Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Now the speed-crazed comet dashes up and down the third-base line, trying to rattle Caldwell. Will Cobb have the nerve to try to steal home? You said it; he will. Caldwell doesn’t think so. No one thinks so, but Cobb. The Yanks’ lanky pitcher hurls the ball at the batsman like a rifle ball. As the ball left his hand Cobb bounded over the ground like a startled deer.

  At the plate crouched Nunamaker. He was so surprised that he didn’t know his own name. Cobb dashed through the air toward the scoring pan. His lithe body swerved away from Nunamaker’s reach and clouds of dirt kicked up by his spikes blinded the eyes of Nunamaker, Caldwell and Silk O’Loughlin.

  The umpire ruled that the catcher didn’t touch Cobb. He also ruled that Cobb hadn’t touched the plate. While the Yankee players were protesting, Cobb sneaked around the bunch and touched the plate.

  A smart young feller, this same Cobb. Caldwell threw his glove high in the air in derision at O’Loughlin’s decision. Cobb pulled the wool over their eyes like a “sharper” unloading mining stock on a Rube. Caldwell was put out of the game for being mad that Cobb had outwitted him.

  And so on.

  But if the Tigers were really headed back to the World Series that year, they had to go through the Red Sox. Boston had finished second the previous year, when the Athletics won the pennant, but now that Connie Mack had been forced—by the financial constraints caused by the Federal League, he said—to sell off his star players, the Red Sox were widely considered the team to beat in the AL, and they played to expectations, holding down first place in the standings from the middle of May onward. It doesn’t always work this way in baseball, but the most successful team in the league also had the most talent: future Hall of Famers Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, and Herb Pennock; might-have-been Hall members Smoky Joe Wood and Carl Mays; and in Bill Carrigan a manager whom Ruth said was “the best I ever played for.” Besides being good they were a colorful (if not always lovable) bunch. Ruth, a left-handed pitcher then, less than two years out of a Baltimore orphanage, was already becoming famous for his Falstaffian appetites and guileless charm. Mays, a right-handed “submariner” who scraped his knuckles on the mound when he threw his exaggerated signature pitch, was a “strange, cynical figure,” wrote F. C. Lane, the editor of Baseball Magazine, who “aroused more ill-will, more positive resentment, than any other ballplayer on record” due to his “sarcastic” attitude with teammates, and his tendency to throw at opponents’ heads. Hubert “Dutch” Leonard, another headhunter, was described by historian David Jones as “a hard-throwing, spectacularly talented left-hander” who was “regarded as a selfish, cowardly player by many of his contemporaries.” And Tris Speaker, a veritable riot of biases, brawled constantly with the Roman Catholics on the club and confided to Lieb that he was a proud Ku Klux Klansman.

  The Red Sox and Tigers played six series during the 1915 season, a total of 22 games, and while some were pitchers’ duels and some were slugfests, some one-sided floggings and some nail-biters, all were bench-clearing brawls waiting to happen. Players trash-talked trashier than usual. Batters, especially Detroit batters, constantly complained to umpires that balls were being tampered with, and demanded that they be replaced. Fans, or to be more precise Boston fans, showered the field with bottles and what the sportswriters described as “hard wads of paper,” most of them aimed at Cobb. Both managers, but especially Jennings, used an extraordinary number of pitchers. Clearly something extra was at stake, and something had to give. Both teams expected to win the pennant, Boston because it inherited the leadership position abdicated by the Athletics, the Tigers because they had the best player in baseball, they felt overdue—and they had gotten off to such a swell start. And yet in each home city decidedly different emotions hung in the balance. If the Red Sox failed to make it to the Series they would be disappointed by their second straight second-place finish, but they would most likely regard it as a very frustrating delay. The Tigers, meanwhile, were older, their self-image easier to shatter. For them, no pennant meant starting over and even those on the team who had the time lacked the psychological energy to rebuild practically from scratch.

  The first time the teams faced each other that year, on May 11 at Navin Field, the starting pitcher for Boston was twenty-year-old George Herman Ruth. “Built like a bale of cotton,” as the New York Times said, the Babe (as he was already known) was not quite a phenom yet. When he had come up to the bigs a year earlier, after a couple of months with the minor league Baltimore Orioles, he had looked promising but raw, and manager Carrigan had used him in only four games (he went 2–1) before shipping him to the Providence Grays for seasoning. His Boston teammates didn’t know what to make of a lunky kid who seemed so new to the world of trains, hotels, and restaurants (but sported a dandy-ish haircut that involved a pompadour “roaching” over his forehead), who showed such promise as a pitcher yet was also so interested in honing his hitting skills that he, a mere yannigan, had the temerity to take batting practice with the regulars, or at least try to. (The older Red Sox told him he couldn’t and when he shrugged and took his cuts anyway, they sawed the handles off his bats. His hazing was in some ways like Cobb’s, but less fierce and more contracted.)

  Cobb had missed his chance to see the Babe in action the year before, when on a sweltering mid-July day at Fenway, while he was still recovering from the thumb injury he incurred while pummeling the not-black butcher, the Tigers knocked Ruth out of the box in the seventh inning, and went on to win 5–2. In the meantime he had no doubt asked around about the young pitcher and learned that while he had a tendency to wilt in the home stretch, he was (given his personal habits) a surprisingly disciplined performer who could keep batters guessing and hold runners on base. For his part, Ruth would have known Cobb by his reputation, but unless he was taken aside by Carrigan, or one of the other Boston players, and given unsolicited advice about the Peach, that would have been it. Homework would never be Ruth’s thing.

  What could he have learned in any case? There was no good way to pitch to Cobb, who hit lefties as consistently as righties. You could try to surprise him with a curve when he was expecting a fastball, or try to trick him outright and see how that worked. In the seventh inning of a game on August 22, 1909, at Navin Field, Walter Johnson started off Cobb with three intentional balls and then suddenly zipped the next one in, waist high and tight. Perhaps the Big Train thought Cobb would be caught off guard and proffer a feeble swing resulting in a feeble grounder; instead he stroked a triple and knocked in two runs. So scratch that. Some thought the best way to pitch to Cobb was to constantly push him off the plate or knock him down. Cobb was no Hughie Jennings, willing to let balls bounce off his noggin until the sunset. He absolutely hated the brushback pitch and felt it should be barred from baseball—which made him extra susceptible to it. It was a slim thread for a pitcher to cling to, but there it was.

  We don’t know if Ruth felt intimidated in that initial encounter but he was certainly overmatched. Cobb batted against him twice and calmly bopped two singles into right field. By Cobb’s third trip to the plate, the Babe was already “in the showerbath,” said E. A. Batchelor, having walked eight and given up five runs in five and two-thirds innings. But if the Tigers’ 5–1 win felt like the start of something big for Detroit, it wasn’t. The next day Ernie Shore flummoxed them with a dancing, diving pitch that looked too good to be legal. Hughie kept running from the dugout and yelling “Emory ball!” and imploring umpire Bill Dinneen to check what sportswriters liked to call “the pill” for signs of intentional scuffing. The manager’s histrionics—which didn’t end until Dinneen pressed a ball into his hands and told him to please send it to Ban Johnson for a more thorough examination—made the Detroit crowd chuckle, even in the midst of a 4–1 defeat. Dark clouds returned the next day, though, Thursday, May 13, when Dutch Leonard took the mound.

  Leonard—and not Cobb or Carl Mays—may have actually been the least-beloved man in baseball. He continually moaned about his teammates not gi
ving him run support, complained about his salary, criticized the owner, Joseph J. Lannin, for undermining the manager, and impressed umpire Billy Evans as the whiniest man he’d ever met, in terms of balls and strikes calls. A few weeks after the May series against the Tigers, Lannin would suspend Leonard indefinitely and send him home to California, not for any particular offense, like drinking or breaking curfew, but “just for the way he acts.” From the first inning of the May 15 game Leonard showed he was less interested in throwing strikes than throwing at Cobb’s head. The two argued heatedly across the sixty feet, six inches all afternoon, as Leonard, who had pinpoint control that day, continually pitched Cobb high and tight. Cobb drew the only two walks Leonard issued, and in the sixth inning was hit (on the shoulder) by a pitch. Trying to make Leonard pay, he twice stole his way around the bases, scoring the Tigers’ only runs, but the Red Sox scored four and took the series.

  • • •

  As he made the circuit that summer around the American League cities, Cobb was celebrated on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his arrival in the major leagues. Before a game in Philadelphia, the town where overzealous fans once threatened to shoot him, he was presented with a custom-made double-barreled shotgun. The Boston chapter of the Shriners gave him a diamond-encrusted Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine badge. On the exact date of his anniversary, August 26, before a game against the Red Sox at Navin Field, the fans presented him with two armfuls of flowers and prolonged applause. The New York Times on its editorial page said that even with a war raging in Europe “and the fate of empires trembling in the balance” he remained “a personality of national importance.”

  As its way of celebrating the anniversary, the New Orleans Times-Picayune had the doubly odd notion of having Hughie Jennings interview Cobb on a number of nonbaseball topics. The result didn’t run as a written-through piece, but the paper did feature, in bare-bones form, a batch of Cobb’s responses:

  “Mrs. Cobb is not a suffragist or an anti-suffragist. She finds her interest in other problems.”

  “Women’s dress should be utilitarian instead of ornamental. A woman should attract because of herself and not her dress.”

  “The tango—I guess it’s all right. I never saw anything improper on the dance floor, but then you know I don’t dance much.”

  “Parents are growing too confident. They don’t give enough consideration to the character or personality of the men with whom they allow their daughters to associate.”

  “Votes for women. There are arguments on both sides. It’s a question.”

  Only the Boston fans, it seems, stood apart from this groundswell of appreciation. There was more than a whiff of danger in the atmosphere at Fenway that year, and the potential for violence got increasingly palpable, as a number of commentators noticed. “Boston crowds have always been very polite and seemed anxious to applaud good plays by the visitors,” said Sporting Life in September. “But the recent games there have been marked by fierce rooting by the populace.” What was causing the upsurge in cursing, spitting, cowbell ringing, and garbage flinging? The Chicago Tribune thought “the transformation dates back to last season,” and blamed George Stallings, manager of the National League Boston Braves—known that year as the “Miracle Braves” for going from last place to the pennant in two months, then sweeping the Athletics in the World Series—for inciting the masses with his explosive displays of anger toward umpires and opposing players. Another only marginally more plausible theory had it that the once patient citizens of Beantown were finally punishing visiting players for the bad reception their boys had long had to endure at various stops along the road.

  It was much more likely, though, that the rowdies were incited by Boston sportswriters, like Tim Murnane of the Globe, who repeatedly told his readers that the Red Sox deeply appreciated and were materially aided by their boos and screams. Just before the Tigers arrived for the final set of games against the Red Sox that year, starting on September 16, Murnane added fuel by saying—truthfully or not; it’s hard to determine—that during the previous series, in Detroit in late August, Cobb, while standing in the on-deck circle, was seen urging fans to make noise so as to rattle the Boston pitcher—“a cheap line of work,” Murnane wrote, “especially for a clever ball player. Chances are,” he said, “that the Georgia Peach will receive a little of his own medicine when he comes to town this trip.”

  By September, Red Sox fans didn’t need much more encouragement than that. Both teams had been trying to outfox each other all summer. In their previous series, played about three weeks earlier in Detroit, Hughie had starter Harry Coveleski warm up in a secret location, somewhere in the bowels of the stadium, so the Red Sox wouldn’t know whom they were facing until the last minute. A cadre of displaced Boston cranks, resplendent in red caps, turned up in the Navin Field grandstand and tried to distract Detroit hitters by “blowing horns and shaking policemen’s rattles.” And on a day when he went 1-for-5, a bad day for him, Cobb paid a midgame visit to the Red Sox dugout—to talk to manager Carrigan, calmly, about his continuing concerns about emery-boarding, he insisted, although Silk O’Loughlin dispatched a few Tigers to get him out of there before the conversation could get heated. Boston had won 11 of the first 19 games against the Tigers that year, but the two teams were still close enough in the standings—Detroit was in second place, two and a half back—that those four September games would make all the difference. If one team swept, or even took three, the other team would be not mathematically but spiritually eliminated, its season in veritable ruins. Or so everyone felt. No wonder the papers were calling it the Little World Series.

  It was over 100 degrees on the field for game one, a condition that made the single male cheerleader cavorting along the foul lines seem especially incongruous. The 22,000 who came out on a Thursday afternoon were cheering despite the heat, and singing along with a band that played the Red Sox theme song, “Tessie,” as well as hits of the moment such as “I Love a Piano” and “Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser.” It would be wrong to imagine them as a particularly happy lot, however, especially as the game dragged into the seventh inning with the score 5–1 Detroit. They were probably wondering what to do with all the wads of paper they were stockpiling under their seats, when Carrigan switched pitchers, pulling out starter George Foster and replacing him with Carl Mays. As good as Foster was, Mays was the sort of player who made things happen.

  The first batter he faced, in the top of the eighth, was Cobb. A few years later, Mays would say that Cobb annoyed him by standing with his right foot in front of home plate, a technically illegal move that umpires usually abided, but which left the pitcher with very little room to work. Mays started him with a fastball very near his face. Cobb said nothing. But when the next pitch came just as close, Cobb yelled “Yellow dog!” and flung his bat, which flew over Mays and came down near second base. You’d expect a fight to break out at this point; both men must have been fuming. But the newspaper accounts say that Mays retrieved the bat and handed it to Cobb, who resumed his turn at the plate. With the count now 0–2, Mays whizzed another fastball high and inside. This time Cobb instinctively put up a hand to protect himself, and the ball hit him on the wrist. What happened next was also odd: Cobb simply trotted to first. In 1920, when Mays delivered the fatal fastball that killed Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman, sportswriters were quick to cite his plunking of Cobb in 1915 and make much of the lingering bad feeling between the two men, but at the time that it happened, the reaction of both players appears to have been muted. Cobb did take revenge, but within the rules and in his signature fashion by stealing second, going to third on a fielder’s choice, and coming home, somehow, on a routine infield grounder. The run was superfluous to the final score, which was 6–1 Tigers, and therefore, perhaps, minimally inflammatory.

  Sooner or later the stands were going to erupt, though, and they did in the next inning. The riot unfolded in a way that was almost a replay of events in P
hiladelphia in 1911, when Cobb and Frank Baker briefly renewed their animosity over the infamous 1909 “spiking.” Cobb caught a soft fly ball for the final out, and thousands of fans rushed the field as he stood in place, tossing the ball lightly into the air. “Prudence would have dictated that Ty take to his heels and make for the shelter of the dugout,” Batchelor wrote. “But the greatest of ball players isn’t made of that sort of stuff. He waited until his would-be assailants were upon him, then began to walk deliberately in. Somebody tossed a pop bottle that hit Ty lightly, but before he could locate the man who had done so a couple of Irish policemen arrived on the scene and the hoodlums were driven back. One cur made a rush for the Tiger and a copper caught him a beautiful punch in the jaw and knocked him sprawling 20 feet away.” Also as in Philadelphia, his teammates ran to his rescue. “The whole Tiger squad, some of them clutching bats, went out to meet Cobb and formed a body guard ready to give the mob the busiest few minutes of its life if anybody had started a real fight.” Miraculously no one did.

  One last echo of Philadelphia: at the next game, played two days later, Cobb got a lengthy ovation when he first came to the plate. Was this an apology? A way for more proper Bostonians to say “Those rowdies are not us”? Whatever the answer, the more civilized reception didn’t help the Detroits. Boston’s pitching was too much for them, for everybody. Dutch Leonard beat them cleanly on Friday (despite a two-run homer from Cobb); Ernie Shore out-dueled Coveleski in a beautiful 12-inning, 1–0 game played before 35,000 on Saturday, and in the Monday finale Babe Ruth and George Foster teamed up for the 3–2 win. “I’ll admit it looks now as if the Tigers have blown the championship,” Cobb wrote in a syndicated newspaper article a few days later. “We had worked hard to win it, but if we would have to win by the tactics used in Boston, I am just as well satisfied we lost. I myself don’t mind playing before hostile, hollering crowds. It makes any man go harder. But when a fellow has to dodge pitched balls aimed at his head and pop bottles aimed at his head, too, it is too much of a handicap.” The piece ended on an elegiac note, suggesting he was conceding more than just the season. “It is a big disappointment to me not to be in the World Series again before I get through in baseball. I acknowledge that. This was a good chance this year. It may not come again in my time. That last Boston series has left a bad taste in my mouth.”