A week later, though, the situation had changed. In its May 10 issue the Defender reported, with obvious disappointment, that Cobb would not be prosecuted on criminal charges because some “mit [sic] greasing” had occurred and “the Morris family, hypnotized by the sight of a few silver dollars scorned all help and absolutely refused to file criminal charges against Cobb.” The reason given by “the Morris woman” for not going forward is that “too much publicity and a court trial might hurt Cobb’s good reputation.” That account certainly does make it sound like Cobb, or Cobb and Navin, arranged to pay for Morris’s silence, just as they had ten years earlier when the night watchman from the Euclid Hotel in Cleveland was given money to abandon his case. But then, days later the Free Press and other papers reported her prosecuting Cobb after all, albeit in civil court. What was going on?
Without explaining this second reversal, the Defender on June 7 picked up the story line about the lawsuit and proffered a few more details, some accurate (the names of Cobb’s and Morris’s lawyers), some not (Cobb is said to come from “a family of scrappers in the backwoods”). On June 21, the paper further reports that “people higher up on the ball club have endeavored to use their influence to smother the [civil] case by the payment of a small sum outside of court,” but, much to the Defender’s delight, Morris’s attorney, one R. Nicholson, is “pitching good ball” and “has fanned away all offers” to protect the reputation of the man “known by his confederates as ‘Rough-House Cobb.’ ” After this, though, nothing; silence, forever. The story, like the case itself, simply disappears.
The Defender started the same year Cobb came to the majors, 1905. A graph depicting its coverage of him over the decades would show a single angry spike in the spring of 1919, set off by peaceful prairies of positive prose. Upon Cobb’s death in 1961 the Defender eulogized him as “the greatest,” called him “a daring and impulsive base runner,” and, just as significantly in a paper that viewed the world through the prism of race and wasn’t too polite to point a finger, even in an obituary, had nothing to say about alleged character flaws.
In truth, it would have been bizarre to attack Cobb as a bigot in 1961. By then he had for years been publicly applauding the integration of organized baseball, cheering it louder than virtually any old-time star. “The Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly,” he told the Sporting News in 1952, on one of the many occasions he spoke out on what was in some quarters still a controversial topic. “The Negro has the right to compete in sports and who’s to say they have not? They have been competing notably in football, track and baseball and I think they are to be complimented for their gentle conduct both on the field and, as far as I know, off the field.” Cobb praised the Dodgers’ Roy Campanella as a “great” catcher who “had the good sense to play up close to the plate, so he could catch the ball before it broke away, and get his pitcher more strikes.” He called Willie Mays “the only player I’d pay money to see,” and after Campanella was permanently paralyzed in a car accident in 1958, and Walter O’Malley staged a tribute game for him at which tens of thousands held lit matches aloft to show their appreciation, Cobb wrote privately to the Dodgers owner to thank him “for what you did for this fine man.”
Did Cobb, then on the verge of his dotage and embracing religion, brim with the convert’s zeal, as some insist who can’t get over the fact that he was, for Chrissakes, born in Georgia, in 1886, and therefore must at some point have been severely prejudiced? It will always be impossible to say, but it is not difficult to find stories of him in the 1920s and 1930s treating Negro League players and black trainers with the decency they deserved. Detroit Stars infielder Bobby Robinson recalled a game in 1929 when a rumor circulated that Cobb was in the house—and then an inning or so later he found him in the dugout, sitting next to him and seeming eager to talk baseball. “Robinson recalled that there wasn’t a hint of prejudice in Cobb’s attitude,” wrote Nick Wilson, author of an oral history of black and Cuban League players. “They were just two ballplayers sharing stories.” How much this tells of Cobb’s attitude is hard to say, but black people were a constant in his life, more so than with other ballplayers, if only because most other ballplayers didn’t have a household staff, like he did. He employed at least two black domestics at his home in Augusta, and starting in about 1914 went about Detroit and elsewhere with a black valet, as successful men of that era sometimes did (the comedian Jack Benny and his sidekick Eddie “Rochester” Anderson were perhaps the last surviving example of this phenomenon).
One of Cobb’s batmen, a former New Orleans chauffeur named Alex Rivers, stayed with him for at least seven years, or until oil was discovered on land he owned in Mississippi and he was reported to have become a millionaire (the tale may be apocryphal; he was also said to have become a preacher). Rivers named his first son, born in 1921, Alexander Ty, saying “it would have been Alexandra Ty if it’d been a girl,” and when Cobb retired, declared “I love the man.” When they had a brief reunion in the mid-1930s in California, he and Cobb fell into each other’s arms and sobbed. Not that any of this was a consolation to Ada Morris, who in the 1930 federal census turns up as a domestic employed by a private family in Detroit, but whose full story we shall apparently never know.
If Cobb experienced a crisis of conscience over what happened in a stairwell of the Pontchartrain on opening day of 1919, he apparently used it the way he had used similar potential disturbances: as a threat to his serenity that helped him focus his thoughts on the daily business of baseball. Shrugging off not just legal problems, but a boil on his leg that kept him out of the lineup for nearly two weeks, as well as an increasing tightness in his calves, quads, hamstrings, and hips, he picked up where he left off before the war and was hitting about .365 by the first day of summer. If he stole fewer bases than he once did—and his production in that area was down by about 50 percent from his best seasons—he still excelled at “worrying” his opponents into making mistakes that allowed him to dart and dodge his way around the diamond. “Cobb worried [catcher Sam] Agnew so much before he stole in the third,” said a note in the May 20 Free Press, “that when Ty did go down Sam threw the ball into centerfield, which gave the Peach a chance to skid on his way to third.” This was a trademark trick that, for him and the fans, never got old. But he was not at age thirty-two all fake-outs and finesse. In the same game, a 6–0 victory over the Washington Senators at Navin Field, he got “a pair of safeties, the first one nearly tearing [shortstop Howie] Shanks’ gloved hand off as it sped on its way to center field, the other a roller to [third baseman Joe] Leonard that Ty beat out by a great sprint.”
In the first game of a morning-afternoon Memorial Day doubleheader in Detroit, Cobb reached base only once, on an error, but managed to score the winning run against the Browns. In the “matinee game,” he had two doubles and a triple in four at-bats and scored three runs, whereas St. Louis, as a team, scored only two. On July 21, he scratched out three infield hits and stole a base against Babe Ruth (who took the loss but also hit the first home run ever to disappear over the right field wall at Navin Field and, said the Free Press, “take flight across Trumbull Avenue”). Ruth was explosive, but Cobb—who had a .381 lifetime batting average against Ruth the pitcher—was stunningly consistent. He had won the American League batting title by hitting .383 and .382 in 1917 and ’18, and he would win it again this year, for a twelfth (and final) time, by hitting .384. He would even get in another fight with a spectator, this time an able-bodied heckler who came out of the stands in Detroit to curse and challenge Cobb as he was trotting in from the outfield at the end of a game. Cobb, who had told the man twice that day to be quiet, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, kneed him in the groin, and then kept on walking as the fellow, the Sporting News said, “took a few steps and fell in a heap.” Cobb was still the greatest baseball player around, and the most exciting. What he wasn’t anymore was the game’s biggest story.
If you counted the new live
lier ball they started playing with that year, more tightly wound with string made of stronger and springier Australian wool, he was the fourth biggest story in sports in 1919 behind 3) said ball; 2) heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, who won the title by whipping the much bigger Jess Willard in a historic three-round battle in Toledo on July 4; and 1) Babe Ruth. Numbers one and three are intimately related, of course. Ruth by then was playing the outfield for Boston on most days when he wasn’t pitching, in order to get his bat in the lineup as much as possible. He held that bat very differently than Cobb gripped his much thicker club—all the way down at the knob end—and swung it differently, too, with a decisive uppercut motion, and with such force that if his spikes stuck in the clay around home plate he could, and sometimes did, wrench his back. When he made contact with what everyone but the Spalding Company (which insisted it was turning out a perfectly uniform product year after year) called the “jackrabbit ball,” the results were electrifying. After leading the league with 11 home runs in the war-shortened 1918 season, and helping the Red Sox win the world championship, he hit 29 homers in 1919, breaking the modern major league record of 24 set by Gavvy Cravath of the Phillies in 1915, and the all-time record of 27 posted by Nagle Williamson of the Chicago Colts in 1884—and became a national phenomenon.
Cobb got all those pitty-pat hits, and struck out only 3.1 percent of the time, but now it hardly mattered. Even at Navin Field, as H. G. Salsinger wrote, Ruth received “the welcome due a conquering hero. He got the applause, the shrieking adoration of the multitude, in Cobb’s own city. Cobb, standing aside, could feel deeply how fickle the adoration of the sport-loving public is. He saw before him a new king acclaimed.” (The following year Ruth would hit 54, and after that, 59, then down the road 60.) “Cobb represents the mauve decades in baseball,” said the Sporting News. “Ruth represents the hot cha-cha, and hey nonny, nonny period.” In the Ruthian Age, dozens of once shameful strikeouts could be atoned with the occasional fence-clearing clout. Like one’s sister, the plate, in the Roaring Twenties, no longer required fierce protection. This was of course exactly the opposite of the way the deadball era greats, who choked up on the bat and mostly tried to poke the ball over the infielders’ heads, approached batting. After initially saying it was simply the wrong way to play the game, Cobb—whose split-hands grip now suddenly struck Washington Nationals manager Clark Griffith as “awkward” and old-fashioned, and who never hit more than 12 homers in a season—grudgingly came around to saying in public (probably with his fingers crossed behind his back) that it was a legitimate alternative style of play, a crowd-pleasing trendy thing that ought to be, uh, encouraged—but he could never bring himself to describe Ruth as the Father of Modern Baseball, or anything other than one lucky son of a bitch.
“I do not vie for prominence,” he wrote in 1953 to Ruth’s agent, Christy Walsh, “but I do know of all the efforts in every way possible that have been put forth by New York scribes, etc., to always play up Ruth. . . . Remember, Christy, I know who was voted in first [italics his] to the Baseball Hall of Fame (Cooperstown).” For Cobb, the idea that Ruth had come into the pastime as a pitcher was key to his somewhat unearned success. As a pitcher, he said years later, “he could experiment at the plate” at first. “He didn’t have to get a piece of the ball. He didn’t have to protect the plate the way a regular batter was expected to. No one cares much if the pitcher strikes out or looks bad at bat, so Ruth could take that big swing. If he missed, it didn’t matter. And when he didn’t miss, the ball went a long way. As time went on, he learned more and more about how to control that big swing and put the wood on the ball. By the time he became a fulltime outfielder, he was ready.”
Cobb could see that there was no use standing in the way of the juggernaut. By 1922, home run production in the the American League more than tripled from what it was in 1918, jumping from 96 to 369, and people were coming out in unprecedented numbers to see the pyrotechnics. Not everyone favored the bombastic new way, and a decade or so later, some grew nostalgic for the more chesslike game played by Cobb and his contemporaries. Asked in 1933 if he would take Ruth or Cobb in their respective primes, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, just thirty at the time, said, “I’m still a fan. I would take Cobb. I like to see Ruth hit the long ones, but nothing has thrilled me more than the sight of Ty Cobb dashing around the bases, taking chances, outwitting the other side. You could never tell what he was going to do, and it was fine fun trying to figure out what he might do next. You don’t get that with Ruth.”
But what you did get with Ruth was more money. The lively ball, the advent of Sunday baseball in New York, and the general postwar exhilaration combined to send attendance soaring in 1919, making for what Charles Alexander rightly calls “the beginning of a sustained surge that would last for a decade.” Ruth, just twenty-four when he for all practical purposes completed the transition to position player, would flare and dim like they all do, but the game people like to insist has never changed was morphing fundamentally and fast. Though Cobb would finish with the highest batting average and the most hits (191) that year playing the old way, there was no going back.
For all the individual success they enjoyed in 1919, neither Ruth nor Cobb could propel his club to the top. In baseball, it takes a village, and a deep bench. The Tigers overcame a 5–14 start after Navin bought Dutch Leonard from the Yankees in mid-May, and wound up finishing fourth in the AL, a half game behind Boston, who by securing third qualified for World Series money that figured to be $550 per player. No one could stop the White Sox that season—no one, that is, except Arnold Rothstein and his fellow professional gamblers, who, it would be revealed in the coming months, paid off seven Chicago players to ensure that the Cincinnati Reds would win the championship. Like a lot of people, Cobb had heard rumors that something was fishy with the best-five-out-of-nine series, but he said he didn’t believe the stories, theorizing instead that the men who became known as the Black Sox played poorly because of “overconfidence.” The truth is, though, he wasn’t paying much attention. He had a new daughter, Beverly, his fourth child (his first daughter, Shirley, had been born in 1911) to attend to, and, up in the Georgia hills, far from the world that weighed so heavily upon him, plenty of birds to shoot. It would be just as well if he missed the New York Times piece that said “Ruth was such a sensation last season that he supplanted the great Ty Cobb as baseball’s greatest attraction.”
— CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE —
AFTER THE FIRST FEW WEEKS of the 1920 season, Hughie Jennings would do his Ee-Yah act no more. The last little bits of his sometimes weird enthusiasm expired as he watched his Tigers lose their first 13 games, and look bad doing it. “The Tigers are not tigers,” Harry Bullion wrote in the Free Press after a loss to the St. Louis Browns on May 7. In the field that day, Bullion added, Detroit “put on an exhibition that could rank with the worst they ever have presented to the gaze of paid spectators.” They lost “without so much as a snarl.” What they needed, said shortstop Donie Bush, was just “a few breaks to put the confidence back into us.” He thought those breaks would be coming soon. He was mistaken. By the end of May, Cobb was batting in the low .200s. Following a game in which he went 0-for-4, a Detroit headline read “Jungaleers Drop Final Game of Yankee Series; Ruth Gets Daily Homer.” (Ruth had been sold to New York that January for $125,000.) Jennings stayed in the dugout, or sometimes, claiming stomach troubles, back at his hotel, often sending Cobb to man the coaching box since he was not on base all that much in those days, and the Peach did a fair job of coaching in the classic, rubber-snake-less manner—which only helped the rumors that he was being groomed to be the team’s next manager.
Meanwhile, Cobb by that point was one of the few Tigers who had a relatively easy relationship with Jennings. That April, after the manager had once again allowed his star to spend spring training working out at home in Augusta (with the Washington Senators) instead of joining the club in Macon and slogging north with a tedious but profitable barnstor
ming tour, they had gone together to a Mercer University alumni dinner, and since then attended events in support of James M. Cox, the Ohio governor who, on a ticket with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was running for president against the Republican team of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Cobb, as we have seen, had once thought Jennings unfit for the job of manager because of his poor people skills—he combined an extreme aversion to confrontation with a tendency to bully and be sarcastic toward the younger or more insecure men on the team—but he had since realized the benefits of having a boss whom you can play like a ukulele. Cobb’s acceptance of Jennings, however, put up a wall between him and pitchers Hooks Dauss, Howard Ehmke, and Red Oldham, who were particularly peeved at the manager, and also worsened his relationship with Dutch Leonard, who despised Hughie most of all. As the decade of the 1920s dawned, and the players sank into a premutinous state, the manager desperately needed to mend fences—but instead he announced, not to the players but to the press (as always), that the rules on the Tigers would be stricter than ever before. “I’m not going to tolerate any more alibis!” he said, as if alibis and not offense were the team’s biggest problem. And so when a particularly naive minor leaguer came back to the bench after dropping a fly in a spring training game and told Hughie that he thought it had “been carried off course by a trade wind,” the manager was “driven almost wild” with anger, reported Bullion, and said, “Yes and that’s the same trade wind that’s going to carry you back to New Orleans!” The skipper, alas, was losing his grip.
After his poor start Cobb’s problems only seemed to worsen. Chasing a fly ball at Comiskey Park on June 6, he collided with right fielder Ira Flagstead and tore ligaments in his knee. It was the worst injury of his career, and he would hobble around back home in Augusta, and on the sidelines of various ballparks, for almost a month. In all it was a miserable season for him, the Tigers, and in many ways for major league baseball as a whole. Topic A was the slowly unfolding drama concerning the Black Sox scandal, and before that could be resolved (with the expulsion from baseball of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Cobb’s old Tourist teammate Eddie Cicotte, and six other Chicago players), on August 16 at the Polo Grounds Carl Mays served up the underhand pitch that hit the popular Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman in the left temple and fractured his skull.
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