Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  Navin also knocked his former manager for failing to develop young players the way Joe McCarthy of the Chicago Cubs routinely did, and for causing unhappiness in the ranks. “It is true that I intended dropping Cobb at the end of the 1925 season because 11 or 12 players on the Detroit club demanded that I sell or trade them,” he said. “They did not want to work under him. I explained this to Cobb so he would be able to handle the situation, and I had Harry Heilmann promise me that he would help me remedy the condition.”

  Navin had cried the blues before about Cobb, but never in this particular key. Whatever he did or said publicly or privately, his goal until this point had always been to keep Cobb close (and Cobb’s enemies closer). When Hughie Jennings tried to frame young Ty as a troublemaker so that he’d be traded, and Ban Johnson wanted to bounce him out of the league for continually fighting, Navin employed a brand of psychological jujitsu that made it sound like he sympathized—like he was madder, in fact, than either of them at his problem child, even as he hustled Cobb safely behind his skirts. When Cobb was accused of spiking Home Run Baker, it was Navin who sent the exonerating photograph to every sports editor on his list. The old nickel nurser had given the unheralded rookie from Royston, Georgia, an unsolicited raise and twenty years later made him the highest-paid player-manager in the game, at $50,000 a season. He had put the Peach into good investments and paid lawyers to extract him from some very sticky jams. He’d met a boy reeling from the death of his father at the hand of his mother and helped mold him into a man—but a man whom he was now estranged from, done with forever, it seemed. Navin’s anger, when it flared, had always been fundamentally paternal, never just a disciplinary technique or a negotiating pose, and so sometimes it seemed especially fierce. But this wasn’t anger. This was the end of the road.

  What was really fueling the public argument between Cobb and Navin did not begin to surface until November 29, 1926, when Tris Speaker unexpectedly resigned as player-manager of the Cleveland Indians. Spoke was thirty-eight years old then, his legs had begun to go, his average had dropped to .304, and his departure came amid numerous managerial denouements—but in other important ways the leave-taking confounded logic. His Indians, blissfully unaware that they were, man for man, a second-division club, had hung close to the Yankees all season and finished just three games behind the Ruth-Gehrig combine in second place. The Plain Dealer called their showing “something a little short of a baseball miracle.” Speaker was the club’s biggest, as well as its only, drawing card (though Homer Summa, Garland Buckeye, Ike Eichrodt, and By Speece were name players in their own way). Surely team president Ernest Barnard would have happily reupped the local hero at his $30,000 annual salary—and yet Speaker said he was, in effect, leaving baseball to pursue his love of geometric metal stamping with the Geometric Stamping Company of Cleveland. Huh? The Plain Dealer editorial writers said they were “bewildered” by Speaker’s exit. So were a lot of others. The New York Times called the move “a profound mystery.”

  Speaker’s and Cobb’s resignations made perfect sense, though, separately and together, to a small group of baseball insiders aware of a drama that had been unfolding behind the scenes all that summer. It was still late May, in fact, when Dutch Leonard, who had been stewing among the prunes and figs on his California fruit farm, came to Ban Johnson’s office in Chicago with an unsettling story to tell about Cobb and Speaker and two letters to prove that what he had to say was not pure spite. Johnson, who probably realized the pitcher had a grudge against Cobb for canning him in 1925, and also resented his former friend Speaker for not picking him up off the waiver wire, at first tried to stymie Leonard by refusing to meet with him. Always a bit lily-livered, and now in the later stages of alcoholism, Johnson struggled to summon the energy and gumption to solve even routine problems. All Leonard did, though, was peddle his potential bombshell elsewhere—namely to Frank Navin, one of the more influential owners in the American League as well as the immediate boss of a man he was ratting on. Navin, too, at first said he was too busy to talk to Leonard, but when he finally did he was impressed enough by what he heard and saw to call Johnson and tell him that he must sit down with the wounded and therefore dangerous Dutchman. This the league president did, and a short time later, with the help of Johnson’s lawyer, Henry Killilea, Navin had arranged to buy Leonard’s letters, as well as his silence, for $20,000.

  What could be worth so much? The story Leonard told was more than a few years old, but it involved gambling and was set, if only by coincidence, in the significant season of 1919, when the White Sox lay down in the World Series and let the Reds win, after accepting bribes from professional gamblers. It was precisely the kind of story that Johnson wished the public not to hear, a tale that, whatever its particular merits, was sure to reinforce the idea that baseball, and his American League in particular, was riddled with corruption. Leonard set his opening scene, in melodramatic fashion, under the Navin Field stands. He said that on September 23, he, Indians manager Speaker, Cobb, and Smoky Joe Wood, a former pitcher but by then an outfielder for Cleveland, had gathered there and got around to discussing the next day’s game. The Tigers had beaten the Indians earlier that afternoon, wiping out the very slim chance they’d had of winning the pennant. Cleveland now was guaranteed to finish second, but the Detroits were still battling the Yankees for third place, the last remaining spot that came with a share of World Series money.

  According to Leonard, Speaker told the group that the Indians, since it was all the same to them, would let the Tigers win—and then someone pointed out that as long as the outcome was certain, it made sense to get down a bet. Cobb allegedly said he was in for $2,000 and suggested that a Navin Field worker named Fred West would be able to place the wager. Leonard said he’d bet $1,500 while Speaker and Wood promised to put up $1,000 each. The transaction didn’t go smoothly, though. West’s bookmaker got nervous about taking so much action, and wanted to get an okay from his boss in Chicago. It also appears that Cobb changed his mind about his participation. Speaker also may have dropped out and been replaced in the little syndicate by a never identified friend of Wood’s, a “man from Cleveland.” In any case, West, according to Leonard, was able to get down only $600 each for the three men at odds of 10–7.

  The letters the pitcher had saved—one from Wood, the other from Cobb—did not back him on every single aspect of his story but they generally supported the idea that a bet had been discussed and attempted by at least some of the men he mentioned. Wood, in his note, left no doubt about his involvement:

  Cleveland, Ohio, Friday

  Dear Friend Dutch:

  Enclosed please find certified check for sixteen hundred and thirty dollars ($1,630.00).

  The only bet West could get down was $600 against $420 (10 to 7). Cobb did not get up a cent. He told us that and I believe him. Could have put up some at 5 to 2 on Detroit, but did not, as that would make us put up $1,000 to win $400.

  We won the $420. I gave West $30 [as a tip], leaving $390, or $130 for each of us. Would not have cashed your check at all, but West thought he could get it up at 10 to 7, and I was going to put it all up at those odds. We could have won $1,750 for the $2,500 if we could have placed it.

  If we ever have another chance like this we will know enough to try to get down early.

  Let me hear from you, Dutch. With all good wishes to Mrs. Leonard and yourself, I am

  JOE WOOD

  Cobb’s letter speaks for itself. While it shows his knowledge of the scheme, it reveals him to be a man uncomfortable with gambling. The articles and books that have quoted it in the past usually have edited out the small talk, but I present it here in unexpurgated form to show the friendly tone he took, at least on this occasion, with a teammate who was notoriously hard to like. To paraphrase something said earlier in this book, his legend notwithstanding, Cobb was not always the crankiest guy in the clubhouse.

  Augusta, Ga., Oct. 23, 1919

  Dear Dutch:

 
Well, old boy, guess you are out in old California by this time and enjoying life.

  I arrived home and found Mrs. Cobb only fair, but the baby girl [Beverly] was fine and at this time Mrs. Cobb is very well, but I have been very busy getting acquainted with my family and have not tried to do any correspondence, hence my delay.

  Wood and myself were considerably disappointed in our business proposition, as we had $2,000 to put into it and the other side quoted us $1,400, and when we finally secured that much money it was about 2 o’clock and they refused to deal with us as they had men in Chicago take up the matter with and they had no time, so we completely fell down and of course we felt badly over it.

  Everything was open to Wood and he can tell you about it when we get together. It was quite a responsibility and I don’t care for it again, I can tell you.

  Well, I hope you found everything in fine shape at home and all your troubles will be little ones. I made a this [sic] year’s share of world series in cotton since I came home and expect to make more.

  I thought the White Sox should have won [the fixed World Series], but I am satisfied they were too overconfident. Well, old scout, drop me a line when you can. We have had some dandy fishing since I arrived home.

  With kindest regards to Mrs. Leonard, I remain,

  Sincerely,

  TY

  Cobb would eventually admit that his letter “connected me to” the plan to make a wager, but he insisted that in the end he acted only as an intermediary, setting up Wood, an out-of-towner, with Fred West. Speaker, though rumored to be a frequent gambler on baseball (and horses), would claim he made no bet, and add in his own defense that he was not even mentioned in either note. And he, Cobb, and Wood all said there had never been a clandestine, beneath-the-stands meeting to hatch a plot, but rather just casual, on-the-fly conversation about matters that at the time seemed of no major consequence. This rings true. It is commonly and I think correctly assumed that baseball’s garden was then rampant with prototypical Pete Roses. Before the Black Sox scandal, merely betting on a game, even one you participated in, was a mundane thing and a venial sin at worst, a common violation of an unwritten rule that was still not in the books seven years later, when Leonard came forward with his story, but for which a player might draw anything from a warning to a suspension of several days. A much more serious crime was fixing a game in order to cash a bet. For undermining the integrity of the pastime in that particular way, players could and did receive lifetime suspensions as well as public scorn. Hal Chase, who would have been certain to win election to the Hall of Fame, once it was founded in 1936, was banned in 1919 for offering bribes to his teammates, and of course eight men connected with the Black Sox scandal, including the otherwise Cooperstown-worthy Shoeless Joe Jackson, were also exiled from baseball.

  Did the game played on the chilly, windy afternoon of September 25, 1919, have a prearranged outcome? It certainly was odd in some ways. The daily newspaper accounts describe a sloppy slugfest won by the Tigers 9–5 in an hour and six minutes, the briefest game of the season. “Cleveland did its best to hurry the game through so it could make the 5 o’clock train for home, dodging the night boat trip,” said the Free Press. Many batters on both sides swung at the first pitch. “Cleveland didn’t care much whether it won or lost,” wrote Harry Bullion in the story he filed that evening, “and the Tigers, catching the visitors in that mood, smashed their way to the top and held the advantage to the finish.” The Plain Dealer felt the same way. “The best thing about this contest was its brevity,” its writer said, noting that it “did not seem like a real championship game.”

  Even if you knew that players back then often coasted and jived their way through meaningless fall “friendship games,” as they were known, the strange rhythm of the game still might raise an eyebrow. But what of the individuals singled out by Leonard as perpetrating or condoning a fix? Did they act suspiciously? It would be hard to convict them on the basis of their performances that day. Two of the men—Leonard himself and Wood—did not play (the former, finished for the year, was on his way back to California), while Cobb went a subpar 1-for-5, and Speaker, who was supposedly betting on his team to lose, smacked two triples that seemed to have been grooved into his wheelhouse by Detroit starter Bernie Boland. With so many players not participating in the “conspiracy,” and the few insiders not playing their logical roles, it is difficult to see this as a classic example of a contest with a predetermined outcome, though clearly Speaker should never have spoken about a laydown and Cobb should never have even considered making a bet.

  The quality of the evidence notwithstanding, Ban Johnson reacted strongly. He always took personally anything that even remotely threatened to besmirch the reputation of the league he had founded a quarter century before, and he wanted to mete out severe punishments—“guilty or innocent,” he said later, inexplicably—but there were problems. Leonard and Wood, a planter and the baseball coach at Yale since 1923, respectively, were now beyond his jurisdictional reach. That left Cobb and Speaker, both all too involved, and synonymous with, the pastime, to discipline quietly—if that were possible. It would be tricky indeed to banish those stars from American League baseball without letting the world know that further evidence of gambling by players had surfaced. Since he didn’t know what to do, Johnson did nothing about the matter for several months except hire private detectives to tail Speaker and Cobb and determine their betting habits (the Pinkertons discovered what was already known: that Speaker gambled frequently, and Cobb never did). In the meantime—probably in early June of 1926—Kenesaw Mountain Landis heard about Leonard’s allegations, through the scuttlebutt, and also sat tight, no doubt enjoying the thought of Johnson agonizing the summer away in the AL president’s more spacious Chicago digs.

  The two baseball “czars” did not exactly go together like peanuts and Cracker Jack. Johnson openly resented Landis from the moment that the owners, in 1920, installed him as the first commissioner, with the command that he clean up the game in the wake of the Black Sox brouhaha, or at least give the impression that he was doing so. A clash between Johnson and Landis was inevitable because the new hierarchy was ambiguously defined—though it was clear that the commissioner superseded a league president—and both men were blatant egoists, more eager to claim territorial rights than to come up with coherent responses to the challenges at hand. Picking sides in this power grab would be difficult. We’ve already seen how mercurial and muddle-headed Johnson could be, even before he started to break down under the influence of drink. Landis—whose first name was a spelling variant of the Civil War battle where his father, a Union Army doctor, was wounded—had been a federal judge known for untoward pronouncements and outlandish decisions that were frequently overturned on appeal. No one ever accused him of being brilliant, or consistent—on the matter of the racial integration of the game, for example, he would in future years be, at turns, pro, neutral, and con—but he did enjoy the stage that baseball provided him, and it was sometimes entertaining to watch him hold forth at the center of it, dressed flamboyantly in nineteenth-century throwback style.

  After keeping mum on the matter for almost four months, Johnson called a secret meeting of the American League owners in his Chicago office on September 9 and told them what he knew about Cobb and Speaker. It’s not clear why he did this, but he may have felt that the gossip was reaching a level where it might soon spill into the press, and so the issue needed to be resolved quickly. It is also impossible to say what exactly he hoped might come of the meeting, but what did happen after some discussion was that Ernest Barnard of the Indians made a motion, seconded by Colonel Jacob Ruppert of the Yankees, that all of Johnson’s files “pertaining to the charges made by Hubert Leonard . . . be submitted to Commissioner K. M. Landis for his consideration.” This motion was passed unanimously. The owners also stipulated that they wanted Landis to conduct a hearing with Leonard, Cobb, Speaker, Wood, and West to investigate the charges.

  John
son, apparently angered by the resolution—he wanted to resolve the matter in his way—did not follow up on it for quite a while. The day of the meeting, his chief lawyer, Killilea, sent Landis copies of the 1919 letters from Cobb and Wood and promised in writing the full cooperation of the American League president, but the bulk of Johnson’s information on the case seems to have remained in the American League offices for at least two additional months, if not longer. In the meantime, Johnson went to see Cobb and Speaker at their homes, to give them a status report—they both knew about the charges already, but Cobb, he said, “was heartbroken and maintained his innocence” when Johnson told him that he planned to banish him from the AL forever, no matter how Landis’s hearing went. Meanwhile, the chagrined commissioner pursued his own investigation, inviting Leonard to come to his office for a discussion. When the ex-pitcher balked at that proposition, saying “they bump off people once in while around there [Chicago],” Landis went to Leonard’s farm near Sanger, California, on October 29 to take his testimony himself. Landis scheduled a formal hearing for late November, which was postponed when Leonard refused to travel east to face the men he was accusing. When the hearing actually did occur, on December 20, Leonard, despite repeated requests for his presence, was still not among the dozen or so people crowded into Landis’s small office.