Ty Cobb
Page 43
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And the Athletics almost caught the damn Yankees in 1928. They were a half game ahead of New York, in fact, when they came to Yankee Stadium on September 10 of that year. The biggest crowd in the history of baseball—more than 88,000—turned out for the doubleheader that would kick off the four-game set. “The stands rang with the cheers of the crowd,” said the Times, “when Ty Cobb emerged from the Yankee dugout on his way to the A’s bench.” But that was where he stayed, for 18 innings of baseball, as the Yankees swept both halves of the twin bill. He wasn’t injured, but that was the way it was by then, and had been for a while.
The year had started off fine. Mack had finally snagged Tris Speaker, also at a reduced rate, and the two of them, plus Simmons, added up to a ridiculously slow but classy outfield. But Speaker collided with a substitute right fielder named Bing Miller in late May and never came all the way back; Mack used him mostly as a third base coach, a demotion he graciously accepted. Cobb lasted two months longer, hitting comfortably above .300 all the way, until a condition described as “nervous indigestion,” as well as general soreness and a fastball from White Sox pitcher George Connally that struck him around the right pectoral muscle combined to force him out of the lineup. As July became August it became apparent that he, too, had a new role on the A’s, as an occasional substitute. He was in some ways back to where he had started.
Mack put him in as a pinch hitter in the third game of the big series against the Yankees, on September 11, after Ruth (of course) had homered to put his club ahead 5–3 in the bottom of the eighth. We don’t know if it influenced the manager, but just prior to the Peach’s entry, a thunderous chant had swept through the stadium: “Cobb, Cobb, Cobb, Cobb!” finally turning into cheers when the man himself emerged. Facing Hank Johnson, a pitcher just about half his age, Cobb hit a benign little fly ball that Mark Koenig, a shortstop born the year Cobb joined the Augusta Tourists, drifted over and snagged behind third base. That brought his average for the season down a tick to a subpar .323, where it would stay. Cobb would play in two more exhibition games for the A’s, but that mundane moment in the Bronx turned out to be it—that is, his 11,434th and last major league at-bat.
So this is how it ends, not with a bang but with a pop-up.
Of course in baseball you still have to play out the schedule. On September 22, Cobb made his last appearance as a player at Navin Field. There were no ceremonies or speeches, even though it was clear that he was tired (tired, tired) and surely wasn’t coming back. During batting practice, he and Frank Navin passed each other on the field and said nothing. It was just another meaningless, end-of-the-season game that Cobb wasn’t playing in; the Yankees had already clinched the pennant. There were a few extra reporters there to mark the occasion of Cobb’s final visit, however, and one of them, a truly horrible fellow named Westbrook Pegler, who would later make a name for himself writing hard-hearted columns on assorted political topics, found Cobb’s old friend and valet, Alex Rivers, in the stands. Lucky Alex! Pegler described him as a “niggerish blue gum colored boy” who dismissed his persistent questions about Cobb’s many confrontations and ultimately had very little to say.
“I don’t care what the crowd thinks of Mr. Ty,” Rivers told him. “I don’t care what the world says about him. I love him and I hate to see him go.”
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PART FOUR
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— CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE —
ONE FINE SUMMER AFTERNOON WHEN I was about eight months into my Ty Cobb research I ran into a friend of mine, a fellow writer, on the F train heading from Brooklyn to Manhattan. She politely asked what I was working on these days, and from Bergen Street to the Broadway-Lafayette station I spun mesmerizing tales of the Georgia Peach that kept her awake for almost the entire fifteen-minute trip. Then something slightly odd happened. Just before she disembarked, a gray-haired man who had been sitting near us tapped me on the shoulder, apologized for listening in—and (only in New York, kiddies) said he had played Ty Cobb in a production of Lee Blessing’s play Cobb about ten years before at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in downtown Manhattan. “He was a very complicated person,” the actor, whose name I never got, informed me. “I’ll never forget the time that one of his grandchildren, who had been in the audience, came backstage afterward and said to me, ‘He was a man who needed a tremendous amount of love—but who nevertheless pushed everyone away.’ ” When I got home that evening I emailed Ty Cobb’s granddaughter Peggy Cobb Shugg, who lives in North Carolina and with whom I’d been (sort of) in touch. “Does this ring any bells?” I asked, after telling her my subway story. “Yes!!” she wrote back almost immediately. “It happened!! That was me!!”
I found Peggy’s response instructive. Although her assessment of her grandfather had come to me via a stranger on the subway, it was the first time in our several conversations that I had known her to say anything substantive about the man whom she had seen at reasonably regular intervals as a child and whom she had known well enough to have taken to show-and-tell at her grade school in Daytona Beach, Florida, when he was a heavyset and shambling man of nearly seventy. Usually, I got a gentle brush-off. Whenever I asked her something about Ty Cobb Sr. (her father had been Ty Cobb Jr.) her response had typically taken the form of a somewhat belated and brief note to the effect that I would be better off posing my question to one of a small list of independent experts she trusted, or one of the employees at the Ty Cobb Museum, in Royston, to which she had loaned some of her memorabilia. “They probably know better than I do about that,” she often said in her emails, regardless of who the “they” or what the “that” was. Sometimes she didn’t respond at all, perhaps unsure of whether I was just one of those many retirees who spent their time on the Internet doing “research.” Or she simply may not have wanted to talk to someone outside the family about her grandfather, who lived for thirty-three years beyond that last Yankee Stadium fly-out and whose second act was something of a delicate subject in the family, to say the least. Before he died on July 17, 1961, Cobb lost two children and saw two marriages slip away, along with his last chance to shape his legacy. Considering all that many people seemed to know about him toward the end were some untrue stories about his sharpening his spikes and insanely sliding into rival infielders, his failure to correct the myths, and his sense that he had inadvertently wound up helping to propagate a distorted view of himself, brought him a profound sadness.
It is easy to get depressed watching a 1955 episode of the game show I’ve Got a Secret on which Cobb appeared as a “mystery guest.” His secret was that he had the highest lifetime batting average in the history of baseball. The men on the panel—Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan—were asked to put on blindfolds before Cobb, identified as Mr. X, came out to answer a series of yes-or-no questions, but the women—1950s game show perennials Jayne Meadows and Kitty Carlisle—didn’t have to. Women were assumed in those days to be ignorant about sports, but another factor, the reason he could be a guest on a show where people guessed identities, was that Cobb, at the age of sixty-eight, had long since slipped from the national spotlight. He looked reasonably healthy, if considerably overweight, in a light-colored double-breasted suit, and wasn’t exactly a trivia answer yet, and would never be, but he was at that point in the twentieth century fading fast in that general direction.
In the end, the panelists did not guess as much as his identity, never mind his particular secret, in the allotted time; even after they were allowed to remove their blindfolds Cullen and Morgan didn’t know who he was. For an awkward moment, the stars of the show stared at Cobb and sputtered. Morgan expressed a wait-wait-don’t-tell-me sentiment as he pulled his curly hair. Finally the host, Garry Moore, who sat next to Cobb smoking a cigarette the whole time (the show’s sponsor was Winston and Moore would die of emphysema in 1993) rushed into the breach. “This is probably the greatest baseball player we have in the world today—this is Mr
. Ty Cobb!” Moore then ticked off a list of Cobb’s records: “Highest average in an American League season; most bases stolen in one season, most total stolen bases; most seasons played; most games played; most times at bat; most hits; most runs scored; most years the batting champ; most years hitting over .300; most years hitting over .400—and that’s only the beginning of the record!” The applause was tumultuous.
But it was almost as if the cast of the show were acting out an allegory about Cobb’s public image, for over all that affirmation came the sound of Bill Cullen’s voice saying, “He spiked a lot of second basemen, too!” To which Moore responded, “Yes, he was a mean one in his time!” Cobb chuckled along with everyone else, but something had registered. Instead of simply exiting stage left, as most guests did, he took his complimentary carton of Winstons from the host and walked over to the panel to say goodbye. Always the Southern gentlemen, he addressed the ladies first, bowing as he took their daintily presented hands. When he reached Morgan, however, the senior male member of the panel and thus to his mind perhaps in some way responsible for Cullen’s mutterings, he stopped, and said a few things, which on the old clip are inaudible. It’s likely he spoke in reaction to the spiking comment, though, offering a few corrective thoughts, because as Cobb, still smiling, moved along down the panel, Morgan appeared chastened and we clearly hear him respond, “Well, you’re still okay, then!” I wouldn’t be surprised if Cobb’s appearance on I’ve Got a Secret, or the comment about spiking in particular, made before millions on national television, pushed him closer to the realization that he just had to write a book to explode the conventional wisdom about himself, and set the record straight for future generations.
Cobb’s image problems, before he died, were to a great extent tied to technology. “The greatness of Ty Cobb was something that had to be seen,” George Sisler said, “and to see him was to remember him forever.” But relatively few actually did see him play because the only way to do that was to buy a ticket and watch him from the stands. Only a handful of his A’s games were even broadcast on the radio, and there are, as I’ve mentioned, only a few brief film clips of him taking some cuts in batting practice or tossing a ball on the sidelines. While motion picture cameras existed when he arrived in the majors in 1905, virtually no one seemed to be using them to record baseball games, certainly not Cobb’s baseball games. Even still photography was limited in Cobb’s prime, and when it was employed it couldn’t really capture the unpredictability and intimidation, the gracefulness and the (almost always strategic) violence that were inherent in his running game—although, as we’ve seen, it did once get him out of a jam regarding Home Run Baker. Cobb put up some of the best numbers ever, but with him perhaps more than anyone before or since, statistics don’t tell the true story. So many of his best moments were invisible, often because they lived on in other people’s memories, and most of his best performances are lost, like Sarah Bernhardt’s. The human memory can hold proof of Cobb’s singular greatness, true, but only so much and for only so long before it begins to fade. And without film to refer to, memory cannot be refreshed.
Fortunately, when the idea for a baseball Hall of Fame was first advanced in the mid-1930s by National League president Ford Frick and several others, many could still conjure a figurative movie of Cobb in their minds. Although he’d had no formal attachment to organized baseball for seven or so years by then (he never again would), everyone still knew who he was, by sight and by reputation. If there had been an I’ve Got a Secret in 1935, even the women would have had to be blindfolded, and somebody would have known who he was. It was de rigueur that his name be listed among the thirty-three players on the first ballot distributed to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and hardly surprising that Cobb—who is referred to in recent books as “an avowed racist” (whatever that may mean) and “a near psychotic,” though he clearly wasn’t thought of that way in his day—got the most votes, 222, or four short of the maximum. Ruth and Honus Wagner tied for second, with 215; the only others who gained admission by being named on three quarters of the ballots were Christy Mathewson (205) and Walter Johnson (189). Cobb, who received the news while on a golf course in San Francisco, said he was “overwhelmed” by the honor, and in future years he would with obvious sincerity cite his admittance to the Hall as his proudest accomplishment in baseball.
But when the shrine finally opened in 1939, he seemed in no particular hurry to get there, eleven years retired but still a superstar charmingly oblivious to other people’s schedules. By the time Cobb arrived in Cooperstown, late in the day, with his two youngest children, Beverly, nineteen, and Jimmy, eighteen, in tow, he had missed the induction and picture-taking ceremonies. Connie Mack said that Cobb must have thought he was heading for spring training. As usual, the tardy star blamed train delays. Some said he was late because he wanted to avoid having his picture taken with Commissioner Landis, but once Cobb got there, he was anything but a grudging participant. He genuinely liked being around most baseball people. He just didn’t have such a strong need for their company, on a daily basis, that he ever found an agreeable way of getting back into the game.
From certain angles it looked like Cobb, in retirement, was living the dream. After toying with the idea of becoming a major league executive of some sort, or minor league team owner, he let such matters drop, and turned to a life of golfing, hunting, managing his financial portfolio, and griping to whoever would listen about the continuing decline of baseball, as evidenced by the slavish devotion to the long ball and the lost art of the bunt. He acted—and increasingly looked—like a typical prosperous (and cranky) retiree. His Coke and G.M. stocks had done well despite the Great Depression, and he was probably worth about $5 million on the day he almost didn’t make it to Cooperstown. His success may have helped him bond there with Ruth, who had shown up on time for the festivities and with whom he no longer felt so competitive. Why should he? He was rich and seemingly content, after all, and Ruth was openly bitter about no one asking him to be a manager. Plus Ruth had received seven fewer Hall of Fame votes than he had—a fact that was very important to Cobb, and which he often mentioned.
From that point on, he and the Babe would get along just great. The series of three golf matches they played against each other for charity in 1941 was one of the highlights of Cobb’s retirement. He beat Ruth 81–83 in the first, lost to him on a 19th-hole playoff in the second, then won the third after supposedly tricking the Babe into thinking he could break training (i.e., drink heavily) on the night before the rubber match (long, probably untrue, story), allowing him to win easily. “This ‘exhibition golf’ is more punishing than baseball,” Cobb said afterward, obviously relishing the chance to once more address the press. “During my twenty-four years on the diamond I never was under such terrific pressure as I was while coming from behind to beat the Babe. Maybe it was because both of us were so gentlemanly. He was awfully nice to me.” Not so nice, though, that he didn’t push Cobb’s buttons once or twice by saying, “Oh, Tyrus, remember how we used to sit around together and file our spikes?” (Neither ever had, of course, but Ruth couldn’t help noticing how Cobb kept getting asked the Question and bridling at it.)
It sounds like the best part of their golf tournament was watching them tease and try to psych each other out. Cobb, like most people, considered playfulness, misdirection, and outright trickery to be much more interesting elements of competition than brute strength or a robotic reliance on technique. When he talked in his later years to young catchers, he liked to pass along, with a chuckle, Nig Clarke’s old habit of throwing a handful of dirt on a batter’s shoes just as a pitch was coming in so as to distract him. He also talked about how he would fake an injury after stealing second base—ask for a time-out so he could limp around a bit, and then when the game was resumed, take off for third on the first pitch. But a really good trickster had to know how to improvise. After Ruth was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1947, Cobb played at Yankee Stadium
in a two-inning old-timers game staged to raise money for the Babe’s charitable foundation. As he stepped into the box, Cobb told catcher Wally Schang that he hadn’t swung a bat in ages and was afraid it might fly out of his hands; perhaps, he suggested, Schang should position himself back a few feet. As soon as he did, of course, Cobb laid down a dead-duck bunt a yard or two in the opposite direction from which the catcher had just moved, then hustled to first as fast as his sixty-three-year-old legs would carry him. He got thrown out by half a city block, but everyone, including him, had a good laugh about the maneuver. Cobb did indeed have a sense of humor, though he may have suppressed it during his career. Once he was done playing he could even be kind of goofy. The daughter of one of his neighbors in Lake Tahoe told me that after a few highballs at a local restaurant one night in the 1950s, Cobb tried to slip a pork chop into her mother’s purse.
It was after more than a few highballs that things sometimes took a turn for the worse. Sadness, and the habits that attend and increase it, were the hallmarks of Cobb’s retirement years. His mother died in 1936 at the age of sixty-five, and, in a decision that would suggest that he forgave her for shooting his father, he buried her beside W. H. Cobb at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Royston. Amanda’s death left his sister, Florence, who had never married and who suffered from severe arthritis, on her own, and Cobb took her into his home for a while, though she would live out her short life—she died in 1944 at age fifty-one—mostly with their brother, Paul, in Sarasota, Florida. Paul had abandoned his baseball career in 1916, after more than a decade of trying in vain to make the major leagues (he had a lifetime average of .283), and was running a real estate brokerage and dabbling in local politics until he was partly paralyzed by a stroke in 1954. For years, though, nothing brought Cobb greater sorrow than the mention of his namesake. “Ty, Jr.,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “has been a very big disappointment to me.”