Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  “You cost me 10 runs—runs I earned!” he said.

  Rice wrote that “It was all I could do to pull him off and calm him down.”

  On another occasion about ten years later, when they were driving north after attending the Masters Tournament and passing through Greenville, South Carolina, Cobb said to Rice, “I’ve got an old friend in this town. Let’s find him.”

  They proceeded to a small liquor store owned by Shoeless Joe Jackson. Cobb may not have seen him in more than twenty years, since his onetime rival for the batting title was barred from baseball in the wake of the Black Sox scandal.

  “Waiting his turn,” Rice wrote, “Cobb stepped up, looked the old boy in the eye and said, ‘How’s business?’

  “ ‘Just fine, sir,’ replied Jackson, turning his back to rearrange a shelf.

  “ ‘Don’t you know me, you old buzzard?’ said Cobb.

  “Jackson wheeled around. ‘Christ, yes I know you!’ grinned Joe. ‘I just didn’t know whether you knew me after all these years. I didn’t want to embarrass you or nothin’.’ ”

  An article in the Sporting News said that Jackson’s response caused Cobb to smile. “I’ll tell you how well I remember you, Joe,” he said. “Whenever I got the idea that I was a good hitter I’d stop and take a good look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.”

  Jackson insisted on giving Cobb and Rice a tour of the town, where he was a local celebrity. “It was a nice reunion,” Rice concluded, “with three old gaffers fanning about the days that used to be.”

  • • •

  With not enough to do in his retirement years, Cobb would butt into baseball, then butt out again, often getting somebody upset in the process. Even before Joe DiMaggio reached the Yankees, when he was still playing for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, Cobb sent him letters filled with miscellaneous advice, such as switching to a lighter bat during the dog days of August and not taking outfield practice, which would wear out his legs. “I still have those letters,” DiMaggio said more than thirty years later. “I couldn’t believe a man as great as Cobb would take the time to write to me.” When Joe got his first contract from the Yankees in 1936, Cobb, as soon as he found out the amount—$5,625—invited him out to the house in Atherton to talk about it. “Sit down,” he said, handing DiMaggio a piece of writing paper and a pen as soon as he walked through the door. Cobb then dictated a letter he wanted DiMaggio to send to Yankees general manager Ed Barrow, asking for a better offer. About a week later Joe called and said the New York club had sent a second contract, this one for $6,500. “That’s not enough!” said Cobb, who then dictated another response. A few days later, DiMaggio got a third contract, for $8,500, but with a note saying, “Dear Joe, This is our final offer, so you can tell Ty Cobb he can stop writing those letters.”

  With Ted Williams things were a little different. Cobb tried to help Williams, too, but the Red Sox star was a big swinger and a dead pull hitter and less in awe of the Duke of Deadball. As he said in his book My Turn at Bat, “Cobb was a great athlete, in my estimate the greatest of all time, but he was an entirely different breed of cat. He was a push hitter. He choked up on the bat, two inches from the bottom, his hands four inches apart. He stood close to the plate, his hands forward. At bat he had the exact posture of the punch hitter that he was. Cobb was up high with his stance, slashing at the ball, pushing at it; I was down with a longer stroke. When he talked hitting, he talked Greek to me.” Cobb and Williams never exchanged hot words, as has been alleged by Stump (“He’s full of it,” Williams said of Stump), but Cobb did criticize him to sportswriters for not adjusting to the defensive shift that left the left side of the infield wide open. Williams could never be considered a great hitter in his opinion, Cobb said, because he was “one dimensional.”

  And yet Williams was a great hitter, no matter what Cobb said. And so was DiMaggio, although Cobb criticized him harshly in a long-winded two-part piece about the decline of baseball that he wrote in 1952 for Life magazine. “Joe is another modern who made a name for himself without scratching the surface of his talents,” Cobb said. “Joe, like Williams, never liked hitting to the opposite field. And even worse he was perhaps the outstanding example of how modern baseball players neglected to train and keep themselves in condition. He hated physical exertion, and as far as I know never took a lick of exercise from October till March. Naturally he went to spring training with his muscles weakened and soft . . .” and so on. Still, DiMaggio, if he was aware of such criticism, never seemed bothered by it. He revered Cobb, both as a great hitter and, like him, an artist of aloofness. One night in the 1950s when Cobb strolled into Toots Shor’s, Joe, at the bar, turned to his drinking buddies and said, with no sarcasm, “Here comes God.”

  The problem for Cobb was that it was becoming increasingly necessary to have someone in the DiMaggio role, some latter-day saint pointing at him and saying how extraordinary he was. People were forgetting who he was. The game itself had changed so much by the 1950s that Cobb, with his push hitting and jittery base running, seemed like the hero of an extinct sport, something more akin to indoor baseball than what Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams were playing, something that couldn’t be judged by modern standards, and so got dismissed, if it was thought of at all, as comically quaint. His lack of any formal connection to the major or minor leagues and even his physical appearance—rotund, grandfatherly—worked to render him as invisible as any other sixty-something individual. Take off your blindfolds, panel! Do you know who this is? When he spoke out publicly, Cobb was often his own worst enemy. Invited to testify in 1951 before a congressional committee investigating whether organized baseball violated antitrust laws, he came down—tediously—in defense of the reserve clause that still made it impossible for players to receive their true market value (though he did suggest some modifications that could shorten the path to free agency). In the Life diatribe—which attracted much attention at the time, as magazine articles then often did—he hit all the “old codger” bumpers, decrying virtually everything about post–World War I baseball, and going on about truly obscure players (like Dode Criss of the St. Louis Browns) whom he thought would have shone brightly in what he was still calling the age of the “rabbit ball.” Jeez.

  On some level Cobb seemed to sense he was suffering from logorrhea, and playing the old fool. He felt sheepish about his predictable ramblings even as he made them; in interviews from around this time he sometimes said things like, “I know I’ve been accused of sounding old-fashioned,” and “I really don’t think everything was better way back when, but . . .” He actually had some interesting things to say. “Back then baseball was a game played within certain confines,” he said in a 1959 interview with Jeane Hoffman of the Los Angeles Times. “Today the emphasis is on blasting the ball out of those confines.” His need to speak his piece concisely and not offhandedly, to create a statement that would be solid and enduring, something worthy of his signature, also pushed him in the direction of a book. But he was, as always, tired, tired, tired. The task of getting it all down and getting it right daunted him.

  • • •

  Cobb probably first heard the name Al Stump in late 1959 or very early 1960. Angered by yet another bad book about him—John D. McCallum’s The Tiger Wore Spikes—and growing weaker every day (he had already been diagnosed with diabetes and hypertension, as well as heart and kidney problems, and would soon learn that he also had prostate cancer), he wanted more than ever to write a good and true autobiography. It is difficult at this remove to determine who approached whom but in early 1960 Doubleday agreed to publish Cobb’s story. What is clear is that despite the author’s lofty goals, the publisher didn’t see Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball, as it would come to be called, as anything more than just another baseball book. Of course, Doubleday would have been overjoyed if it topped the bestseller lists like Jack Paar’s I Kid You Not or Pat Boone’s Between You, Me and the Gatepost, both current bestsellers, but gi
ven Cobb’s diminishing status, they didn’t think it had that kind of potential. We know this because they paid him a very modest advance for the manuscript—$6,000 (he had gotten $25,000 for the two Life pieces)—and for the job of ghostwriter chose Al Stump.

  Stump was a quantity not a quality guy. The little bio that appeared with his articles or on the jackets of books he’d banged out often bragged that he was “the author of more than 1,000 articles” and several works of nonfiction. In some ways Stump was not even slightly dependable, but in one way he was, and that way mattered very much to a major house like Doubleday: he always finished what he started—if only so he could move on expeditiously to the next unspectacular thing. He might not produce something that bore much scrutiny or made the short list for literary awards, but even if Cobb was as difficult to work with as some people said, as much of a perfectionist and a prima donna, Stump would come back with a book.

  Cobb didn’t have the energy to vet Stump’s credentials, which included years of newspaper reporting in the Pacific Northwest (he was born in Colorado Springs) and a degree from the University of Wisconsin. He interviewed several prospective collaborators, but chose to go with the man whom the publisher recommended. It wasn’t a tough decision. He was in a hurry and the writer who would likely have been his first choice, his old friend the Detroit sportswriter H. G. Salsinger, had died the year before (as had, by the way, Tris Speaker). Meanwhile Stump, at age forty-four, was charming, handsome, and smooth. Just as important, he knew when to keep silent. The writer’s second wife, Jo Mosher, said Stump had a way of quietly disarming people, drinking with them and, with a minimum of prompting, “getting them to act up, to really be bad—he’d get good stories that way.” Cobb, like a lot of his subjects, felt comfortable around Stump, at least at the start, and he liked the way their working relationship, as laid out by his coauthor, sounded. Writing to a friend (and evidencing a shaky grip on language that paralleled his weakening grasp on life) on June 8, 1960, he said that Stump “will do by tape, forming questions & answers a conversational procedure my part reciting from my early youth on to my retirement, select from all this what they think might be usable, the final composition continuity, polishing up which I insist Doubleday and myself will decide whats [sic] to be.” Clearly, Cobb had a naively rosy view of the messy and tense process that ghostwriting often is.

  Stump took himself seriously as a writer, and saw himself as a legitimate member of the vaguely Bohemian literary colony that worked and drank and lived at that time in Santa Barbara, California. He often dropped the name of the well-known crime writer Ross Macdonald, the colony’s most prominent citizen. He wore a cardigan sweater, smoked a pipe, and in other ways tried to emulate Ernest Hemingway. He resented being thought of as just a guy grinding out stories for hairy-chested barber shop monthlies like True. But what neither Cobb nor Doubleday knew (or the publisher knew but chose to overlook) was that Stump had a reputation for inventing scenes and dialogue and otherwise stretching truth. On the advice of its research department TV Guide banned him, as did The Saturday Evening Post. “He got a lot of assignments,” Melvin Durslag, a successful writer of that era told me, “but one by one he alienated the kind of magazines that had fact-checking departments. That’s because he produced fiction.”

  Stump didn’t just lie in the autobiography he wrote “with” Cobb, he lied about it. “For ten months I stuck to him like court plaster,” he would say in his True piece. “I put him to bed, prepared his insulin, picked him up when he fell down, warded off irate taxi drivers, bartenders, waiters, clerks and private citizens whom Cobb was inclined to punch, cooked what food he could digest, drew his bath, got drunk with him and knelt with him in prayer on black nights when he knew death was near. I ducked a few bottles he threw, too.” Stump may have done some of those things, but he didn’t do any of them for very long. We know from Cobb’s still busy schedule, as well from the guests—usually sportswriters and their wives—whom Cobb entertained at his Tahoe retreat during the same span of months that he and Stump spent relatively little time together: no more, in all likelihood, than a few days. Stump’s goal as usual was to fill as many pages as possible as quickly as possible, and he correctly believed that actual reporting—interviewing Cobb and others—was a relatively inefficient way to do that. He preferred to stay at home in Santa Barbara, puff his pipe, drink his drink—and cobble together an autobiography out of old newspaper clips, Cobb’s Life article, and other previous books on his subject as well as his own flights of imagination. His interviews with Cobb were helpful only when they didn’t contradict what Stump wanted to say.

  The pages he was turning out had plenty of personality—“Al knew how to make up lively quotes,” Durslag said. The ghostwriter was pleased with his work and happy to share it with Doubleday as it issued forth from his typewriter but he and the publisher conspired to keep the manuscript from Cobb for as long as possible, because he might object to having words put into his mouth—words that didn’t sound like him and often contradicted his own opinions. If they could stall long enough, Cobb might die and that would both expedite the editing process and boost sales.

  Somehow, though, perhaps by sheer persistence, Cobb got a look at what Stump and Doubleday were preparing to put out under his name. His anger, as might be expected, was volcanic. The manuscript teemed with errors of fact. Stump had Cy Young and Lou Criger on the wrong teams. He called the outfielder Danny Hoffman a second baseman. He referred to Rube Walberg as Rube Waddell. He had Buck Herzog catching and playing second base on the same play. He had Shoeless Joe Jackson playing in the major leagues when he was still in the minors. Cobb would have been mortified by such mistakes. But what bothered him even more were the egregious errors of tone and voice that would strike anyone who knew him as off-key. The very fabric of the book was faulty, and needed reweaving. Cobb’s description of his rookie hazing sounded whiney and overwritten (“I’d stand shivering in a towel or bedsheet while they hogged the tub for hours. McIntyre and his chums began a systematic campaign to make me the fellow who picked his teeth with bench splinters while they made the money”). “Dubious” was the best that could be said of the baseball wisdom Stump put in Cobb’s mouth. (“A defensive play is at least five times as hard to make as an offensive play.”) Plenty of other passages just sounded weird. (Stump/Cobb said that he never held a grudge against fellow players “except when they decided to play beanbag with my slender 168-pound body.”)

  After reading the manuscript in what was probably June of 1961, three months before it was due to be published, Cobb got off a letter to Doubleday demanding that Stump be fired and the book be canceled or rewritten from scratch. By that time his cancer had spread to his brain, and he didn’t have the strength to write himself, so he dictated the letter to Theresa Gailey, the daughter of his second cousin Harrison Gailey, in whose Royston house he’d recently lived for a while. When he got no response from the publisher, he asked Theresa Gailey to send off another letter, threatening a lawsuit if Doubleday didn’t redo the book. Finally, Stump told Cobb to go ahead and mark up the galley proof as he saw fit, indicating areas that he thought needed changing. Although the problems were too extensive to be addressed this way, Cobb, in a shaky hand, did what he could and sent the galleys back. But no changes were ever made and in fact Stump continued to add to the book in his inimitable fashion. He never intended to heed Cobb’s changes. His strategy was to stave off Cobb, who died on the 17th of July. Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball came out two months later. “It is in its fourth printing, having sold furiously,” Stump wrote in a letter to Sid Keener, director of the Hall of Fame in October. In reality it was selling only moderately well.

  By that time Stump was already working on his piece for True, a piece that would shatter the code of silence that had previously prevailed between sportswriter and subject (this was nine years before Jim Bouton’s groundbreaking book, Ball Four) and, in the process, undermine the credibility of his and Cobb’s book. Stump always
said that he’d pitched the piece to True because Cobb had wanted My Life in Baseball to be nothing more than a propaganda piece about himself and had ignored his coauthor’s pleas to at last tell the full, honest truth. But of course that was nonsense; his real reason for writing the piece was that he saw a business opportunity. With Cobb safely dead he could portray him as he pleased. By remembering a little, and distorting or imagining the rest, he could fashion a yarn that fit perfectly into the pages of a monthly that paid $4,000 per piece, or $1,000 more than he’d realized from the autobiography.

  Stump’s article, which was given the ill-fitting title, “Ty Cobb’s Wild 10-Month Fight to Live,” came out in the December 1961 issue, between a lurid-looking crime story called “The Mystery of the Fiery Murders” and an exposé about slave traders who specialized in circus sideshow freaks.

  Even by True’s standards Stump’s piece was shockingly bold. From its opening lines—which describe a deathly sick but Scotch-sodden Cobb insisting that his houseguest, Stump, drive him from his luxurious lodge in Lake Tahoe into Reno in the midst of a post-midnight ice storm so he can meet up with Joe DiMaggio and shoot craps—the story presents Cobb as, to use Stump’s phrase, “Tyrus the Terrible.” Cobb’s success on the field and in the stock market, as Stump sees it, has convinced him that he is superior to all other humans except his sainted father, and allowed his violently obnoxious streak to flourish. Everything is painted in lurid Tales from the Crypt comic book colors. At a motel in conveniently named Hangtown, California, Cobb fires his ever-present Luger out the window to scare noisy revelers. He speaks in a strange dialect: “What kind of pest house is this?” “Who gave you a license, you mugwump?” In the middle of the night he wakes Stump and forces him to drive twenty miles to Carson City where they in turn wake the president of the First National Bank of Nevada so Cobb can order him to stop payment on a $45 check. Together they visit Virginia City and its conveniently named Bucket of Blood Saloon, where Cobb decides the Scotch is watered and flings his drink in the direction of the bartender.