Cobb

by Al Stump

  Another trick he picked up was to bunt for a hit, not as a sacrifice for a teammate on base. In this move he stroked the pitch harder, aiming it to bounce behind a right-handed moundsman’s left-sided fall-away on delivery and taking him out of the play, while forcing the second baseman or shortstop to rush in for the throw to first. Making baseball geometry and tactical methods a field of study, Cobb drew upon the advice given him by Wahoo Sam Crawford of Detroit on outfield maneuvers. He often referred to the notebook he kept, filled with Wahoo’s tips.

  Anniston, after all, was not such a bad training ground. Within weeks Cobb was among the league’s top batters with a .350 average and a small clique of fans; the “Cobbies” cheered him from the bleachers. More good fortune came when he met local steel-mill executive and rabid rooter J. B. Darden, who invited the Steelers’ lively newcomer to board at his home. Darden would not accept rent, charged nothing for the excellent meals his cook prepared, and even wrangled from the Steelers’ owners a pay raise for Cobb to sixty-five dollars a month. Darden’s generosity enabled the boy to add five or so pounds to his still spare frame. “You are going a long, long way in baseball,” predicted Darden. The thought gave Cobb his biggest lift in months.

  At this stage, seeking to regain confidence, he was less impressed with himself than he had been back home with the Royston Reds. Now he took a more balanced view. Maybe he was making so favorable an impression because competition in the semipro Southeastern League was not up to that played in the official minor leagues. At the same time he was smartening up, beginning to see the game calculatingly, comparatively, and more technically.

  Publicity was scarce in the deep bushes. Against the Gadsden, Alabama, club, Cobb slid into second base twice for steals, rapped a triple, and drove in the winning runs. For this he drew only a few buried column inches in the Anniston weekly. His performance improved, but his notices did not. In one instance his name was misspelled in an area paper as “Cyrus Cobb.”

  “I worried about that,” he said in a later interview. “I decided that something calling more attention to me was needed.” He became busy.

  Against Oxford, Alabama, one afternoon he hit for the rare “cycle”—single, double, triple, and home run in one contest—and was robbed of a second homer. Oxford’s left fielder, feigning a catch of a high drive that cleared the fence, jogged in to show the plate umpire—the only umpire on hand—a ball nestled in his glove. The fielder had carried a ball in his hip pocket for just such an occasion. Cobb was not fooled. When the call went against him, he punched the Oxford man, setting off a brawl among players. Trouble spread to the crowd, which piled onto the field. After things cooled, the umpire threw Cobb out.

  Cobb went into an act—at least that was how he explained it in later years. He grew profane, shoved the umpire, and spit on the ump’s uniform shirt and shoes. With that the Oxford fans renewed the war, attacking Cobb. Police had to be called. While delaying play for nearly an hour, he managed to keep attention focused upon himself. He was fined one day’s pay by the league office, made headlines and also history. It was Ty Cobb’s first ejection from a game played under organized rules—“one of the best fights I was ever in. People got to know me.”

  In the Southeastern circuit, three days sometimes went by without a game, offering free time for him to use the Anniston public library to check out Georgia’s metropolitan newspapers for any mention of his name. He found nothing. The Associated Press did not carry Anniston results beyond Alabama borders; word of his doings was not reaching anyone who counted in his native state. It was then that, turning volunteer correspondent, he thought up a way to advertise himself with nothing more than pen, paper, and gall. His first target was the Atlanta Journal. On a postcard directed to sports editor Grantland Rice, he raved about the abilities of one Ty Cobb, a terrific hitter with the Steelers and a coming star. More colorful accounts went to newspapers in Memphis, New Orleans, and Augusta—especially Augusta, scene of his recent failure. Rice and several other well-read sportswriters fell for the trick and wrote up Cobb in glowing terms.

  Luckily for him the Augusta Tourists were playing poor baseball at the time. Their fans were complaining, and the favorable columns and feature stories on Cobb of Anniston were noticed. Augustans remembered the noisy rookie of the past spring who raced around in a flaming-red suit and looked like he might be a hitter. They asked for his recall.

  Eventually, Cobb’s play decided it. He went on a batting spree, raising his average to .370, best in the Southeastern circuit. He also stole a bunch of bases. On August 5, just short of spending one hundred days in Anniston, he received a telegram from the Augusta Tourists: “WE HAVE ARRANGED YOUR RELEASE STOP REPORT AUGUSTA SOONEST POSSIBLE.” The Tourists wanted him back. It was a big break for Cobb, a development for which he had hoped and, indeed, had helped bring about with his fake correspondence—yet he waited to start cheering. The summons was not signed by his nemesis, Con Strouthers, but by Andy Roth. He had not yet formally met Roth, the Tourists’ catcher. Augusta’s telegram made no mention of Strouthers, a man Cobb despised and had sworn never to play under again. If Roth had moved in as field chief, was Strouthers lurking somewhere in the picture, perhaps in the front office? What would Professor Cobb say if Tyrus was fired for a second time in the same city?

  Checking with sources in Augusta, he told them, “I don’t want to be burned anymore by that damned Strouthers. I want to be sure he isn’t in charge of anything.” Informants assured him that Strouthers had resigned and the likable Roth was now in charge.

  On August 8 Cobb caught a train back to where he had started, reporting to Warren Park as an exile returned. Little time was left in the season in which to show up well at Class C level, and he had a few reservations about Andy Roth being “his kind” of handler. Taking orders on when to hit away, when to bunt and steal, and where to position himself in the outfield came hard for a naturally spontaneous, hardheaded type who wanted to go by “Don’t tell me, I’ll tell myself.”

  His attitude didn’t work with the veteran Roth. Stationed in center, right, and left fields from day to day, “second-chance” Cobb mostly played it his way—his inventive way. His hitting against the better pitching in the Sally League was light, and he clashed with the conservative Roth over ways to advance a runner. Roth required base runners to be under control of the first-base coach, via Roth’s signals from the dugout, on how big a lead to take off first base, when to play it safe, and when to attempt stealing a base. The same applied at third base, where a coach’s hold-or-go order was to be violated only in rare circumstances. This was book baseball, supported by the best thinking in the major leagues.

  Cobb was of an opposite opinion—he wanted no beer-bellied traffic cop directing him. Eyesight, timing, and intuition were what counted. Whether he was aware of it or not, he was constructing a foundation for detecting openings and instantly exploiting them, confusing infields. Even if he was thrown out by a yard on a base-advance attempt, he had established the threat that he might go at any moment, especially when the odds were longest against him. Cobb did not mind getting trapped between bases in rundowns. With his reversible speed he was hard to catch. Moreover, solo theatrics singled him out to the crowd.

  Customers enjoyed his unpredictable stunting, while Andy Roth burned. After a game in Charleston, South Carolina, in which Cobb twice was thrown out on plays after he overrode Roth’s signs, he was publicly bawled out. The manager ran onto the field to cry, “You’re fined and benched! This is the last grandstanding you’ll do here!”

  “We’re winning the game on my run, aren’t we?” yelled Cobb.

  “Be careful, junior, or you’ll be catching another train out of town!” threatened Roth.

  Rebel Cobb did not play for two days, and when he returned he repeated his ad-lib stealing. Again Roth fined him. This time there was a near fistfight. Intervention was needed from William J. Croke, an Augusta businessman who was in process of buying into the Tourists and assumi
ng the team presidency, to prevent Roth from firing or trading Cobb.

  Long after he left Augusta—in quite a different way than by release, trade, or outright discharge—Cobb continued to believe that he had been in the right. Not nearly as experienced as Roth, he saw the catcher even so as a dimwit on strategy and himself as the victim of both ignorance and prejudice. Roth was a redneck, biased against anyone from a “better class” family. Not then or ever did Cobb doubt his intellectual and social superiority over teammates, front office managers, and most club owners.

  The 1904 season concluded on an unpromising note. In the short time after he returned from Anniston to Augusta, he had only 32 hits in 37 games, for a .237 average, thirty-third best in the Sally League. Twenty-five of his 32 base blows had been singles; he had been caught stealing almost half of the time, an outcome Andy Roth had foreseen. His fielding had received no significant test. Cobb’s guess was that Augusta would not want him back for 1905.

  Before the season drew to a close, he proposed to Croke that he be converted into a pitcher—he had always wanted to fill the most commanding position on the field. Teammates, nervous about the wild fastballs that brushed them in practice, suggested that he forget it—with his arm, he would maim or kill somebody. As an outfielder, he had a naturally good distance arm—rubbery and injury resistant.

  It was improvement of his batwork that would decide Cobb’s future. Left-handers and spitballers tied him in knots. He could not hold back on change-of-speed pitches, pulling himself off-balance with his body ahead of a too-early bat. Lacking coaching to match his talents, the Georgian retreated into a wait-them-out mode at bat, looking for a base on balls or hit-by-pitch, a tactic entirely against his nature. On the favorable side, the few big-time scouts who bothered to look at him ranked him as the fastest runner in the South, and a strange sort of bunter who needed refining. His stealing methods were a laugh.

  Bill “Hummingbird” Byron, the funny “singing umpire” of the Sally League, like to recite self-written poems to batters who stood around waiting for a walk. Byron did this even while a batter was in the box. He embarrassed Cobb with:

  You’ll never hit the bowler

  With the bat on your shoulder.

  And:

  Only hope for runt

  Is take one and bunt.

  Cobb told Byron to go to hell. The ditty he hated most went:

  Stick the bat up your ass

  If you can’t show us class.

  Cobb didn’t need Byron or anyone else to tell him he had rushed things by several years, that a kid with his bones and muscles still forming lacked the strength to stand out against matured men. Whatever he accomplished would be a while in coming. It was possible that Cobb at seventeen was the youngest regular player in organized baseball in the southern United States, and maybe beyond that.

  In the event that he could not improve in ability, and to please Professor Cobb, as well as with the intent of broadening himself, he corresponded that winter with Oglethorpe College, the University of Georgia, and Middle Georgia Military, among nearby schools. “Only one I missed was Decatur Female Seminary,” he later joked, in one of his rare light moments. “I saw that the game I was in paid damned little … and management owned you one hundred percent, could fire you at any moment … that the smart people on top had all the power. Getting an education was the only way I could be independent, have some real value, like a surgeon or scientist or lawyer.”

  He was back in Royston by September, with something else on his mind. He had taken a fancy to a Royston girl during his playing days with the Royston Reds. They had corresponded after he left town and the affair seemed serious. She was from a family as prominent as the Cobbs. He had taken her “walking out” to indicate his intentions. She had written that her parents were far from sold on the idea of her marrying a professional ballplayer.

  It was one more reason to leave the ballparks, to enroll at a university. His secondary-school grades in the serious subjects had been only fair, but his father, as a county supervisor of education, had many friends in the academic community. The idea of trying for West Point came up again. This time Cobb listened seriously.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOR SALE, ONE REBEL KID, $25

  He grew whiskers and began shaving on a daily basis for the first time in 1904. His lasting impression of the season was that Andy Roth stood as an unmovable obstacle who hoped that firebrand Cobb would quit. A further discouragement was club ownership—Augustans who counted their profits and did nothing to end dissension in the ranks.

  That winter, Professor Cobb had a gift that helped raise Ty’s spirits—a gaited black saddle horse. His grandfather, Squire Cobb, had given him his first game-skinning knife and rifle, and it was another happy day when his father presented him with his first mount. He called the horse “Blackie.” Cobb explained the name with “He was as dark as an Alabama nigger in a coal mine.”

  The use of the ritual scurrility of “nigger” or “nigra” was employed in public by Cobb throughout his life. In his later years, even when black stars Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and Larry Doby finally were admitted to the hitherto segregated major leagues after World War II, his attitude did not change; blacks did not belong on pro ball fields any more than in the white man’s parlor. Speaking to friends in private, he regularly dropped “coon,” “smoke,” “Sambo,” and “shine” into his discourse. By inheritance, communality, and disposition, Cobb was a fixed racial bigot.

  Andy Roth, a tough customer in a fight, was much on Cobb’s mind that winter. A showdown with the manager was coming if Augusta renewed his contract, and if he did not pass it all up to become a doctor or an Army officer. Asked in Royston about his plans, Cobb made no allowance that Roth might have reason to object to his wildcatting on the bases. “Just wait,” he confided to his former hometown coach, Bob McCreary, “I’ll put Roth in the ditch.” McCreary, in a scrapbook he kept over the years on “my boy,” entered, “There will be no changing of his mind on this.” When you made an enemy of Ty Cobb, McCreary knew, he did not forget.

  Whichever way the career decision might go, Cobb stayed in shape. Two years earlier he had been so spindly that his hip pockets ran together; now his hindquarters were athletically rounded, his chest stuck out, and his neck was thickening. He had grown to middleweight size so quickly that his clothes needed refitting. Almost every day, in any weather, he ran along Royston roads at jogging speed for a few dozen strides, sprinted for a time, returned to a jog, and resumed sprinting, continuing the pattern for five to six miles. Local admirers, doing roadwork with him, were told, “If it turns out to be college for me, I want to give football a try.”

  Friends argued against it. That October several regional sportswriters quoted a scout from the New York Highlanders (later Yankees): “I kind of like this country boy. He’s all flying arms and legs … but worth watching if he calms down.” The scout was not talking about the major leagues, but only of possible promotion to a higher minor organization.

  Working against Cobb’s chances were his cockiness, bullheadedness, and utter lack of humility. Professor Cobb again put him to mucking out stables and sowing winter wheat on the farm. W. H. was surprised to hear that Ty had saved $150 from his small earnings at Anniston and with the Tourists; he congratulated Ty for not misbehaving in the city. But the elder Cobb still wanted his son out of baseball. Much underpaid, traded around like cattle, given no security, ballplayers were not respectable people. A Cincinnati newspaper headlined one report, evidently because it concerned a team doing something unique, “BALLPLAYERS GO TO CHURCH, LISTEN TO SERMON.” In West Virginia, one Jim Carrigan was called out sliding into home plate; he went home, got a shotgun, returned, and killed the umpire. According to Cobb in later years, his father read the report’s postscript to Ty: “A new umpire was substituted and the game went on, Carrigan taking part in it.” Only a few seasons earlier in Lowndesboro, Alabama, umpire Sam White’s skull had been fatally crushed by a ba
t-wielding player.

  This was not sport, but work of the devil, said W. H. Ty had been hearing of sin since he was a child, and he had to admit that in Augusta things got rough. He had watched men go directly from the park to bars, returning next day in no shape to play. No curfew existed on Roth’s loosely controlled “joy club.” Some Tourists secretly laid bets on their games. Most of the boys spit tobacco, went unshaven—looking tough was the ideal. Warren Park was not a place to bring a lady. It was an Augusta joke that the Tourists could outdo a mink for screwing, Cobb said in later years.

  He could only put up the defense that a good many of the Tourists, himself included, could regularly be found at church on Sunday. Some did not drink at all.

  In a place like Royston, it was perhaps to be expected that the girl he had been courting broke off their marriage plans. Her father, for reasons close to W. H.’s objections to Ty’s would-be career, told Cobb not to come around his home anymore. Ty Cobb’s instructions in dictating his autobiography to me in 1960 were to omit any mention of the girl, “Kate,” and this was done. “She quit me,” he wrote in his notes. He reminisced sourly on this failure. “It was her hard luck,” he said. “Kate could have lived high on the hog as my wife. I never saw her again … after a while I didn’t give a cow turd.” Cobb would not marry until four years later, in 1908, by which time he was American League batting champion.