. And yet five disappointing finishes later, Jennings was not only still around but making about $10,000. He was also, along with Cobb, partners with Navin in the ownership of the Providence Grays, a minor league club to which a nineteen-year-old pitcher named Babe Ruth had been sent the previous season after a few less than satisfactory games with the Boston Red Sox.

  What kept Hughie in the owner’s good graces? If we can rule out blackmail, then it likely had something to do with the fact that he was a salt-of-the-earth sort, a lovable leftover from the riotous old Orioles who was much esteemed around the league. Navin’s fellow magnates were always saying things like “I’d snatch up ol’ Hughie in a moment if the Tigers ever let him go.” Whether they meant this or not, it may have convinced Navin that his manager was more valuable than he sometimes seemed, dancing around the coaching box, punctuating his incessant patter (Atta boy, Ty; Way to go, Ty; Way to hit the ball, Tyrus) with strange little Ee-Yah yelps. Or perhaps it was Hughie’s ability to always win just enough games that kept him in his job. It was indeed the rare season when the Tigers weren’t at or close to the top for at least a little while, fanning the flame of hope.

  F
or a considerable stretch of 1915, it looked as if Navin’s patience was finally paying off. As Fred Lieb wrote, the Tigers that season appeared to have coalesced into pennant contenders again. “The outfield was really a punishing affair—Bobby Veach came fast that year, hit .313 and bombarded the fences with 40 doubles and 10 triples. And Crawford still had plenty of dynamite in his cudgel; he just missed .300, finishing with .299, and was second to Ty (.369) in number of hits [183 as compared to 208].” Hughie meanwhile packed the infield with the baseball equivalent of Styrofoam peanuts—necessary but interchangeable utility men like Ralph “Pep” Young and Ossie Vitt—and for pitchers he had not just Coveleski but the righties George “Hooks” Dauss and Jean Dubuc, a long-forgotten trio who that year combined to win 63 games. It is no wonder the team went 18–7 at the start and spent most of the season either in first place or, as Lieb put it, “a short mashie pitch from the top” behind the Boston Red Sox.

  The revitalized Tigers and Cobb seemed to inspire each other. Although he had said in spring training (he was there from the start for a change) that he planned to take it easy on the base paths in 1915, in order to give his battle-scarred legs a break, he wound up running more often, and more successfully, than ever before. In June alone he stole home five times. “Look, there he goes!” said the supposedly stodgy New York Times on the fifth steal:

  Ty Cobb is loose again on a base-galloping spree. He romps to first on a single. Slim Caldwell pitches to Nunamaker, and the ball nestles in his big mitt. Cobb, a few feet off first suddenly bolts into action and races to second. Nunamaker, amazed at the Georgian’s daring, stands dumbfounded.

  He throws the ball to Dan Boone just as the Southern Flyer jumps into second base. The steel spikes flash in the waning sun and Cobb is lost in a cloud of dust. Nunamaker’s nervous toss rolls into center field, and the Georgia Gem bounds to his feet and tears to third. He’s as safe as the Bank of England. Cobb’s sarcastic smile angers his hoodwinked opponents.