(10) Although this 1912 picture is often used to indict Cobb, catcher Paul Krichell said it was misleading: Ty wasn’t spiking him, just knocking the ball out of his hand. After the collision, the two fought fiercely, if briefly, and both were fined.
(11) Cobb (left) got along better with his fellow Southerner Shoeless Joe Jackson (center), whom he called “the best natural hitter I’ve ever seen,” than he did with teammate Wahoo Sam Crawford (right), but in the 1950s he campaigned successfully to get Crawford into the Hall of Fame.
(12) The all-time leader at getting hit by pitched balls, Hughie Jennings often managed the Tigers from the coaching box, where he behaved rather bizarrely, ripping up grass and throwing it like confetti, shaking rubber snakes and constantly shouting “Ee-yah!”
(13) Cobb’s fans were fascinated by his split-hands grip, which allowed him to make adjustments to his swing at the last second. Although the hitting manuals advise against the technique, it worked brilliantly for Cobb.
(14) Cobb employed Alex Rivers as his personal bat man for more than ten years.
(15) Cobb’s well-deserved reputation as a bibliophile (he couldn’t resist biographies of Napoleon) sometimes resulted in him receiving books instead of trophies or flowers.
(16) In 1926, Giants manager John McGraw tried to pluck the Peach from the American League. “Lay off Cobb!” Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis said.
(17) The great George Sisler (left) was an admirer of Cobb’s, but from a distance. Ty and Babe Ruth had a more complicated relationship, if only because he had dated Ruth’s wife.
(18) When Joe DiMaggio was in the minors, Cobb sent him letters of advice and even helped him negotiate his first contract with the Yankees.
— ACKNOWLEDGMENTS —
Getting the thank-yous right is always impossible, but surely Wesley Fricks should be among the first to be acknowledged. A native of Royston, Georgia, and a longtime Ty Cobb scholar, he has a three-dimensional sense of our subject’s early years, having grown up among the descendants of Cobb’s friends and neighbors, and since reaching his majority has spent hundreds of hours collecting and studying personal and legal documents as well as news accounts related to the man that he and many others consider the greatest player in history. While at first understandably wary of someone who said he wanted to write a biography of Cobb, he quickly came to see that I was open to questioning the myths and he generously shared his trove of research, which included quite a few facts and stories that have never before been published. He also vetted the manuscript after it was completed and corrected several errors.
William R. Cobb—another Georgian, though no relation to Tyrus Raymond—was also a great help to me. Ron, as he’s less formally known, is an award-winning writer and editor who has produced several books by and about the Peach (see Note on Sources) that guided and inspired me on my three-and-a-half-year journey. He is also a collector of Cobb’s correspondence, and he shared many of his letters with me, and pointed me in the direction of others. I hope he likes this book, which wouldn’t have been what it is without him.
My thanks to Roger Angell and Yogi Berra for the comments and insights they made. The Hertog Research Fellowship at Columbia University provided me with the services of Kevin Magruder, who did significant digging and interviewing. I’m also grateful for the help I received at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, from librarian Jim Gates, as well as John Horne, Freddy Berowski, and Tim Wiles.
At the Detroit Public Library I was aided immensely over the course of several visits by Mark Bowden, the coordinator of special collections. The justifiably prominent Detroit attorney Gary Spicer received me warmly, advised me wisely, and took me to a Tigers game. Dan and Stephanie Wroblewski drove me around to various places Ty Cobb had lived in Detroit and became my friends.
Thanks also to two of Ty Cobb’s grandchildren, Herschel Cobb and Peggy Cobb Shugg, as well as Julie Ridgeway at the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Rex Teeslink, Rod Gailey, Michele Merkel, and Carol Loomis. For the reporting on Al Stump, I owe a debt to J. Michael Kenyon, Melvin Durslag, Doug Kirkorian, Ron Keurajian, and John Stump.
I am grateful to the support and counsel I received from my agent at ICM, Kristine Dahl, and from Bob Bender, my editor at Simon & Schuster, superstars both. Kris’s assistant, Caroline Eisenmann, and Bob’s colleagues at S&S, Johanna Li, Jonathan Evans, Fred Chase, and Joy O’Meara, have also enriched my book-writing experiences. As always, my friend Karen Schneider was an early reader of my manuscript and an encouraging presence.
My wife, Sarah Saffian Leerhsen, is the love of my life and a superb editor. I can only thank God for that.
Also by Charles Leerhsen
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Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem and the Birth of the Indy 500
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Charles Leerhsen is the author of Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500 and Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America. He has written for Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, and other magazines. He has been an editor at SI, People, and Us Weekly. He has co-written books with Chuck Yeager and Brandon Tartikoff and teaches writing at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
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— NOTE ON SOURCES —
No truth was injured intentionally in the creation of this work of nonfiction. No quotes are made up, no scenes manufactured. The information is drawn mostly from hundreds of contemporary newspaper and magazine articles dating back to the late nineteenth century, but I also interviewed people who had known Ty Cobb and I relied on letters written by and to him, and recordings of radio and television appearances that he made following his days as a player, a number of websites—including Baseball-Fever.com—and the resources of the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR).
Of the many previous books about Cobb, the ones I found most useful were, in no particular order, The Ty Cobb Scrapbook by Marc Okkonen; Ty Cobb by Charles C. Alexander; My Twenty Years in Baseball by Ty Cobb, edited by William R. Cobb; Inside Baseball with Ty Cobb, edited by Wesley Fricks; Busting ’Em and Other Big League Stories by Ty Cobb; Ty Cobb: Safe at Home by Don Rhodes; The Georgia Peach: Stumped by the Storyteller by William R. Cobb; Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up with My Grandfather, Ty Cobb by Herschel Cobb; and Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours by Richard Bak. The two most popular books about Cobb—Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball by Ty Cobb with Al Stump, and Cobb by Al Stump contained too many inaccuracies to be useful. The movie Cobb was no help at all.
Other books I consulted:
The Glory of Their Times: The
Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It by Lawrence S. Ritter; Baseball: The Golden Age by Harold Seymour; Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era by Steven A. Riess; The Tumult and the Shouting by Grantland Rice; The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ; The Detroit Tigers by Frederick G. Lieb; The Chalmers Race: Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie, and the Controversial 1910 Batting Title That Became a National Obsession by Rick Huhn; Ty Cobb: Two Biographies by H. G. Salsinger, edited by William R. Cobb; Ty Cobb by John D. McCallum; The Babe and I by Mrs. Babe Ruth with Bill Slocum; The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth by Leigh Montville; Babe: The Legend Comes to Life by Robert W. Creamer; Ty and the Babe: Baseball’s Fiercest Rivals: A Surprising Friendship and the 1941 Has-Beens Golf Championship by Tom Stanton; Baseball Stars of the American League edited by David Jones; Ban Johnson, Czar of Baseball by Eugene C. Murdock; The American League Story by Lee Allen; Detroit Is My Own Home Town by Malcolm W. Bingay; History of Franklin County, Georgia by the Franklin County Historical Society; Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South edited by Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover; Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 by John Pettigrew; Honor and Slavery by Kenneth S. Greenberg; Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South by Richard E. Nesbitt and Dov Cohen; Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend by Timothy M. Gay; Ernie Harwell: My 60 Years in Baseball by Tom Keegan; Ee-Yah: The Life and Times of Hughie Jennings, Baseball Hall of Famer by Jack Smiles; Say It Ain’t So, Joe!: The True Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson by Donald Gropman and Alan M. Dershowitz; Shoeless by David L. Fleitz; Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train by Henry W. Thomas and Shirley Povich; Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game by John Thorn; The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.; Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero by Leigh Montville; Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life by Richard Ben Cramer; Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball by Norman L. Macht; Connie Mack: The Turbulent and Triumphant Years, 1915–1931 by Norman L. Macht; Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Eliot Asinof; My Fifty Years in Baseball by Edward Grant Barrow and James M. Kahn; Touching Second: The Science of Baseball by John J. Evers; Cap Anson 3: Mugsy John McGraw and the Tricksters—Baseball’s Fun Age of Rule-Bending by Howard W. Rosenberg; Guys, Dolls, and Curveballs: Damon Runyon on Baseball edited by Jim Reisler; How They Played the Game: The Life of Grantland Rice by William A. Harper; Baseball as I Have Known It by Fred Lieb; Cobb Would Have Caught It: The Golden Age of Baseball in Detroit by Richard Bak; Rogers Hornsby: A Biography by Charles C. Alexander; Ross Macdonald: A Biography by Tom Nolan; Going Their Way by John D. McCallum; Crazy ’08 by Cait Murphy; Where They Ain’t: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball by Burt Solomon; Images of Forgotten Detroit by Paul Vachon; Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell; American Monsters: 44 Rats, Blackhats, and Plutocrats edited by Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobson; Ty Cobb: The Tiger Wore Spikes by John McCallum.
— ENDNOTES —
A note about the endnotes: The pages referenced in this section refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Many sources are noted in the text. Those not so identified are listed below.
PRELUDE
This is an edited transcript of an Opie and Anthony radio broadcast from June 13, 2009.
CHAPTER ONE
The details and quotes from the dressing room scene were drawn from an article called “In Dressing Room Interview Cobb Sticks to Diamond Career” in the Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 26, 1911, p. D2. For sources on the 1909 incident at Cleveland’s Euclid Hotel, see Chapter Eighteen. The Moe Berg quote about Cobb being an intellectual giant (p. 7) comes from an interview with the (I must admit not always trustworthy) John D. McCallum, date unknown; it appears in McCallum’s 1975 book Ty Cobb. There are many references to Cobb as a good conversationalist, including one in Baseball Digest, Aug. 1985, p. 72. The Sam Crawford quote about Cobb outthinking the opposition (p. 10) comes from Lawrence S. Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times, p. 60. Germany Schaefer’s assessment of Cobb (p. 12) was reported in the St. Louis Republic of Sept. 9, 1915. The reference to Cobb’s possibly having typhoid fever (p. 12) comes from the Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 4, 1911, p. 9. George Sisler’s quote (p. 12) was published in the American Mercury, Sept. 1956, p. 104. Cobb admitted he sometimes lacked a sense of humor (p. 13) in the 1914 newspaper serial republished as Busting ’Em and Other Big League Stories; the subsequent quote, about base running, comes from the same series. The Eddie Collins comment about “compressed steam” (p. 13) was taken from Baseball magazine, Mar. 1924, pp. 435–36. Casey Stengel praised Cobb’s base running in his autobiography Casey at the Bat, p. 244. The statement that “baseball is 50 percent brains . . .” (p. 15) is from the Atlanta Constitution of Feb. 25, 1912. “I see no reason in the world why we shouldn’t compete with colored athletes . . .” (p. 20) appears in an Associated Press story of Jan. 29, 1952. Cobb said that Roy Campanella was “the player who reminds me most of myself” (p. 21) in the Huron (South Dakota) Daily Plainsman of Dec. 1, 1955, among other places.
CHAPTER TWO
Cobb said “I was taken there to be born” (p. 23) in a radio interview with Grantland Rice, the tape of which was provided to me by the Cobb scholar Wesley Fricks; it is undated, but probably from the early 1930s. The quote “You saw it the minute you set eyes on him” (p. 24) is from an unsigned article in a special edition of the Royston Record, published in conjunction with the groundbreaking for the hospital that became the Ty Cobb Regional Medical Center in late March of 1950. The other quotes, from Joe Cunningham, about Cobb’s boyhood adventures, come from the same piece. The quote about “a vying nature” (p. 25) appears in several places, including Richard Bak’s Ty Cobb: His Tumultuous Life and Times. W. H. Cobb’s quote about “harmony among the people” (p. 30) is from the Atlanta Constitution, July 9, 1899. Billy Bowers’s claim to have been the only man in Georgia to have voted for Abe Lincoln (p. 32) comes from Memoirs of Georgia Containing Historical Accounts of the State’s Civil, Military, Industrial and Professional Interests, and Personal Sketches of Many of Its People, Vol. 2. Nicholas Lemann’s quote about Teddy Roosevelt is from the New Yorker, Nov. 18, 2013. The information on Ty Cobb’s ancestors comes from documents provided by Wesley Fricks, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, the Pittsburgh Press, Dec. 10, 1911, and the Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 27, 1921. The excerpts from W.H.’s Cobb speech about educational opportunities for black children were taken from the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer-Sun, Aug. 16, 1901. Cobb’s quote about his father being a school commissioner and state senator is from My Twenty Years in Baseball, edited by William R. Cobb, p. 13.
CHAPTER THREE
Cobb’s quote (p. 34) about Royston is from My Twenty Years in Baseball, p. 13. Much of the information about Royston is from The History of Franklin County, Georgia, published by the Franklin County Historical Society. Cobb’s reminiscences about his boyhood years (p. 35) are drawn from my interviews with the Ty Cobb historian (and Royston native) Wesley Fricks, and the 1912 newspaper serial published in book form as Inside Baseball with Ty Cobb, edited by Fricks; the 1914 serial collected as Busting ’Em and Other Big League Stories; the 1925 serial, republished as My Twenty Years in Baseball, edited by William R. Cobb and from miscellaneous articles such as “Cobb Tells of Start and Secrets of Success in the American League,” in the Pittsburgh Press, Dec. 10, 1911, p. 22; “Fighting and Baseball Were Cobb’s Only Thoughts as a Boy; A Row Started His Bright Career” in the Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 18, 1912, p. D5; and “Bank Clerk Finds Ty Cobb,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 25, 1912, p. C2. The medical student mentioned on p. 39 is
Rex Teeslink, who spoke to me in 2013. My research assistant Kevin Magruder acted as an intermediary in the Yogi Berra interview mentioned on p. 40, as he was for the Roger Angell interview, cited on p. 42. Cobb made his observation (p. 45) about how we remember criticism better than praise in his 1914 newspaper memoir. The interview with Furman Bisher mentioned on p. 46 ran under the headline “A Visit with Ty Cobb” in the Saturday Evening Post, June 14, 1958, p. 53.
CHAPTER FOUR
Eddie Cantor frequently mentioned his grandmother’s aversion to ballplayers (p. 50) in his comedy routines and in books such as My Life Is in Your Hands. Cobb’s quote about baseball biographies (p. 51) is from My Twenty Years in Baseball, p. 13. That book, and Cobb’s two other serialized memoirs, were used throughout this chapter. The information on early baseball demographics (p. 53) comes mostly from Chapter Six of Steven A. Riess’s Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. The Rogers Hornsby article mentioned on p. 54 ran in True magazine, Aug. 1961, pp. 59–60. Hugh Fullerton’s quote (p. 54) is taken from a series called “How to Play Baseball in 100 Lessons” that ran in the Atlanta Constitution during the summer of 1919. The Bill Veeck quote on p. 54 is from The Hustler’s Handbook (1965). Sam Crawford’s opinion of Ed Delahanty (p. 55) can be found on p. 65 of The Glory of Their Times. The Ned Garvin quote (p. 56) comes from Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss by Marty Appel, p. 35.
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