The accident happened in the fifth inning, when the sun was getting low and the shadows long. Chapman never saw the pitch, or so it is assumed, but the sound it made led Mays to think the ball had struck his bat, and he picked up the roller and tossed it to first base as the batter pitched forward in the box, blood gushing from his ear. Chapman died twelve hours later. To all but the New York scribes, who rallied around the supposedly distraught Mays, it seemed like a clear case of good versus evil: Mays was a known brushback artist and hothead who in separate incidents in recent times had thrown a bat and a ball at hecklers; Chapman was a salt-of-the-earth type and a blushing newlywed whose last words, it was said, were a request for the wedding band that he’d left with the clubhouse man to be put back on his finger. Nor did it help Mays’s case that he initially seemed to be trying to lay blame on the umpires, who he said allowed a ball with a rough spot to remain in the game, creating a situation in which he was forced to make pitches that he could not control. (The umpires who worked the game angrily retorted that Mays had a habit of roughing up balls himself, despite their admonitions.)
As word spread of Chapman’s death, people in and out of baseball called for Mays’s permanent banishment and some newspapers reported that the Tigers—and Cobb in particular—were requesting “immediate summary measures” against the pitcher. Was this true? It’s not hard to believe that he felt no sympathy for Mays, a man with whom he’d had a long running battle, but whether he actually said something about the incident is another matter. Cobb vehemently denied that he had, but the Yankee writers whipped up sentiment against him anyway. When the Tigers next came to town, on August 21, he was hissed and booed by a crowd that had usually been surprisingly kind. The reaction bothered him, and on his first trip to the plate that afternoon, he felt compelled to make a statement. Bowing deeply to the jeering throng, he swept his right arm up toward the Polo Grounds press box, as if to say “Blame those guys.” If his frustration affected his performance, though, it was only for the good. Cobb got just one hit that day, but it allowed him to put on an exciting display of base running and score a run in the Tigers 10–3 victory. The next afternoon he had four singles and a double as the Tigers beat the Yankees again. On the day after that he was 2-for-4 against Mays on the (unpunished) pitcher’s first day back. The two men never resolved their differences, but forty-odd years later Mays would say of Cobb, “I’d want him over Ruth on my team. Ruth would fill your stadium. Cobb would beat you in it.”
The Yankees series—three Tiger wins in four games—gave a misleading impression of a seriously flawed and dispirited team, which left New York in seventh place, with a record of 46–71. Cobb would regain his batting eye and pull his average up to .334 for the season (10th on a list topped by the Browns’ George Sisler at .407), but many newspapers were declaring that his best days were behind him. “Ty is hitting like a man who hasn’t had enough practice,” wrote William Hanna of the New York Sun. “His timing of pitched balls is poor. He is off balance when he hits and he is meeting the ball thinly.” Detroit would still be sulking in seventh place at season’s end, ahead of only Philadelphia, which finished last for the sixth year in a row.
The awfulness of the Tigers brought a shift in the conversation. Instead of speculating about if and when Hughie Jennings might get fired, people wondered who would replace him. Cobb’s name came up constantly in such discourse, especially after Cleveland, led by player-manager Tris Speaker, won the World Series that year. The cranky Sam Crawford had said as far back as 1917, after all, that Cobb was already running the club. But he always denied any interest, saying things like “Just playing the game is challenging enough” and “If I had that extra responsibility I’d worry myself to death.” He may have half meant it, too, and yet Cobb did feel competitive with Speaker and did want—someday—to see what it felt like to manage and to draw a manager’s pay. Partly to that end, he had signed up for an off-season job playing for and managing the San Francisco franchise in a four-team West Coast league that operated in October and November. It was while on the train to California that he received a telegram from Navin telling him Jennings had resigned and would be returning to the practice of law in his native Pennsylvania.
Navin wanted Cobb to take the skipper’s job, as did the men to whom he had sold Bill Yawkey’s shares in the club: Walter Briggs and John Kelsey. Those quintessential Motor City hotshots—Kelsey was in wheels, Briggs auto bodies—had paid $500,000 for a 25 percent interest in the team, after having already spent many a night bonding with Cobb at the Pontchartrain bar. Cobb continued to play hard-to-get, though, until the sportswriter E. A. Batchelor took him aside one early December day in New Orleans, where Cobb was hunting ducks and Batchelor was covering a Baylor–University of Detroit football game, and reminded him that if he declined the job it would most likely go to Clarence Rowland. “Pants,” as he was known for the time when his fell off as he slid into home plate during a minor league game, was a Tigers scout who had once managed the White Sox to the world championship, but who had a reputation as a lightweight, a “cajoler and a jollier” who might keep a good thing going for a while but couldn’t turn a bad thing around. It was the prospect of playing for Rowland that sent Ty, just a few days later, to the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York City, where Navin was on off-season baseball business, to talk seriously about managing the club.
The conventional wisdom about Cobb as a possible skipper was that he had plenty of baseball smarts but not enough restraint. “The commentators of the land are most suspicious of Cobb’s famous temperament,” wrote Damon Runyon, “the same which has led him into matches with his brother ballplayers, to leaping into the grandstand after critical spectators and into passages with butcher boys.” Could Ty keep cool when umpires erred, when sportswriters criticized, and, most crucially, when the men in his care failed to replicate his feats? Once in 1917 when Cobb was filling in as coach, he grabbed his teammate George Burns, then lumbering around third base, and pushed him hard in the direction of home plate. Was that the indication of an overly hands-on management style? Runyon admitted he couldn’t say for certain how it would work out but urged his readers to remember that “other men just as temperamental as Tyrus have taken over a club and proved to be successful mangers.” As examples, he mentioned John McGraw of the Giants and Buck Herzog of the Reds and he might also have tossed in Ed Barrow, who as Red Sox pilot nearly came to blows on several occasions with Ruth. The only name that mattered, however, was that of Pants Rowland, for whom Cobb simply could not imagine playing. His choice then was quite stark: either quit or take a sweet jump in salary—from $20,000 to $35,000—to become the Tigers’ star/field boss. The only mystery was why a second meeting with Navin was necessary. At a kind of press conference to announce his new job on December 18, his thirty-fourth birthday, he vowed not to terrorize his men—to “give credit where credit is due,” said the Free Press, “and to correct through mild criticism.”
Who said he had no sense of humor?
— CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX —
IF A FILMMAKER WERE EVER to make a first-rate movie of Ty Cobb’s life, he or she might employ the time-tested montage technique to show how spring training changed under the Cobb administration. If so, we might see ballplayers fast asleep in their bunks while a rooster crowed and the clocks on their nightstands spun round and round—an indication of how the new manager had done away with morning workouts at the training grounds in San Antonio. Panning around, the camera would show a bed here and there that seemed un-slept-in, to signal that Cobb had also dispensed with the nightly curfew. (Maybe an actor in an adjoining cot would turn over and wink!) Then cut to our Detroit boys brunching heartily before sinking into their hotel lobby armchairs to read the paper, shoot the breeze, or just suck their teeth prior to practice time, still several hours distant. If we didn’t mind conflating a couple of years, the way Hollywood biopics often do, we might set these March scenes in the two lavishly appointed Greek Revival mansions that Cobb in 19
22 rented for his players just across the state line from his hometown, in North Augusta, South Carolina, so they might be more comfortable and he could sleep in his own bed.
“I’ve planned my whole campaign on the theory that ballplayers are human,” he told Robert Edgren of the Chicago Tribune. “Managers always clutter up a training camp with rules and regulations. Up on time, to bed on time, diet, general conduct and all that. It’s a case of threats and penalties. Well, I have studied out a new way to handle a ball team. This is one club going through spring training with no rules!” Of course, if you abused the policy and failed to put up proper numbers once the season started because you hadn’t trained hard, you would soon be playing for the Columbus Redbirds or the Omaha Omahogs. Yet Cobb was serious about the freedom he was according his men, and perhaps to drive home the point he arrived two days late for his own first spring training without so much as a tiresome excuse about missed train connections.
Yes, by acting this way and saying these things, Cobb was trying to win the support of his downtrodden and no doubt, in some cases, wary Tigers—to get them behind him the way all of Detroit seemed to be on February 1, when, in celebration of his new position, it gave him the keys to the city and a testimonial dinner at which 600 people paid the astounding sum of $10 to attend. After ten vaudeville acts and speeches by Mayor John C. Lodge, Frank Navin, Ban Johnson, Hugh Chalmers, and even Hughie Jennings, Cobb called the affair “the greatest honor of my life,” and, according to the Free Press, once or twice had to choke back sobs—but he still managed to put in a plug for his players, saying how hard they were trying, despite the recent poor results, and how sensitive they were to criticism. (As a manager he tended, for better and worse, to project his own personality onto his charges.) To ease the pressure on them, and himself, he told the assembled citizenry to expect nothing better than a sixth-place finish in 1921, one notch up from the previous year, and still in the second division—a tepid prediction that triggered a mighty avalanche of cheers. From a public- and player-relations standpoint, the modesty was a genius move.
Cobb said and did all the right things in the spring of 1921 and almost all of the players responded positively to their new boss. Really, what was there not to like, at least about his attitude toward spring training and daily practice? Apart from the niceties already mentioned, the men got Sunday off, all the home-style cooking they could handle, and free passes to golf at the Augusta Country Club, arranged by Cobb himself (unless you were a pitcher; Cobb felt that pitchers shouldn’t play golf because it tightened their shoulders). Along with torn hamstrings and sore arms, Cobb worried about bruised feelings. “Ballplayers are full of sentiment,” he said. “They have no camouflage. They come nearer being natural [meaning their true, naked selves] than men who grew up in business.” One of his more innovative moves was to have relief pitchers warm up out of the sight of the starter, so as not to discourage a man already struggling. “If it were left to a vote to determine the popularity of Cobb and Hughie,” wrote Harry Bullion, “the Peach would unquestionably win.”
And yet spring training under Cobb did involve actual training. The afternoon workouts at San Antonio, and then Augusta, began promptly at 1:00 and consisted of three and a half to four hours of hard work, some of it outside and physical, some involving indoor “skull sessions” to talk strategy. Bunting, the hit-and-run, double steals—these nuts-and-bolts-y maneuvers were practiced endlessly, whereas under Jennings such fundamentals had lately come to be ignored. Daily sliding sessions were also part of the regimen, the men in sheepskin culottes. Cobb might not have been able to run much anymore—he had only 15 stolen bases the previous season—but he could still teach. “When I was fast . . .” he said to a writer named Prosper Buranelli who paid him a visit in San Antonio. Buranelli noted that Cobb seemed struck by his own words, and paused to weigh them before continuing. “When I was fast I used constantly to go to second base on a single. I stretched hits so regularly that I made people think I was faster than I truly was. They laid the extra bases entirely to my speed, when half of my method was psychological. I used my speed to confound the nerves and brains of the opposition.”
This was a variation on his lecture about always being a “mental hazard” for the other guy, and it’s nice to have it. “It is an unfortunate human thing that we do not perform as well in the emergency as out of it,” Cobb went on. “We do not pinch hit well.” He certainly didn’t; his lifetime batting average in that role was only .217. Few other managers could be so thoughtful and articulate. But sometimes—too often—Cobb’s teaching amounted to him describing the way he did things with the understanding that he wanted his players to replicate him. The problem, of course, was that not everyone could do what he did—nor, especially in the Ruthian era, did everyone want to.
The mature but still athletic Cobb of the very early 1920s was a man confident in his ideas and comfortable with himself. “His features are good,” Buranelli wrote, “nose slightly beaked, and his face has a smoothness and firmness of fibre that makes you think of a carefully cut sculpture. His blue-gray eyes are roundish and you can fancy them perfectly circular with anger. His lips are full, but colorless. His chin is round and does not thrust forward in pugnacity. His forehead curves and is capacious, head domed somewhat, with neutral colored hair thinned to baldness to almost the top of the skull.” For a man who read a lot—people who knew him noted that if you came upon him in his living room in Augusta he always had a book in his hand and at least one other tented on the arm of his chair or the floor—he, thanks to baseball and off-season bird hunting, had the look of an outdoorsman, an appealing mens-sana-in-corpore-sano aura that not even his burgeoning cigarette habit could dim. He seemed to love the life he had constructed for himself in Augusta, the dogs, the guns, the dinners at which some combination of Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Moe Berg, Joe Tinker, and Grantland Rice would mingle with his neighbors. Jimmy Lanier, for most of the ’20s his personal batboy, and the son of one of those neighbors, recalled that when Cobb was asked by civilian guests on such occasions if it was true that he sharpened his spikes, the way some newspapermen said, he would chuckle and say no, he never had—and then he would ask “Jimmy, m’boy,” who during the season was in charge of cleaning, polishing, and putting away those same spikes, to say whether or not he was being accurate. And Jimmy would pipe he had never known Mr. Cobb to keep a file as part of his baseball kit, and for his honesty and/or loyalty he would be given a Ty Cobb candy bar.
If Cobb wasn’t a millionaire yet he was close to it in 1921, thanks to his endorsement deals with candy, clothing, and sporting goods companies, the probably useless patent medicine Nuxated Iron, a tire store, the Hupmobile dealership, the Augusta Tourists (which he now owned in partnership with several local businessmen), and his stock. One of his hunting buddies was Robert W. Woodruff, who would succeed his father as head of the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Company in 1923, and who urged Cobb to buy and hold on to as many shares as he could afford. He did, and passed along the tip to a number of sportswriters, who, in keeping with a sacred press box tradition regarding the accumulation of wealth, almost universally didn’t. “Had we taken his well-intended advice, we each could have made between $250,000 and $300,00,” said Henry P. Edwards, a baseball beat man for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. (The business journalist Adam J. Wiederman has calculated that one share of Coca-Cola, purchased for $40 in 1919, would be worth $9.8 million today.)
When a reporter visited the Cobb family in mid-October 1921 he found an archetypical American man of leisure, cheerfully overseeing a household full of fresh-faced baseball buffs. Ten-year-old Shirley waited at the front door for the newspaper to arrive so she could keep track of the Giants-Yankees “subway” World Series then ongoing. Eleven-year-old Ty Jr. expounded on his theory that Babe Ruth should return to pitching despite his hot bat. Dad listened and chuckled. “Yes, we’re all fans in this house,” said the “lovely, raven-haired” Charlie Cobb, in one of the very rare moment
s when she is quoted directly. “And in between times I suppose I’m the biggest fan of all!” Unless this was a charade put on for a visiting reporter, Cobb owned all of the items on the standard checklist for happiness: a loving spouse (with family money of her own), a brood of five healthy kids (Jimmy was born in July of 1921), a more than healthy income, well-recognized success. It was probably the happiest time of his life.
Indeed it was only baseball that ruined a good thing. The team he’d inherited had many frustrating flaws. Despite his prediction in April of 1921 that “Detroit will have the best pitching staff in the American League by July 1!” it actually had possibly the worst; four of its five starters—Leonard, Dauss, Howard Ehmke, and Red Oldham—would finish the season with a losing record. The middle of his infield had become so porous that he put shortstop Donie Bush, a fan favorite, on waivers in midseason and brought in center fielder Ira Flagstead to do the best he could at second base.
Left fielder Bobby Veach was a different kind of problem. The skinny, handsome Kentuckian was a consistent .300 hitter and superior RBI man, if you just considered the numbers, but he was not particularly smart; he lacked intensity (he often failed in the clutch) and thought nothing of fraternizing with opponents on and off the field—“snuggling up to them like a Labrador pup” is the way Fred Lieb put it—characteristics that drove Cobb crazy (even though he had players for other teams as dinner guests). After hounding him for a while himself—Cobb’s image as what Bullion had called “the perfect manager” was already starting to crack—he ordered Harry Heilmann, who followed Veach in the batting order, to ride him from the on-deck circle, to call him yellow and a busher, so that he would bear down harder when at bat. Heilmann was at first reluctant to go along with the scheme, saying that he liked Veach and didn’t want to ruin their friendship (“Ballplayers are full of sentiment . . .”), but, Fred Lieb wrote, “Cobb reassured him,” saying, “ ‘Don’t worry, when the season ends I’ll explain to Bobbie that I put you up to it and for his own good.’ ” So Heilmann did what he was told, and Veach both improved as a clutch hitter and stopped talking to him. Unfortunately, Cobb took off for Georgia after the final game of the season without making the promised explanation. By next spring, things were better between Cobb’s fellow outfielders, but they were never quite the same.
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