Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  There were no big surprises that day, just some interesting little revelations, such as Wood, to make the point that gambling by players had been an everyday thing, saying that the entire Washington Senators team once “went broke” betting on a game in which he out-pitched Walter Johnson. An attentive reader of the transcript might also have seen that Cobb could at times sound like an upper-class Brit: “All the players were fagged out,” he told his inquisitor, Killilea, explaining why the September 25 game seemed so rushed. “I dare say every season there are games that slide along and are played off hurriedly on that account; it has been happening ever since baseball has been played.” When Landis offered him the chance to slam his accuser, Cobb took it. Asked about Leonard’s possible motive, he said “I cannot imagine a human being with any sort of honor or ideals having the spleen . . .” and so on for another five minutes. For the most part, though, the principals stuck to the stories they had been telling unofficially and behind closed doors all that spring, summer, and fall: Cobb and Speaker had not bet, the idea of them fixing a game was ridiculous, Leonard was just looking to make some money by threatening to go public with his slanders. They agreed that he had always been a troublemaker, or as Cobb called him, “a Bolshevik.”

  The hearing ended with Landis not giving a hint as to which way he was leaning in the case, but the next day he announced to the press what had been rumored for months: that he was investigating accusations made by Leonard involving Cobb and Speaker. At the same time he released 100 pages of related documents—everything he had on the matter, he said—and explained that as a result of the stories told about them the two player-managers had been “permitted to resign.” That wasn’t what Cobb and Speaker had been saying about their departures, but there were more contradictions to come. Asked by newspapermen why the public hadn’t been informed previously, Landis said the delay was out of consideration for the baseball greats at the center of the controversy. But he also said, a few minutes later, that he had gone public at the request of Cobb and Speaker. As for when the world could expect a verdict, he at one point said he would not be rendering one since now all the men involved were out of organized baseball—and at another point noted that his decision could be expected sometime later that winter. Baseball must be a strong game to have survived its leaders. Only Leonard seemed happy with the judge’s pronouncements. “I have had my revenge,” he told Damon Runyon.

  Johnson said he couldn’t comment on the revelations because “I am dumbfounded” and “not over the shock” of Landis going public with them. In trying to keep the matter secret, he said, “we had thought of Ty Cobb’s wonderful family, of Joe Wood’s two sons at Yale University and of Tris Speaker’s aged mother.” Johnson, at this stage of his life, had a tendency to get garrulous, in a maudlin sort of way, like the man you regret sitting next to at a bar. He had never liked Speaker, who was a little too “cute” for his taste, he told the writers. But Cobb was another story. “I know Ty Cobb is not a crooked ballplayer,” he said. “We let him go because he had written a peculiar letter about a betting deal that he couldn’t explain and because I felt he had violated a position of trust.” After more than twenty years of fining him, suspending him, and addressing countless letters of warning to him c/o the Detroit Tigers, “I love Ty Cobb!” Johnson declared.

  To a lot of people, though, kicking Cobb out of the American League was a funny way of showing that affection. Both Johnson and Landis seemed caught off guard by the way the public instantly rallied around Cobb and Speaker, and denounced the lords of baseball for prosecuting them. “Fans Refuse to Believe Spoke or Ty Guilty” said a headline in the Plain Dealer, while sports columnist Joe Bang wrote, “Clevelanders believe in Tris. They are behind him almost to every last man and woman.” At a rally for Cobb in Augusta, his wife, Charlie, told a crowd of about 500 people standing beneath a banner (“TY IS STILL OUR IDOL, AND THE IDOL OF AMERICA”) on Broad Street, “above all persons I should know that Ty Cobb is absolutely fair and square. We have been married 19 years and have five children. My husband may have his faults, but dishonesty is not one of them.” Detroit sportswriters, so recently ready to write good riddance when he resigned as manager, were unanimous in their support. So were most of the baseball people reached for comment by the press. “It’s the bunk,” said Harry Lunte, a shortstop for the 1919 Indians. Said Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators: “I don’t believe it.” Even L. L. Scarborough, the druggist who owned the Anniston, Alabama, team that Cobb had played for briefly in 1904, chimed in: “When Ty came here he was just a youth, fresh from the countryside, but he had principles that were not to be overrun. Any man in Anniston who knew Ty when he played here doesn’t believe these charges!” Navin had no comment, though clearly he could not bear the idea of Cobb still caught up in controversy at age forty. Of those who spoke for the record, only Hughie Jennings was not supportive, saying, “Judge Landis would not make such statements unless he had proof to back it up.”

  What undercut Jennings’s observation a bit was that Landis had made no statement of any kind yet. He had both promised to make one and denied that he would ever do such a thing, so it was difficult to tell if anything was in the offing. But before he could clarify that matter, another old betting scandal knocked him sideways. “Won’t these God damn things that happened before I came into baseball ever stop coming up?” Landis asked no one in particular after Charles “Swede” Risberg, an already banished Black Sox shortstop, came forward in the final days of 1926 to say he wanted to talk about a series of games the Tigers had allegedly thrown, or as he put it, “sloughed off,” in 1917. “They pushed Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker out on a piker bet,” Risberg told the press. “I think it’s only fair that the ‘white lilies’ get the same treatment.”

  The lilies in his particular field were Eddie Collins, Ray Schalk, and other Chicago players who were believed not to have been involved with the fixing of the 1919 World Series. The Clean Sox, they were sometimes called. Risberg said that on this earlier occasion those fellows and other members of the Chicago club chipped in $45 each to create a purse of $1,100 for the Detroit pitchers, ensuring that they serve up slow fastballs and nonbreaking curves in back-to-back doubleheaders played in Chicago on September 2 and 3, ensuring a White Sox victory. Chicago, then battling Boston for first place, did win all four games (and eventually the pennant and the World Series), and for what it was worth, Risberg’s fellow exile, Arnold “Chick” Gandil, spoke up to back his assertion that this was no accident. Fixed games were nothing unusual, the two Black Sox said. The St. Louis Browns also had sloughed off games against Chicago in 1917, and Chicago had purposely lost two against the Tigers late in 1919 so some White Sox players could cash bets on their opponents. If you don’t believe us, the players said, ask White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey; he knew all about it.

  This wasn’t the first time these charges had been raised. Five years earlier, yet another Black Sox, conspirator Oscar “Happy” Felsch, had said the same thing and Landis had ignored him. This time, though, the commissioner brought in Risberg for an interview on New Year’s Day and four days later brought in thirty-four players from the 1917 Tigers and White Sox for a two-day hearing. Pressed against the back wall, among the sports scribes, was the famous humorist Will Rogers, who considered himself a good friend of both Cobb’s and Speaker’s. Cobb testified on the first day while Risberg looked on, chain-smoking. While he had been polite and sincere at the hearing held two weeks earlier, Cobb’s attitude toward Landis now seemed, depending on which newspaper you read, “cold” or “bitter.” Like all of the players who had come before him, and would be called later, he flatly denied Risberg’s charges. “There has never been a baseball game that I played in that I knew was fixed,” he said. Risberg, speaking to the press between drags on his ever-present cigarette, backed him up on this. “There never was a better or straighter baseball player than Cobb, or Speaker, either, to my way of thinking,” he said. Will Rogers agreed. “If Cobb an
d Speaker had been selling out all these years,” he said, “I would like to have seen them when they wasn’t selling.”

  Most of the players who testified over the course of the two days said that Risberg wasn’t making up a story out of whole cloth exactly but was rather twisting one small truth. Money was collected from the White Sox, Collins admitted, but the fund it went into was used as a “reward” to the Tigers for beating the Red Sox in a doubleheader on September 19 and another game on the 20th, not as a bribe for lying down against Chicago. “It was nothing out of the ordinary,” said Collins, “to give a player on another team some sort of a gift if he went out of the way to turn in a good performance against one of the team’s leading rivals in the [pennant] race.” Comiskey, when called to give his testimony, said, “I am not condoning anyone or any act, but this matter was known to everybody.” Even Ban Johnson, speaking outside of the hearings, admitted he was aware of the practice. “It was simply a reward for a player to use extra effort against a pennant rival. Of course it was wrong doing, yet it was not a criminal act.” On January 12, Landis, saying more or less the same thing as Johnson but taking 3,000 mostly multisyllabic words to do it, issued an opinion that exonerated all of the players involved in the “reprehensible and censurable but not corrupt” practice of gift giving.

  Meanwhile the status of Cobb and Speaker remained murky. While Landis had busied himself with the Risberg affair, they had traveled to Washington with a naive-sounding plan to “enlist the federal government’s aid in the fight to clear their names from the taint of the latest baseball scandal,” said the Atlanta Constitution. Not surprisingly, that didn’t amount to much, but both men kept pleading their case with the newspapermen, saying now that they were seeking reinstatement. Cobb was especially adamant in insisting that his bad relations with the Tiger players had been exaggerated and that most men on the team had telegraphed or written him to express their support. (However deserving he was of his reputation as a hard-ass, it greatly bothered him to be thought of as one.)

  Johnson met the press, too—and in doing so enhanced the entertainment value of the controversy. There was no telling what he would say. While the Risberg case played out, he had been giving not-for-attribution interviews in which he, in the guise of “a leader of organized baseball” (he asked the scribes to use that particular locution), suggested that the American League president was sitting on explosive information regarding Cobb and Speaker that had never been passed along to Landis. Then at a bizarrely gratuitous and disjointed press conference he called on January 17, Johnson came clean, admitting he was the source of those stories. He also claimed that the commissioner had stolen the credit for his, Johnson’s, investigation of the Black Sox scandal seven years earlier, and then mismanaged the outcome by not acting quickly enough—and he repeated his promise that whatever the commissioner decided about Cobb and Speaker they would never again play or manage in the American League. Asked why he thought Landis had gone public with Leonard’s charges he said, “The only thing I could see behind it was a desire for personal publicity.” Before he was finished, he mumbled something about a “financial matter” between him and Landis that he would rather not discuss. The suggestion was that the commissioner had acted less than honorably.

  The sight and sound of a pompous suit self-destructing in public is both delicious and a little sad. Johnson had been formally warned by the AL owners two years earlier to quit criticizing Landis or lose his $40,000-a-year job, but he couldn’t help himself. “I’m thoroughly tired of this,” Jacob Ruppert said while on his way to Chicago for a January 23 “war council” Johnson had called to see just how much support he had. It was not a propitious time for the league president to check in with the owners, who had just shown their support for Landis by raising his salary $15,000 to $65,000 annually, and just read the accounts of Johnson saying embarrassing things, in an embarrassing way, not for the first time, to the press. Nor was the AL president finished making people cringe. Before the war council could convene, he called in the scribes to say that he had never said that Cobb and Speaker were “crooked”—no, not at all; they were forced out merely for being incompetent managers. As long as they didn’t want to manage anymore, he now said, they could return to the American League as players anytime they desired. Physically and mentally Johnson was falling apart. It appears that he never spoke at his January 23 meeting, but his physician did, rising at the start to formally advise the assembled that “the president’s health is such that he should immediately take a much-needed rest.” A motion to grant him a leave of absence passed unanimously, and Frank Navin became the acting president of the league. Johnson left the room. His biographer, Eugene C. Murdock, wrote that Ban’s “condition was considered ‘pitiable,’ and at several times he appeared near collapse. He was later seen wandering dazedly in the hotel lobby, where he seemed almost oblivious to what was going on around him.”

  Four days later, Landis issued his opinion on the Cobb-Speaker case: “These players have not been, nor are they now, found guilty of fixing a ball game. By no decent system of justice could such a finding be made.”

  Cobb returned to Augusta, picked up his dogs, and went duck hunting.

  — CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT —

  ONE OF THOSE DOGS WAS named Connie Mack.

  That fact, little known beyond Cobb’s circle of friends, would have been a useful clue for the many baseball fans wondering what the Peach planned to do next. For a while after Landis’s decision came down, all he was certain of was that he didn’t want to go out like this, a pawn in a game played by fools with fancy titles. But where to finish his career? Cobb was happy to relinquish the manager’s responsibilities and become just a player again, but he couldn’t play for just anyone. To take orders from some run-of-the-mill skipper would be unseemly. In November, more than a month before the general public even heard about Leonard’s stories and letters, John McGraw, one of the insiders who knew about the case, had made it clear that there was a place for him on the New York Giants—and Landis had promptly slapped down McGraw, saying, “Lay off Cobb.” It was too soon, and anyway under the rules the former Tiger couldn’t play in the National League unless he cleared waivers, and that wasn’t going to happen. Too many American League teams had expressed interest in him: the St. Louis Browns, the Yankees, the Philadelphia Athletics; the minor league Baltimore Orioles wanted him, too, and were offering $25,000. Only Detroit was completely out of the question. He liked the city, had friends and still went to the dentist there, but there were too many bad memories, one of them named Frank Navin. Cobb was looking for “vindication before the public,” he would say years later in a letter to the two-legged Connie Mack. He wanted to start fresh and with someone he respected enough to name a dog after. (His other dog, by the way, he named after himself.)

  Connie Mack, who was born a few days after the Battle of Fredericksburg and who would live long enough to manage a game called by Vin Scully, had already been around a long time at that point. He first came to the National League in 1886, the year Cobb was born, a tall, blade-thin catcher for a Washington team known variously as the Statesmen, Senators, and Nationals. He himself was in a larval stage known as Cornelius McGillicuddy, or, sometimes, “Slats.” By 1927, though, Mack was sixty-four years old, the manager and part-owner of the Philadelphia Athletics, and was generally regarded, along with McGraw, as one of the game’s great thinkers. Outside of their clash in the Baker Spiking Incident in 1909, Cobb had only admiration for the natty sage of East Brookfield, Massachusetts. “Think of the situations and how craftily manager Mack analyzed every little detail,” Cobb wrote in a syndicated column about the 1913 World Series (in which the Athletics beat the Giants four games to one). “Think of the different angles and the thought which he put into the problem.” What impressed Cobb on that occasion was how Mack disrupted his starting rotation to use Eddie Plank, “a pitcher of a nervous temperament, every action showing high tension,” before a friendly home crowd, where he�
��d be more at ease, and thus more effective. That the A’s lost that day didn’t matter. Cobb and Mack shared the belief that you should fit a pitcher to the particular circumstances he’d be facing—batters, ballpark, weather, etc.—rather than worry about how rested he might be.

  More generally, Cobb liked the way Mack constantly employed psychology to gain an advantage or get the most out of his men. Mack’s motto—“If you get the other fellow worried, the battle is half won”—closely resembled his own guiding principle. But what Cobb liked more than anything about Mack was what most people liked: the sheer aesthetic pleasure of watching him work—seeing him standing in the dugout (or sometimes on top of the dugout), ramrod straight, dressed in suit, tie, and hat, holding a rolled-up scorecard that he used like a conductor’s baton to signal his fielders to move this way or that in accordance with his encyclopedic knowledge or golden gut.

  Although it defied conventional wisdom in some ways, Mack had a feeling that Cobb would be good for his club. The A’s hadn’t been in the World Series since 1914, and had finished dead last every season from 1915 to 1921. But in 1925 and ’26 they had helped make a race of it in the American League, and wound up, respectively, second and third. They lacked in two areas, as Mack saw it: pitching and passion. While he worked on the former, he figured, Cobb, along with a few other crafty veterans he signed that winter, would inspire the latter in the highly promising bunch of youngsters Mack had acquired—Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, future Hall of Famers all—just by being themselves. That Cobb was still fired up to play baseball at the age of forty might in fact make him a better role model than he’d ever been, though he would continue to be a most unconventional one: the last man to arrive in the clubhouse each day, and an inveterate heel-dragger when it came to spring training. He was never what we’d later call too cool for school, though; once he was suited up and ready to play, he pursued the typical baseball tasks, things like bunting, running, and sliding, as if they were as vital as sex. He could help Mack at the box office, too. With Sunday baseball against the law in Pennsylvania, the A’s were hard-pressed to put up flashy attendance figures, and thus to show the profits being reaped by his fellow magnates. “I certainly would like to have both Cobb and Speaker,” Mack said as soon as they were exonerated—though Spoke, he could sense, was hearing the Senators’ siren song. The manager already had added forty-two-year-old Jack Quinn, forty-year-old Eddie Collins, and thirty-eight-year-old Zack Wheat to what James R. Harrison of the New York Times called “his interesting but not highly valuable collection of antiques.” Mack thought they’d be useful both as teachers and as drawing cards. But those men took salary cuts to extend their careers. Cobb was something else again, much more than just a curiosity or a master coach, and for him Mack was willing to engage in a full-on courtship display.