He was not alone in feeling lousy at the end of a season in which the Tigers had won 100 games—more than they’d ever won before—but not the pennant. Hughie Jennings called the campaign “my biggest disappointment in Detroit.”
Imagine a ball bouncing, lower and slower, until it rolls to a stop. Over the next three years the Tigers would play out their 154-game schedule, looking—except for Cobb—to writer H. G. Salsinger “like a team that did not care where it finished.” It was not an interesting interval in Tigers history. A summing up should suffice: In 1916 the Tigers, despite a September surge that brought them briefly to within a half game of the lead, wound up third in the American League, behind Boston and Chicago. Cobb hit .371, a few ticks above the previous season, but not better than the .386 posted by Tris Speaker, now of the Cleveland Indians. Speaker, who would hit .345 over the course of his 22-year career, thus stopped Cobb’s streak of batting titles at a record nine. The Georgian wasn’t done, by any means, but here was the first hint of autumn. It certainly bothered him and it may have scared him, too, because in 1917 he picked up his game, hitting .383, knocking in 102 runs (34 more than the year before), and reclaiming the batting title.
His team, however, was heading in a southerly direction, despite Navin’s and Jennings’s best efforts to acquire the necessary personnel. Little went untried. The Tigers that spring returned, said the Free Press, “to the style of uniform in which they won three pennants. The shirt and trousers are of plain white flannel. Black caps and stockings are worn. The old English D is used on shirtfront and caps instead of the block letter that was in vogue last year.” (That “D” is the oldest major league logo still in use.) Alas the throwback togs made no difference. The team started slowly, losing 14 of its first 22 games, and spent most of that year in the second division, lucking into fourth thanks only to the Yankees’ late-season swan dive.
Sam Crawford, at age thirty-seven, ended his career a few days short of the end of the season, and on a bitter note, using his final interviews to say yet again that Cobb caused dissension and was primarily concerned with his personal statistics. Crawford was never able to get beyond the resentment he felt about the relatively huge salary—$20,000 at this point, as opposed to his $7,500—and special treatment Cobb received; he, too, would have liked to have been excused from spring training, to have been able to travel during the season without a roommate (as Cobb did from about 1912 onward), to miss with impunity the first few innings of a meaningless late-season game against the Yankees in 1915 because, as Cobb explained to a New York scribe who asked why, “I was attending an organ concert at Aeolian Hall.” Crawford and Cobb never came to blows, but until Cobb effected a semi-successful rapprochement late in their lives, they were cool to each other at best. At a “tribute” game played for Crawford late in the 1917 season, Cobb and Jennings declined to participate in the ceremonies, staying in the dugout rather than standing in the receiving line at home plate. The Tigers, winning only three more games than they lost, finished 211/2 games behind the pennant-winning White Sox in the AL standings. And things would get worse.
Crawford’s comments aside, Cobb, at age thirty-one, was being talked about more like an elder statesman or a venerable font of baseball wisdom, and less like the key to a championship. “I preach Ty Cobb to my ballplayers day in and day out,” said Fielder Jones, a groundbreaking strategist from an earlier generation, then managing the St. Louis Browns. “Every time we have a meeting I hold him up as an example of what quick thinking and intelligence will do for a man. One of these days I hope to get Ty Cobb in a room for a good talk on baseball. It will be a treat for me.” Howard “Kid” Ehmke, a twenty-year-old pitcher, had the good luck to have the locker next to Cobb in the Navin Field clubhouse. “In the fall, he used to sit down and talk baseball with me before and after the games. The opening of every series he’d take a half hour and point out the weakness and strength of the opposing batters. Cobb knew just what kind of stuff to serve every batter.” Sometimes Cobb worried about what might come next for him. “I have often wished I could become a composer,” he told F. C. Lane, the editor of Baseball Magazine, as they wandered together through a music store in Augusta while the resident pianist played.
But I don’t suppose I have any talent in that line. Every man to his trade, and I guess mine is cut out for me. I know enough of fame on the diamond to realize that it lasts just as long as the ability to win it. I shall have my day like all the rest, and whatever I’ve done will be forgotten just as other records have been forgotten before. I was always ambitious, I guess. I used to think that if I were ever able to make a record on the diamond I would be satisfied. But people have been good enough to claim I have done no less and I am not satisfied.
During the season, though, there was as yet no outward change in him; he did not act venerable; he looked, from the grandstand, like the wild child of 1905. For starters, there was the fight he had with Buck Herzog, described in the previous chapter. Also, in July of 1916, angered by a called third strike, he threw his bat into an unoccupied section of the stands at Comiskey Park, and received another admonishment from Ban Johnson to add to his impressive collection, followed by a three-day suspension. In May of that year he flung a handful of dirt into the face of Washington’s Joe Boehling (after, he said, the pitcher cursed at him while tagging him out during a rundown), and a few weeks later he had to be pulled out of the stands in St. Louis by teammates and police before he could pummel another heckler. He also continued to display the kind of base running flair—the trash talking, explosive takeoffs, swift slides, and violent crash landings—that was often mistaken for rage. “I never saw anybody like him,” Rube Bressler, a pitcher for the A’s, told Lawrence Ritter nearly fifty years later. “It was his base. It was his game. Everything was his. The most feared man in the history of baseball.”
And yet, in his day, also the most widely admired. Cobb simply refused to be part of the Tigers’ decline, which in 1918 saw them, as Lieb says, “back to where they were in 1904 under Barrow and Lowe.” In a July 4 doubleheader that was swept by the White Sox, Cobb went 5-for-6 in the opener and, playing first base in the nightcap (following the ejection of Harry Heilmann), he used the hidden ball trick to pick off starting pitcher Joe Benz. Four days later he was 4-for-5 in a losing effort against Philadelphia, and by the beginning of August his batting average was .393. He would wind up leading the league with .382, though his stolen base total dropped sharply to 34. The Tigers? They finished in seventh place, four games out of last. When the war cut short the season it was a relief for everyone associated with the club. Looking sharp in his doughboy uniform, Cobb addressed the reporters who had come to the dock to see him depart for Europe, saying more explicitly what he had suggested atop the dugout at Navin Field: “I am tired of baseball.”
— CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR —
ON A FINE OCTOBER DAY in 1918, Captain Tyrus Raymond Cobb, “resplendent in his new uniform, with his puttees and shoulder bars glistening in the sunlight,” or so the Philadelphia sportswriter Robert W. Maxwell assures us, “leaned wearily against the fence of the White House in Washington” and talked about his eagerness to get to the battlegrounds of France. Mustered into the Army a week or so earlier, he was supposed to have gone first to Camp Humphreys (now Fort Belvoir) in Virginia, but “basic training” sounded to him suspiciously like “spring training,” and so he asked for and received permission to skip it and join what the Free Press called “the chase for Huns” ASAP. As with annual preseason baseball preparations, his intolerance pertained to the tedious, not the tough. Lest he be assigned “some sort of soft snap,” as he called it, Cobb had volunteered for what was known as “chemical warfare service work.” According to the Army manual of the day, this was easily the most dangerous job in the service. Chemical warfare or “flame” men, the book says, “usually go into action ahead of the attacking waves of infantry, carrying tanks on their backs, and advance under cover of artillery barrage squirting flames of
liquid fire from the tanks. Gas men advancing carry a sack of gas-filled bombs, which they hurl into trenches and dugouts, like grenades.” It sounds borderline suicidal, yet Cobb told interviewer Maxwell—when he was not snapping to attention to return the salutes of other soldiers, Boy Scouts, police officers, and “a couple of icemen” parading down Pennsylvania Avenue in the midst of their chat—that “it’s very interesting work and I enjoy it.”
In theory, that is, of course. Through no fault of his own, he never got a chance to squirt liquid fire on fleeing Huns. The Allied counteroffensive, begun in early August of 1918, had quickly decimated the German army and made the Central Powers realize it was best to start hatching an exit plan—and so by the time Frank Navin received a plain, buff-colored postcard from Cobb saying, with spy-conscious sparseness, “The ship I sailed on arrived safely overseas,” and nothing more, the Armistice was just weeks away. Cobb did manage to almost get killed, however, while teaching gas mask technique to a bunch of hapless enlisted men who would almost certainly never need a gas mask, at an airbase near Chaumont, France, along with Christy Mathewson. The situation was a recipe for disaster. On the one hand you had soldiers distracted by the sight of two of the biggest stars in baseball—Look, the Georgia Peach and the Christian Gentleman!—staring back at them through creepy yellow goggles and speaking through long black hoses (there are few things more nightmarish than a World War I gas mask). On the other hand, you had two celebrity teachers who had themselves received only a one-week crash course in their subject.
The day’s lesson plan involved the release of actual deadly fumes into the sealed chamber where the class was taught, and the men putting on their masks and making their way calmly to the exits. Someone, however, made a mistake of timing, which no one realized until doughboys started dropping like Huns. Then the door got stuck. Al Stump’s Cobb “autobiography,” My Life in Baseball, says that eight men died as a result of the accident, but there is nothing to corroborate that. We do know that several soldiers became ill. Cobb himself was laid up for about a week, Mathewson somewhat longer, and when the ex-pitcher died of tuberculosis seven years later at the age of forty-five, it was widely assumed that his susceptibility to lung disease could be traced to the toxic classrooms of Chaumont.
Cobb came back to America on a ship called the Leviathan, arriving at Hoboken on December 16, two days before his thirty-second birthday. “I’m going down to my home in Augusta, Georgia, and rest up for several months,” he told the assembled press. “I intend to break away from baseball. I am tired of it. I’ve had 15 years of it and I want to quit while I’m still good.” The words sounded similar to those he had used on the way over—except now they were but a smoke screen. Just twenty-four hours before, during a shipboard minstrel show, he had mounted the stage and announced that everyone present would receive free admission to his first game back (the “password,” he said, would be “I heard Ty Cobb try to make a speech”). That wasn’t just the champagne talking; he fully intended to return. On the pier in New Jersey, addressing men with notebooks, he was more cagey, first refusing to directly contradict his position of two months earlier, but then, as he went along, introducing a hint of doubt about retirement, saying, rather melodramatically, “There is a danger that the terrible fascination of the game has its hold on me, but I shall make every effort to tear away from it and not sign with any club again.” Finally as a kind of afterthought he added, “I naturally presume that the release that the managers gave us last fall is binding and that they have no legal strings on me now. I hope so, at least.”
For those who followed the business side of baseball, those last words were a kind of wink—a signal that rather than merely musing on his future, he was negotiating, and not just on his own behalf. When the 1918 season ended early, and 227 major league players went off to war, the team owners “to avoid paying the players the balance of their salaries [for early September through early October],” says Harold Seymour in his Baseball: The Golden Age, employed “the subtle subterfuge of ‘releasing’ them with ten days notice, as provided in their contracts.” As a result, all of the players, the soldiers and the civilians alike, lost a full month’s pay, but were technically liberated from the reserve clause and able to sell their services to the highest bidder once the American and National Leagues resumed play. Except that the poor chumps weren’t free agents, really. As Seymour tells us, “the magnates entered into a gentlemen’s agreement not to tamper with each other’s men. Thus the owners had it both ways,” saving $200,000 in payroll but keeping their “monopsony control” over the players. Navin actually offered Cobb a contract of $19,000, or $1,000 less than he’d received the year before, when he batted .382 (64 points above the next best hitter in the AL, Tris Speaker), led the league in on-base percentage (.440), and was as usual the club’s only real draw.
It seemed slightly bizarre to be nickel-and-diming a man who not only personified the franchise but was by then a full-fledged member of the Tigers family. Cobb was a partner with Navin in several outside business ventures, he regularly passed along his Aunt Norah’s preserves to his boss, and he was at the bedside of Bill Yawkey when the former majority shareholder of the club died suddenly of the flu in Augusta in early March of 1919 at age forty-three. Wanting neither to quibble about $1,000 or take a pay cut, Cobb kept silent until Navin finally came to his senses and sent him a contract for $20,000 around March 30, as everyone knew he eventually would. It was his fifth consecutive contract for that amount, and he signed it promptly in his trademark green.
At any point along its continuum, as we have seen, Cobb’s career was a mixture of controversy and personal success, played out against a backdrop of the up-and-down, generally close-but-no-cigar Detroit Tigers. The season of 1919 would follow a similar pattern, with the exception of one outlying event, a perplexing and potentially criminal incident that occurred away from the ballpark on April 25, 1919, opening day. An eighteen-year-old black woman named Ada Morris would later claim in court papers that Cobb, while she was working as a chambermaid at the Pontchartrain Hotel, pushed her out of his room, where she had been delivering linen, and into the hallway, kicked her in the stomach, and knocked her down a flight of stairs, causing a broken rib and other injuries that left her hospitalized for several weeks. Cobb had no comment on the accusation, not that he was ever asked for one by either the press or the police. He was never arrested, or, as far as can be determined, questioned by authorities, and mainstream newspapers did not say anything about the incident until late May, when an identical short item appeared in the Free Press, the Atlanta Constitution, and several other dailies around the United States, often with a headline like “Negress Sues Cobb.”
The news was that Morris had filed a $10,000 suit against the Tigers star, that he had refused to accept the summons when a server approached him on April 26 at Navin Field, and that a judge had since signed an order of default, meaning that the case could proceed without his participation. The three-sentence squib raised serious questions, such as, who was Tyrus Raymond Cobb, anyway: the family man who urged the public to buy war savings stamps, who read voraciously, chatted with presidents, and was always eager to explain that his wildly aggressive playing style was a well-considered baseball strategy, not a symptom of inner turmoil—or a sociopath who could (in a drunken state, perhaps) put a woman’s life in jeopardy by kicking her down a flight of stairs? Or maybe he was a bit of both, a hero with an extremely dark side? (In a memorable face-to-face conversation undertaken in about 1850, Charles Dickens explained to Fyodor Dostoyevsky that the protagonists and villains of his novels both came from the same place, a place deep within him. “I am, you see, two men,” Dickens said—to which the Russian writer replied, “Only two?”) Not another word about Ada Morris would ever appear in the regular press. Yet in its brevity and singularity that item had great power to tell both a story and a story about a story. Clearly, this business was something a concerned group of people were struggling to contain.
For any further details on the matter one had to rely on the Chicago Defender, a lively if sometimes hyperbolic African American weekly. Calling the alleged attack “one of the most brutal incidents ever reported” in Detroit, the Defender said in its May 3 edition that the trouble had started when Cobb asked the woman what state she was from and she said Pennsylvania. “There never was a nigger like you from Pennsylvania,” he is said to have responded. “Mrs. Morris objected to this remark,” wrote the anonymous Defender scribe. “Cobb forthwith plunged into the woman, showering blows upon her head and body. She attempted to fight back, but was overpowered.” The story suggests that the assault took place at night, after the game against Cleveland in which Cobb went 2-for-4 and doubled in the winning run—and goes on to say that when Morris’s family went to police court the following morning to obtain an arrest warrant, “the bailiff stated that it was ‘impossible’ for Cobb to have committed such an act and that a warrant could not be obtained at that hour.” Outraged by the brush-off, a committee of black clergymen and lawyers had met at the Biltmore Hotel to collect money for an attorney and “see that Cobb was brought before the bar of justice.”
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