Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Cobb would forever be a mystery to Heilmann, a large, lumbering sort—his nicknames, “Slug” and “the Horse,” were both double entendres—but the second best hitter the Tigers ever had. In the 1940s, Heilmann told Shirley Povich of the Washington Post that he and Cobb seldom spoke to each other in the first few years after he first came to the Tigers in 1914. Cobb was cool to him, the Horse believed, because he was such a good hitter, and “Ty was always very competitive.” But then when Cobb became manager, the younger man felt, “he needed me, so we talked a lot.” The conversations did pick up at that point, yet there are problems with Heilmann’s version of events. One is that before 1921 he was a promising but sub-.300 hitter on average who posed no imminent threat to the team’s star. Also, rather than needing him so desperately when he became manager, Cobb at first benched Heilmann, then platooned him with a left-handed batter named Chick Shorten. Another thing Heilmann misremembers is that when Cobb did start talking to him it was to give him hitting tips. He got the self-taught youngster, as Charles Alexander tells us, “to stand back in the box, put his feet closer together and hold his hands away from his body.” Heilmann would win the batting title that year, finishing at .394, five points ahead of Cobb. The next year he would hit .356 and the year after that .403. “Cobb taught me more about hitting than I ever knew,” Harry later had to admit.

  It was a difficult interlude for both Heilmann and Cobb. On the not rare days when the former reported for duty with a serious hangover, Cobb, as was his custom in such situations, insisted that he play. Once when Heilmann went from first to third on a single and then threw up all over the bag, Cobb kept him in the game to teach him a lesson. On another occasion, Cobb changed the batting order without telling Heilmann, who wound up hitting out of turn a two-run homer that didn’t count. “Harry didn’t think too much of Cobb,” said a pitcher named Bill Moore. But the two eventually got over their differences, more or less, and Cobb was there at Heilmann’s bedside shortly before he died in 1951 to tell him that he’d made the Hall of Fame (it was a white lie; he wouldn’t be elected until a year later, but he’d be gone by then).

  One thing we learn from Cobb’s years as manager is that dealing with people is a privilege that frays the nerves. He simply could not go for very long as the placid, perfect player-manager without, as they say in the theater, breaking character and letting his real self show through. This was not necessarily a bad thing, considering the lackadaisical way that many of the Tigers played, yet it resulted in hurt feelings. Cobb practically wore a path between center field and the pitcher’s mound, walking—but more often stalking—in to give instructions to his miffed twirlers before he gave up and just started shouting his orders and suggestions. The idea of being especially considerate of his pitchers’ feelings soon went by the boards as the team, after getting off to a fine start in 1921—they were in third place, two games over .500 on Memorial Day—began giving up runs by the barrel.

  “The manager is permitting reverses to prey on his mind,” Bullion observed. Moore remembered that once, after walking three men consecutively and going 1–0 on a fourth, he heard a high-pitched Southern-accented voice behind him yell, “You’re out of the game!” Cobb was especially hard on Dutch Leonard, whom he never liked and whose performance no longer offset the pitcher’s sour and snappish ways. Cobb once pulled him from a game two strikes into a batting turn because he was appalled by his inept attempts to lay down a bunt. Leonard took this quite understandably as a public humiliation. Meanwhile, forgetting about his no-rules policy, he told Cole to quit staying out all night and Dauss to “leave the beer alone.” But it was not just pitchers who felt his wrath—a wrath that, by the way, was not unlike that dispensed by John McGraw and other famously cranky managers. Cobb ran onto the field at Fenway and raged at Veach for missing the plate on a slide home and getting tagged out.

  A few years into his tenure, he more or less permanently cut off communication with Charlie Gehringer after the great young second baseman, a future Hall of Famer, spoke to him disrespectfully one day during a spring training game at which Cobb had been urging his tired-seeming players to “Go out there and make some noise!” Until then, said Gehringer, who came into the league as a shy Michigan farm boy, “Golly, he was like a father to me. He took care of me, coached me, rode with me on the train and all that. He even made me use his own bat, which was kind of a little thin thing. [Like a lot of players, Cobb switched to a lighter and lighter bat as he aged.] I said, gee, I’d like a little more batting space, but I didn’t dare use another one. He would have shipped me to Siberia. But he was super for the first couple of years I was up.”

  “That must have been one hell of a fresh remark” you might say of the response that soured Cobb on “The Mechanical Man” (as they called the consistent Gehringer). But not necessarily. Gehringer might have just given some mild back talk. Cobb, it must be remembered, was extremely sensitive to anything that might contravene the social order. Even after he became a star, he called the principal owner of the Tigers “Mr. Navin” and demanded similar deference from young ballplayers, hotel clerks, chambermaids, train conductors, store workers, and wait staff of any color or either sex. Indeed, his reaction, when such a person regarded too casually the distinction between him and them, could seem borderline batty even under normal circumstances, as we have seen. But the years 1921 through 1926, his managerial era, were far from normal. The play of the Tigers kept him in an almost constant state of agitation. It was easier than ever to set him off.

  The thing is, “the Cobbmen,” as the scribes started calling them, weren’t all that bad, especially as batters. On offense, in fact, they were sensational. Thanks largely to Cobb’s hitting clinics, pretty much the same bunch that had finished sixth in hitting the year before now had an aggregate average of .316, the highest of any team in the previous twenty-four major league seasons. Overall, because they gave up far too many runs and made a lot of errors, they finished sixth in the standings with a record of 71 wins and 82 losses. But at least that was in line with Cobb’s loudly applauded preseason prediction and a step up from the year before. Navin, the scribes, the fans—all had hope. And the next season turned out even better. Once again hitting above .300 as a team, the Tigers finished at 79–75, which put them in third place behind the Yankees and Browns—their best record in six years.

  In 1923 they made a serious run at the pennant. Another future Hall of Famer, outfielder Heinie Manush, whom Navin had found playing for the Omaha Omahogs of the Western League, gave the team even more punch at the plate, especially after Cobb convinced him to choke up on the bat and “poke hit” more instead of always pulling the ball to right field. (Manush hit .334 his rookie season.) After a furious final push—they won 11 of their last 14 games—the Tigers wound up in second place behind the Yankees. To Navin’s delight, the league’s attendance figures worked out the same way. The Tigers drew more than 900,000, the most ever, justifying the owner’s expansion of Navin Field that year, from 23,000 to 29,000. After a few years of avoiding the racetrack for the sake of his financial health, he was once again a regular at the Windsor Jockey Club, across the river from Detroit. “It was now his habit to stuff seven or eight $1,000 bills in his pocket, depending on the number of races,” Fred Lieb tells us. “He would bet one on each race.”

  Cobb was more of a half-empty guy. When he looked at the standings he saw the yawning 16-game gap between his team and the Yankees; instead of second place he saw second-rate-ness. He felt embarrassed that he had not been able to effect a more dramatic transformation in the club. As a mere ballplayer, he now realized, he’d had greater control of his destiny. “When I went into baseball,” he told Prosper Buranelli in the revealing interview that ran in the Free Press on September 25, 1921, “I said to myself that baseball was a business and that, like any other business, it was a matter of push and fight every instant. I must get ahead of the others and keep ahead of the others.” And he had done that, he had managed to beco
me—unless Ruth knocked him off the mountaintop—the greatest ballplayer of all time.

  As a manager he tried as hard as possible to be an influence. He never sat still. The New York Times called him “the busiest manager in six states” and said he “paced up and down the coaching lines like a caged animal, raged at the umpires, yelled at the bench for ‘more pep,’ turned his head to exchange quips with the crowd and patted his players on the back when they made a good play. He had a hand in everything, did Ty, and he kept the Tigers fighting.” He made so many pitching changes that opposing managers complained to Ban Johnson that he was delaying games. Not infrequently, he would pull his ostensible starting pitcher after one batter and replace him with a man who threw from the other side, forcing his counterpart to remake his lineup or suffer the consequences. Many of these maneuvers succeeded to some degree, just not well or often enough to suit his standards. What he needed was a clubhouse full of Ty Cobbs, wrote Sam Greene of the Detroit News, “and since there was only one Cobb, his ideas obviously wouldn’t work.” The results he got, while an improvement on his predecessor and never worse than mediocre, seemed dreary to him. Cobb didn’t want to be just another manager, at the mercy of luck and cycles and fallible players. He rued his lack of a Midas touch.

  Of course, as we’ve seen, whenever the going was especially tough Cobb ramped up his hitting. Even biographer Charles Alexander, not always the most sensitive observer of his subject’s personality, noticed the phenomenon: “Cobb’s performance on the field suggested that the pressures of managing actually heightened his playing skills.” In 1921, Cobb hit .389 and the following year .401, though the batting title went to George Sisler (who hit .420). In 1923 Cobb fell off considerably—to .340—but he still had more magic in his bat, as he demonstrated over the course of two games in St. Louis, on May 5 and 6, 1925. On the first of those dates, Sid Keener recalled in a Sporting News article in 1961, he came upon Cobb telling his sportswriter friend H. G. Salsinger that he was tired of “reading stories that say I get my base hits on infield grounders and little bunts. The big guy, oh, you know, Babe Ruth, he socks those home runs! Well, I’ll show you something today,” Cobb said. “I’m going for home runs for the first time in my career!” That afternoon at Sportsman’s Park, Cobb in six trips to the plate had three homers, two singles, and a double as the Tigers beat the Browns 14–8. The way Keener remembered it, he missed by only a few inches having four home runs for the day. The following afternoon, though, he did hit two more homers and a single in an 11–4 Detroit win. In the clubhouse after the second game, the old scribe wrote, Cobb was “jabbering all over the place” and practically hornpiping with glee. “What will the Babe say about this trick by Ty, five in two games?” (The feat has been equaled by several players since but has never been surpassed.)

  Watching Cobb and Ruth fail to get along sweetly was one of joys of the early live ball era. Cobb was perennially the more aggrieved party because he paid more attention to what was being said and took offense quicker. It pained him to see the stands at Navin Field packed to near-capacity when Boston, and then the Yankees, came to town and, at a time when he himself was slowing down and getting injured a lot, to read a quote from the Tigers’ own team physician, Dr. William Keane, saying, “There are plenty of ballplayers who are as strong physically, but they cannot do the things Ruth does for the reason that their eyes and their muscles are not in such perfect accord.” To Cobb, in those days the Babe was just a big lummox who would eventually eat his way out of the major leagues—or so he said, probably without really believing it was true. “Ruth is good for the game,” he kept hearing. “Cobb cannot be fully appreciated unless you are a student of baseball,” said Yankees manager Miller Huggins. “Ruth appeals to everybody”—but the only way Ruth was good for Cobb, it seems, was as another piece of grit that he could impearl, a negative he could transform into a plus. Besides hitting 18 points above his lifetime average when Ruth pitched, Cobb had, as Tom Stanton tells us in his book Ty and the Babe, a consistently higher average when Ruth was anywhere on the same field. In 1920, for example, when he hit .334 against all opponents, he averaged .420 against the Yanks. When it came to Cobb’s managing, however, Ruth had the opposite effect, bringing out Ty’s overly prideful side. The Tigers were the only team in the American League that chose not to pitch around Ruth, a decision, on Cobb’s part, that yielded disastrous results. In 1921, for example, Ruth had the game-winning hit in three of the Yanks’ first four encounters with Detroit, and he also twice hit game-winning homers in a four-game sweep of the Tigers in mid-June.

  In the second game of that series, played in New York on Sunday, June 12, single combat between Cobb and Ruth was narrowly avoided, but their respective armies clashed. Wrote Harry Bullion of the Free Press: “Close to 32,000 people were undecided whether to weep out of shame for the athletes, give vent to joy or feel insulted at the spectacle.” The trouble began during batting practice, when Ruth, put off by something Cobb had said to him during the previous day’s game, refused a photographer’s request to take a picture with his rival. The Babe, no idiot, was hardly insensitive to the slurs that came his way. Biographer Robert W. Creamer tells us that teammates and opponents alike “made pointed insults about his round, flat-nosed, heavily tanned face; they called him monkey, baboon, ape, gorilla.” Upon hearing that Ruth wouldn’t pose, Cobb chose the gorilla option and did his best impression of one in front of the Yankees dugout. Ruth, “taking it as a challenge,” according to one paper, charged Cobb, and would have fought with him right there had not umpires intervened. Once the game began, the two stars exchanged words every time they passed on the field, and in the fifth inning, said the Bridgeport Telegram, “struck the pose Dempsey and Carpentier will assume July 2” and glared at each other until umpire Bill Dinneen broke the tension.

  Dinneen was a sort of Neville Chamberlain figure. Earlier in the game he had been slugged in the stomach and jaw by Donie Bush following a disputed call but he did not eject the Tigers shortstop until, when the inning ended, Bush tried to hit him with a thrown ball. All eyes remained on Cobb and the Babe, though—until in the eighth another fight erupted between Tigers first baseman Lu Blue and Yankees catcher Wally Schang following a collision at the plate, which in turn caused both teams, said Bullion, “to pour off the benches like smoke out of the funnels of a trans-Atlantic liner.” Ruth and Cobb found each other in the fracas and were again about to mix it up when Miller Huggins tackled his star to keep him out of trouble. Bullion wrote that it was “humorous” to see the manager, “half as big as Ruth, trying to budge the Babe. But while that was going on Ainsmith rushed to the plate to challenge somebody and ‘Ping’ Bodie challenged Eddie,” and so on. The melee didn’t end “until Blue arranged to fight [Yankees coach] Charley O’Leary under the stands after the game.” The results of that contest went unrecorded.

  Ruth and Cobb were at the center of a very similar battle royal that took place three years later almost to the day, but at Navin Field. That time the inciting event was a pitch that drilled Yankees outfielder Bob Meusel in the ribs, causing him to crumple. Ruth yelled that he’d seen Cobb signal pitcher Bert Cole to plunk Meusel, and ran out of the dugout toward the mound. Cobb scurried to defend his man but Huggins once again played referee, now with the help of umpire Emmett “Red” Ormsby. Thousands of Detroit fans soon engulfed the principals and, with all in chaos, and people somehow pulling up seats and tossing them onto the field, Ormsby declared the Yankees winners by forfeit. Curiously, with that climactic catharsis the feud seemed to run out of steam. The 100 or so extra policemen that Navin arranged to be brought in for the next day’s game proved unnecessary, nor were such precautions ever needed again.

  It’s likely Cobb finally figured out that it looked bad for him to be bothered by the man whom fate had so obviously sent to be his replacement. “I’ve always liked Ruth,” Cobb began saying, with a straight face. Batboy Jimmy Lanier remembered only the friendly last days of the rivalry: “
One time when Ruth hit a tremendous home run he was coming around third base and he yelled at Mr. Cobb, in the dugout, ‘Now do you want to tell me how to hit?’ ” After Cobb’s retirement the two greats often golfed together and spent long evenings drinking whiskey and swapping tales, the way ex-ballplayers do. Maybe they weren’t such an odd couple after all. Besides having baseball and success in common they also had Claire Merritt Hodgson, a Georgia native and a Ziegfeld Follies girl who was Ruth’s second wife. In her autobiography, The Babe and I, Mrs. Ruth said she had known Cobb “very well” as a teenager back in Athens, before he married Charlie, and for what it may be worth, Al Stump, in his second book on Cobb, suggests they were young lovers.

  • • •

  Since he couldn’t lavish it on Ruth without looking like a sore loser, and could take it out on the Tigers only so much before it became counterproductive, what did Cobb do with the rage that obviously rose within him as things went less than grandly during his managerial years? He appeared during this stretch of a half dozen seasons to exist in a state of low-grade fury, with occasional flare-ups, stomping around in center, strutting the sidelines, “bullying and goat-getting,” said John E. Wray of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and spouting “rough-riding stuff.” This obviously wasn’t relieving the tension. So to whom did he vent? How did he cope?