Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  This brings us to the topic of umpires. On September 24, 1921, Cobb and Billy Evans, a close personal friend who had called him out at second base earlier that day on an attempted steal, engaged in a bloody half-boxing, half-wrestling match after a game under the stands at Griffith Stadium in Washington. You could tell by the way he threw punches and cursed that Cobb believed he had been safe on the play. He “inflicted a hard blow on Evans’ mouth that caused an abrasion,” according to a reporter who witnessed the scene. Then the two “went into a clinch, fell into the cinders and rolled around” until “park officials succeeded in separating the battlers,” who shook hands and apologized, friends again.

  Evans was probably not surprised to hear Cobb suggest, immediately after the play, that they meet postgame to settle things with their fists. He had been baiting and battling umpires with odd enthusiasm since he took the skipper’s job. The behavior actually started in late 1920, when he had first tried his hand at managing, in San Francisco; he had that December incurred the largest fine ever levied in the Pacific Coast League—$150—for stalking out of a game in the sixth inning after an umpire refused to remove a ball Cobb said was being scuffed by the pitcher. In March of 1921 he announced, “in strident tones,” said the New York Times, but without explanation, that he refused to play an exhibition game against the Giants because the umpire was to be the apparently onerous NL veteran Bill Brennan. After that, amid many minor run-ins, he had the fight with Evans and then, in St. Louis, a screaming match with umpire Frank Wilson, whose toes he purposely stepped on with his spikes. He may have also worked to get him fired; when Wilson was relegated to the minors two weeks later he blamed Cobb. Pants Rowland, putting in a stint as an umpire, also got a serious tongue-lashing from the man who’d beaten him out for the Detroit managing job.

  Cobb had been rough on umps when he first came up, but never to this degree. Back then, when big league baseball was still relatively new, everybody in the game seemed to see umpires as villains working if not for the other side then specifically against them. Whether the attitude stemmed from a widespread innocence about how things worked down on the field, or the fact that so many people were betting on the games, is hard to say, but players routinely struck umpires, fans threw bottles and rotten vegetables at them, and team owners threatened to take them to court. A week before Cobb came to the majors, Tigers supporters, outraged by a call, mobbed umpire Jack Sheridan and chased him into the clubhouse—where he declared the Washington Senators the winner by forfeit. Umps in those days were everybody’s punching bag. The drama critic George Jean Nathan, an avid baseball fan, counted 355 physical assaults on umpires by players and fans during the 1909 season alone. Abe Pollock, who had been a boxing referee before becoming a professional ump, said that players had often spiked his feet, bumped him, and kicked him in the shins; he didn’t quit, though, until the day when a fan “dropped a bull terrier on the field, pointed to me and said, ‘Sic ’em!’ ”

  Cobb, like most other people who played or followed or ran the game, in time came to realize that while umpires may make mistakes, instances of them favoring one team were exceedingly rare. He also saw that there was little to be gained by being a constant bother to the men in blue. “Once I showed him who was in charge,” said Silk O’Loughlin, “I never had any problem with him.” According to the Chicago Tribune, Cobb promised in April of 1910 that he would “not sass an umpire, no matter what the umpire may do to provoke him.” It was a vow he broke frequently, before and after he wrote in his 1914 memoir, Busting ’Em, “umpires are the bravest men in baseball” and “I have long since seen the folly” of being rough on them—but never with the lack of restraint he showed after he became a manager. Some of his fellow skippers, especially Clark Griffith of the Senators, thought his behavior downright unseemly, and told Ban Johnson that all of his griping (as well as his pitcher switching) was slowing down games to the point where they were getting tedious.

  Cobb’s ever-loyal batboy, Jimmy Lanier, said that the only time his boss ever disappointed him came during this period, when Cobb abused two umpires in a spring training game against the Cardinals at Warren Park in Augusta in early April of 1923. After being called out by Harry Pfirman when he attempted to steal second base, he threw a handful of dirt in Pfirman’s face, then refused the order of crew chief “Steamboat” Johnson to get to the showers. They argued for at least five minutes before Johnson declared the game over, and then the crowd surged onto the field, jostled the umps and demanded refunds. Cobb, who as a part-owner of Warren Park had employed the umpires for the exhibition series, sought out Johnson in the mob and told him he was fired. Later that night, starting to regret his behavior, he went to Johnson’s hotel and gruffly rehired him—“but,” said Lanier, “he made a fool of himself, I thought.”

  Cobb often felt ashamed of his angry outbursts; he was, after all, a true personage who played poker and sipped bootleg whiskey with the president of the United States, Warren Harding, at a private all-men’s club outside Augusta, not to mention a Southern gentleman. On some days he could be the most considerate man you ever met, slipping $20 to a raggedy-looking child he saw along the road or going into the stands to check on a woman who’d been struck by a foul ball, and telling her that if she had any resulting medical expenses, she should send them to the Detroit Tigers. “The King,” as some Detroit sportswriters called him, shouldn’t be throwing dirt in some poor umpire’s face or holding up a game by acting like a stubborn child. “I rode home with him,” Lanier went on, “and he went in and told Mrs. Cobb what had happened [with the umpires]. He said that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.”

  • • •

  The end of the affair is always a sad thing, and Cobb and Detroit were starting to drift apart, not dramatically but perceptibly, even a year before the city threw him another big shindig, this time to celebrate his twentieth year as a Tiger. The city was a booming, more modern, younger place than it had been when he first put his bags down at Michigan Central Station. He was fitting in less comfortably, to the game and to the era. He was now the oldest player in the American League, railing at the kids on his lawn. He could still poke the ball over the infielders’ heads—he batted .338, .378, and .339 over the next three years, 1924, ’25, and ’26—but in 1925 and ’26 he was managing from the bench with increasing frequency, and because he was heavier and chronically leg-sore, he could no longer play his signature game, the mad dance around the bases to a tune only he could hear. Since there was no film of him to watch, newcomers to Detroit—and there were a lot of newcomers to Detroit in those days—may have wondered what all the fuss was about. Or what caused him to get in so many scrapes with service workers. In February of 1925 he “attained new heights of dignity,” said the Atlanta Constitution, with uncharacteristic sarcasm, after “he engaged in heated and profane repartee with a comely waitress over the size of a lunch check” in a Union Station restaurant. The woman alleged that she had to hit him on the head with a glass plate to get him to simmer down. He was booked on a charge of disorderly conduct and released after posting $11 bail. It wasn’t serious—he denied that she’d ever plunked him—but it was silly and more than a little embarrassing. Not long afterward, as the team was stumbling out of the starting gate, a columnist for the Washington Post reported that he’d heard a rumor that some fans were circulating a petition calling for Cobb’s removal.

  The root problem was what it always is in sports: too much losing. Cobb could have delayed games and played his quaint brand of throwback baseball all he wanted if the Tigers had come closer to winning a pennant—but they didn’t. In 1924, the year before Cobb’s physical decline began in earnest—he made 625 plate appearances, the most of his career—the Tigers put up a record of 86–68, and passed the one million mark in attendance, but still finished in third place, 10 games behind the Senators and eight behind the Yankees. In 1925, they regressed, and got booed from the (4–14) start. “This city has soured on the Tigers,” a New
York Times reporter wrote when he came to Detroit. Cobb himself, said the Washington Post, was frequently the inspiration for “the raspberry chorus,” even though his pitchers, which as a group had an ERA of 4.61, probably deserved it more.

  No one was more of a problem to him than the once great Dutch Leonard, who had left the team in 1921 after a salary dispute with Navin and returned in late 1924 following a few seasons in an outlaw West Coast league. Leonard pitched not at all badly the following year, going 11–4, but he accused Cobb of overusing him as a means of punishing him for his outspokenness. He said that Cobb wanted to permanently ruin his arm so as to put him out of the business. Whether it was true or not, it was a very Dutch Leonard–ish thing to say. Cobb, for his part, called it ridiculous, but it may have given him an idea because on July 14 he left Leonard in a game in which the Athletics were walloping him for 12 runs and 20 hits, forcing him to go the full nine innings. In September of that year, he put the pitcher on waivers and, as the Dutchman told it, made a few phone calls to other front offices to assure he would not be picked up. Leonard’s enforced return to his farm in Fresno turned out to be fruitful for him in more ways than one—he became, by his death in 1952, a kind of raisin king—but he left the game vowing revenge on Cobb and, as we shall see in the next chapter, no one can say he didn’t give it his best shot.

  The 1925 Tigers finished at 81–73, good enough only for fourth place, 161/2 games behind Washington. While this may not have seemed like the kind of campaign that ought to be interrupted for a special Ty Cobb Day, it was the twentieth anniversary of his joining the club in midseason as an unheralded yannigan, and so following pregame ceremonies on August 29, Cobb stood bareheaded at home plate in Navin Field and shook the hands of thousands of fans as they filed past. At the new Book Cadillac Hotel that evening, 600—including Connie Mack, Mayor John W. Smith, and umpire Billy Evans, who was rumored to be Cobb’s replacement as manager—gathered to make speeches and present him with a grandfather clock said to be worth $1,000. The spirit of this banquet wasn’t the same as the one four years previous, though. For one thing, Cobb was miffed at the Detroit News for its plan to publish, without his permission, the first book-length biography of him, really a collection of fifty-eight H. G. Salsinger sketches that had already run in the paper and which the News had advertised under the title of Our Ty. In deference to him, no copies were printed but the incident strained relations between Cobb and his oldest friend in the press box. What annoyed the guest of honor even more, however, was the point in the evening when Navin presented him with a $10,000 check, said to be an extra sign of the club’s appreciation. Cobb contended that the “bonus” was nothing more than what the Tigers owed him anyway by the terms of his contract, and that Navin was using him to buff his own public image. The cord that had bound those two for so long was fraying—yet not quite ready to break. That fall, the owner offered Cobb a new contract that raised his salary to $50,000, and Cobb promptly accepted it. Clearly, Navin, who had stuck with Hughie Jennings through 11 pennantless seasons, found it difficult to fire managers, and even harder to separate from surrogate sons. As for Cobb, he wanted one more chance to clear up the muddle that was his managerial tenure.

  No such luck. Things stayed inconclusive. Nineteen twenty-six, Fred Lieb tells us, was “another one of those might-have-been seasons,” somewhere between crummy and Cobbian, thanks again to superb hitting undercut by lackluster arms. Cobb kept himself out of the lineup for most of the second half; he’d started the year by having surgery to remove benign growths caused by excessive exposure to sunlight from both eyes, and then he’d strained his back, but his critics said he was simply tired of hearing so much booing. The Tigers, close to the top all summer, with Bob “Fats” Fothergill filling in at center field when Cobb rested, were sixth in the end, with a kissing-your-sister record of 79–75. Even worse, though, was that attendance had dropped by about 300,000 from just a few years before. “Ty Cobb has lost his popularity,” wrote Henry Edwards of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, and while that was an exaggeration, fewer and fewer wanted to watch him run the ball club. When asked about rumors that he was retiring, Cobb said, “I guess some of the fans hope it’s true.”

  After the final game of the 1926 season—the second half of a doubleheader against Boston in which he ground out in his one at-bat as a pinch hitter—he got out of town quickly, and far from baseball. Instead of going to the World Series (in which the Cardinals, led by second baseman–manager Rogers Hornsby, beat the Yankees in seven games), he went with Tris Speaker and others to hunt bear and moose in the Grand Tetons. When he returned to Detroit, on Wednesday, November 3, he was carrying his letter of resignation, which he left with Frank Navin’s secretary.

  — CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN —

  BECAUSE THE ANSWER SEEMS A lot less obvious now than it did in late 1926, let us pose the question anew: Was Ty Cobb a success as a manager? The answer I think depends on how you define “Ty Cobb.” If you see him as a man who would not be content unless any endeavor he undertook absolutely reeked of excellence, then no, he certainly was not. His record in his half dozen seasons as the Tigers’ skipper was an odorless 479–444, good for a pleasant-enough .519 win percentage. This was slightly below the .523 that Hughie Jennings had earned in the six years prior to Cobb’s ascension, but securely ahead of the .469 that two successive managers produced over an equal span immediately after Cobb. So tough call, the thumbs-up-or-down thing, no? A reasonable person, removed from the zeitgeist and looking at just these numbers, could go either way. Cobb himself seemed to recognize this when he discussed the issue with Fred Lieb a few years after his retirement. His pertinent quote, which appears in Lieb’s history of the Tigers, has, it is true, a certain airbrushed quality, and yet it compactly states the case for him not being an out-and-out bust:

  “Maybe I was not a managerial success, but just as surely I was not a managerial failure,” Cobb allegedly told the Tigers historian over dinner in a San Francisco restaurant.

  I took over a seventh-place club in 1921, and with the exception of that year, all of my clubs won more games than they lost. Four were in the first division. We played interesting, exciting ball, drew well at home, and next to the Yankees were the best attraction on the road. I was continually handicapped by inadequate pitching, but Earl Whitehill and several other good prospects were developed. Heilmann developed into a full-fledged star under my management; he was a natural hitter, and I taught him everything I had learned in my long career. We always had hitting clubs, so I must have imparted some of my own hitting knowledge to my players.

  That may sound reasonable now, but in late 1926 the speaker of those words would have been pilloried. Cobb was still widely revered as the greatest ballplayer who ever lived, no mere jock but a philosopher of the pastime, an innovator and sage. The second most popular synonym for him in the Detroit press, after “the Peach,” was “the King.” Not long before, attempting to convey what it meant to be Ty Cobb, E. A. Batchelor had written of an eerie encounter he had on a rainy evening in Mississippi, when the train carrying the Tigers north from spring training ground to a halt at a water tank station. A score of “countrymen” who’d heard that “Mistah Ty Cobb” was coming through, and who “dun druv 10 miles” to see him (it’s hard to tell from the lamely rendered dialect and other description if the rubes were black or white) emerged from the crepuscular mist and pressed their weathered faces against the Pullman windows. “I jest wanted to shake yo’ hand,” said their leader. “Glad to see you; very glad indeed,” says Cobb. “Won’t you all sit down?” Then, in the ten minutes before the train began to move on, he “talked about everything but himself” and “made every man there feel that his hero had lived especially for this moment.”

  People loved Cobb so much they asked for his autograph on balls and bats and shirts—a relatively new thing—and they named their children after him, boys especially. They just didn’t want him to manage anymore, and within the confines of Navin Fiel
d, when he was in his uniform and they were wearing their fan-faces, they weren’t afraid to make their disapproval manifest. The consensus, articulated by the scribes, was that he had made a mockery of his once promising “no rules” policy, and disheartened the team by becoming a classic martinet. Even those who didn’t think he managed badly thought he managed far too much. “That man makes me so nervous I don’t know if I’m here or in Pekin [Peking]!” one of his players supposedly said. In the wake of his resignation, his presumed friend H. G. Salsinger—who may have still been angry with Cobb for blocking the publication of his book a year earlier—wrote a stingingly negative review of his performance in the Sporting News, saying “As a player he was without peer; as a manager he became a man with a number of superiors.” Cobb’s “natural nervousness” did him in, Salsinger said. “It caused his varying moods. He never moved at an even keel. He was either too generous in his praise or too biting in his criticisms. He left wounds that never healed.”

  Many harsh things were said at this time, by people on both sides; it was, after all, a divorce. Cobb claimed he was victim of a conspiracy involving Navin, Ban Johnson, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the flamboyant, capricious commissioner of baseball. He said those men wanted him out of the league, and in fact they may have, for reasons that hadn’t yet surfaced publicly but soon would. Still, the Tigers’ owner swatted down the contention, saying “I don’t know what he means when he talks about conspiracy. He was on a player’s contract. That contract had expired; therefore it was unnecessary to engage in any conspiracy to drop him.” As for Cobb’s charge that the Tigers undermined his efforts with their penny-pinching ways, Navin had an answer for that, too, which he gave in a very blunt interview with the Detroit News. He said that he and his partners, Briggs and Kelsey, had let Cobb know that they were willing to go into their own wallets to “buy and present to the ball club” any player that the Tigers as a corporation could not afford—but that Cobb had failed to identify such a player who was actually on the market. He also said that of the players they had acquired on their manager’s recommendation, “some were satisfactory but most were not.” He then mentioned Rip Collins, Del Pratt, Wilbur Cooper, and “a player named Goebel”—names he knew would land like Dempsey combinations on Tigers fans’ collective solar plexus, rendering them nauseated. (Goebel, for whom the Tigers gave up the .290 lifetime hitter Ira Flagstead at Cobb’s urging, never even reported to Detroit.)