by Al Stump
Across the Southeast the breach between Cobb and his teammates became a topic of conversation among baseball men. One day in mid-season, a businessman named Charles D. Carr, who was about to join Bill Croke as a major stockholder of the Tourists franchise, called Cobb aside, put a friendly hand on his shoulder, and asked, “What’s the real problem, Ty, behind all this dissension?”
Cobb stared at Carr and replied, “Nothing, except that most of your boys and Roth are sons of bitches.” He walked away.
CHAPTER SIX
SHOTGUN BLASTS
So it went for him, a rebel in the ranks, through his first full season. Heavy June rains hit the Sally League. Cobb caught a cold he couldn’t shake and played mechanically, without zip. Then, in midsummer, George Leidy came into the picture. “He made all the difference in the world to me,” remembered Cobb.
Nearing forty, Leidy, a good-natured, softspoken veteran of the southern-southwestern U.S. minor leagues, played in the Augusta outfield next door to Cobb, and believed that the fractious rookie was a fine talent in the making. In midseason Leidy was named manager of the Tourists, replacing Andy Roth. With Roth gone, Ty was open to suggestions, and Leidy began a course of instruction. Initially it amounted to a suggestion here and there; since Cobb was listening, Leidy broadened the lessons. He was equipped to do an expert job; he was a former Class AA star and had done some big-league scouting. Articulate, perceptive, Dad Leidy was known to have a touch for identifying raw prospects who might move up the ladder.
Stationed next to him on the field, Leidy noted Cobb’s weaknesses, including a growing taste for hard drink. Branching out socially, he had joined a group of college-age sports from well-off Augusta families who hit the bottle, bet on horse races, and dallied with girls from Broad Street bars. Leidy saw him reporting to work hung over from partying. When I acted as Cobb’s collaborator in the early 1960s, he often thought back to that time: “I was losing my ambition to go higher and knew it. Well, hell, I didn’t know what I was doing.” And: “Just a half-smart kid against that bastard Roth and his team.”
Soon after taking charge of the Tourists, Leidy invited Ty to take a trolley ride with him to a nearby amusement park. He had noticed that Cobb’s mind worked faster than others’, that he thought ahead of the inning at hand. He had been held back by Con Strouthers, Roth, and his own ungoverned temper. The two sat on a park bench for the first of what would become a series of talks. Realizing that it would be useless to criticize him, Leidy worked on his imagination. Cobb always afterward credited his new boss as “changing my life one hundred percent.”
The older man did all the talking. Ty listened, and remembered Leidy saying, “Augusta is nothing. In New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities they have ballparks that would swallow several the size of the one we play in. They wouldn’t open the gates for our kind of draw. You’ve heard of the Polo Grounds and the huge new one they’re planning in Chicago, Comiskey Park? Will seat fifty thousand. Up there the big-time arenas are like the ones the Romans used for sports shows. You sure should see them.” Leidy told how teams rode in private railway cars with special food, stayed at the best hotels. As for being well known, U.S. presidents shook the hands of the top players. Newspapers played them up in bannerlines and photo spreads.
The old-timer caught Ty’s full attention when he mentioned that baseball was verging on becoming big business, that six- and seven-thousand-dollar salaries for stars were around the corner. Ty’s annual contract was for just over six hundred dollars.
Nobody reached the majors, said Leidy, without long, hard preparation. The National League’s marvelous Honus Wagner of Pittsburgh had been an ordinary infielder until he built himself a trench around shortstop, dug in, practiced endlessly on bad-hop grounders in bare feet, and became the very best at his position. Christy “Big Six” Mathewson had gone, through discipline and application, from a poor-control pitcher to a strikeout king, winner of 33 games in 1904 for the New York Giants. Other cases were related, such as that of the New York Highlanders’ Willie Keeler, a small man who worked at hitting until his hands bled.
In successive weeks Leidy built incentive. He came to the point with: “You don’t know what you’ve got. It’s my belief that in a year or two, no more, you can be up there making ten times the money you’re getting now. For one thing, you have faster reactions and more breakaway speed than almost anyone I’ve seen and I’ve seen the best of them. I’m sure you can become a better hitter than ninety-nine percent of the big boys. But it won’t happen if you don’t straighten up. Stop breaking training. Stay sober. Apply yourself every minute. You’re not playing ball, you’re playing at it.”
So Cobb always told the Leidy story, his favorite piece of autobiography. As dime-novelish as it sounded, he insisted that every word of it was true. Cobb became sold on growing up and becoming a success when Dad Leidy had put a hand on his shoulder and “with tears in his eyes” promised him, “You can go down in the history books, have every lad in America idolizing you.” And maybe the story was mainly true, at that. When he spoke of meetings between himself and Leidy in future years—“emotional, a wonderful shared feeling between us”—Cobb was being truthful.
Persuasion led to extra batting practice by the hour. When the Tourists were idle, Leidy pitched Ty curves, knucklers, balls in on the fists and low and away, change-ups, chin-grazers, and “lightning” (a term then used for fastballs). He broke down Cobb’s erratic batting form, restructuring his cut at the ball. The veteran preached against overstriding, a Cobb habit, and converted him to a controlled, six-inch strider from all three stances: open, straightaway, and closed. Leidy gave him a “quiet head,” with no more bobbing of the skull, shoulders, and hips, which translated into a smooth, level arc of the bat. They worked on grip. As a youth Ty had experimented with the hands-apart choke hold, but then switched to a big, free swing, providing power but inevitably a string of strikeouts. “Forget home runs,” Leidy advised. “Move your hands up and spread them a few inches.” (Cobb habitually choked the bat for most of the rest of his days.) A nervous hand-hitch between the time the pitch was released and reached the plate was corrected.
Leidy was destiny in a dirty sweatshirt—cussing, berating, demanding improvement. He made Ty feel foolish by tying a rope around his waist and having an assistant coach jerk him onto his rump when he lunged at a pitch outside the strike zone. Cobb hated to be dumped, but he took it. Leidy drove a tall stake in the ground, put a ball atop it, and had his pupil cleanly slice it off, a forerunner of modern batting-tee practice. Since nobody had corrected it, Cobb was a guesser at what kind of pitch was coming. “Guess hitters don’t get out of Cowturd, Iowa,” lectured Leidy. “Get deep in the box, take a longer look at the spin, be ready for anything.”
The ambidextrous Leidy pitched to him only left-handed, since lefties were Cobb’s most pronounced weakness. Patiently, Leidy went on to show how, with the front shoulder pointed at the pitcher, it should remain there until the last split second, a delayed action enabling Ty to connect with late-breaking curves and outside pitches. Cobb had big paws—hands and wrists. The coach acted out in slow motion how to employ another source of power, the sharp snapping of the wrists upon contact with the ball.
Daily, until the Augusta field was dark, Leidy tutored him on the quick hip pivot, on following through on his swing, on hit-and-run technique, on how to duck a beanball by collapsing straight down instead of falling back or forward. Some of the classes were held in the early mornings. Too tired after long sessions to join his downtown college gang, Ty began sleeping organized hours. He had no idea of diet. George Leidy did. Alcohol was out “ninety-nine percent of the time” by Cobb’s estimate.
In San Francisco some thirty years later a noted teacher named Frank “Lefty” O’Doul would employ much the same methods on a rookie named Joe DiMaggio. “Did O’Doul use the rope trick on you, too?” Cobb once asked DiMag. “And twice on Sunday,” said Joe.
Up to now T
y had been mostly a one-way slider into bases—head-first. “Unless you like eating dirt, give it up,” ordered Leidy. “Basemen coming down on your neck with spikes ain’t good. And you could dislocate a shoulder.” They borrowed an old base bag from the groundskeeper, spaded up the soil in a corner of Warren Park, and set the bag at one end of a runway. On early mornings Ty practiced all the known slides: hook left, hook right, bent leg, rolling, sitting-standing, sliding past the bag and reaching back to tag it, sliding to break up the double play, plus a few he invented—such as sticking sharpened spikes into legs, arms, and bellies at twenty miles an hour when basemen obstructed him. After games, he slid fifty or more times, or until his hips were raw. Sometimes Cobb came into the clubhouse with blood staining his pants.
In July, still attending Leidy’s free clinic, he wrote home to Professor Cobb, “Had two doubles and singles vs. star Alabama team. Stole two. Making good progress.” Friends had tipped him that his father, no longer quite obsessed with the idea that his son should come to his senses and find honest employment, had been showing newspaper clippings about the youngster’s feats to friends.
W. H. Cobb now understood what “AB,” “DP,” “H,” and “R” meant in a box score, according to what Ty now heard. After 130-odd pro games over parts of two seasons in a dozen southern towns and cities where his roaming heir had appeared, the Professor had yet to attend a single contest. But he seemed to be softening. W. H. remained a strong political presence in Georgia legislative and educational circles. To have the Cobb name published in columns of the Atlanta Journal or Augusta Chronicle, even when Ty went 0 for 5 or the teams brawled on the field, was not the public shame that W. H. had feared. To the contrary, an Augusta victory brought slaps on W. H.’s back in conference rooms. Baseball was becoming very popular in Georgia. In a notebook Ty kept, he pensively wrote, “I hope Father comes out to see me play some day.”
Dad Leidy was inspired to rebuild Ty both because it was his nature and because he felt sure that he had lucked into an important find, requiring only two or three more seasons of training on fundamentals and one or two of polishing. All that was needed was time. In the outfield, where Cobb too often was apt to turn a fly ball into a three-base error, Leidy hit him fifty balls almost daily. In an attempt at humor, a local sport journal wrote, “By the million they knock flies to his left, his right and short of him. And—hooray!—he catches many of them. The hardest of all is the fly hit directly at him and sinking. Oh, what trouble! But Ty Cobb—whoops!—falls on his face without the pill in his trap less often than before. In 10 years he might become expert.”
In a lasting way, Leidy built within Ty the confidence that comes with fine timing at bat. A repertoire of slides came second in importance. The teacher did not work on Cobb’s violent temper, however; form and mechanics were all that any one man could deal with where a player as combative as Cobb was concerned.
Andy Roth, deposed as manager but still a team member, one day joked about Ty’s efforts to improve. “Are you Leidy’s trained monkey?” asked Roth. “He whistles and you run.”
“Go to hell,” said Cobb.
“Put your mitts where your mouth is,” challenged the husky catcher.
How about right now?” said Cobb. He was a forty-pound underdog in weight, he remembered, but had been spoiling to even matters with Roth.
Their fight was anything goes. Feelings had festered so long that the Tourist players saw no reason to break it up. Cobb went berserk, punching anywhere he could reach Roth, from jaw to crotch. Roth applied a choke hold and was cutting off his wind until Ty bit Roth’s ear and wrenched on it like a bulldog. Blood was lost by both. Roth tore loose to batter Cobb’s eye, closing it. He head-butted Cobb to the ground. Cobb kicked Roth while he was down and a moment later had Roth on his back. It went on to a no-decision when some of the Tourists finally intervened.
Each was helped away, exhausted and needing bandaging. Cobb ranked this one as among the dozen or so dirtiest brawls he ever engaged in. It effectively eliminated Roth as a leading team factor—he was laid up for several days—while reinforcing Leidy’s influence. Cobb, after all, hadn’t been the favorite.
On the buggy ride home, Leidy said, “You made a dumb move. Roth had all the pull in size.”
“Didn’t bother me,” said Cobb flatly. “If it had gone against me, I’d have gotten him with a bat.”
Although the Tourists lost fifteen of the next twenty games in July, an improved Cobb stood out afield and at the plate. For some reason he had stopped using the bunt. On an off day, Leidy took him to Atlanta to watch a new pitching “marvel” named Happy Harry Hale. A sixfoot, six-inch stringbean from Happy Hollow, Tennessee, Hale threw shutout balls for four innings. “Now watch what happens,” predicted Leidy. What the other side then did was to bunt, bunt, bunt. Happy Harry looked silly trying to field the well-placed taps. He spiked his own hand, fell down twice, had to be removed.
Cobb only had to be shown once. Beginning then, he practiced bunting to an old sweater laid down forty feet away. When he could accurately stop a straight bunt on or near the sweater, he moved to other types—the squeeze, drag, sacrifice, the backspin bunt. Before very long Cobb and that bastardized base hit, the bunt, would be as synonymous as Lewis and Clark, Pat and Mike.
UP NORTH the Detroit Tigers had heard gossip about what Leidy was accomplishing with his speedy pupil, and they sent scout Heinie Youngman to take a look. It was highly improbable that a Class C newcomer could be of any use to the Tigers. Yet something moved Detroit manager Bill Armour to learn more. Youngman found “bird dogs” from the fast American Association and International League already present in Augusta. Youngman saw an ideally shaped ballplayer, long in the leg, lean, heavily muscled in places where it counted—the thighs, arms, and shoulder girdle—with pale, glittering eyes that met your gaze head-on. His southland drawl was prominent. Heinie Youngman said, “I’d like to ask you some personal questions.” Perversely, Cobb answered, “Yuh cain if yoh don’t mind that ah might not answer ’em.”
According to Youngman, he informed Bill Armour in Detroit, “That was strike one on him. Here I was giving a kid down in the sticks a chance to be noticed and he’s telling me that maybe, or maybe not, he’ll talk.” Youngman was not the first to encounter Cobb’s exasperating temperament, but he was first to testify to it for the history books.
Cobb gave brief answers to inquiries, implying that he did not discuss his private life with strangers. About all that he would say was that he was a native Georgian who didn’t drink whiskey, would be nineteen in December, farmed in the winter, was unmarried, and had a high school education, with college a strong possibility. Asked about his father, he opened up a bit to brag, “He teaches and preaches and helps make laws. Ah would say he’s the best-known man in Franklin County, Georgia.” Ty was noncommittal about his mother. “She cooks,” he said shortly.
Youngman gave up and watched him beat Columbia’s Spartans with a diving, tumbling catch and a pair of clutch hits, and came away impressed despite himself. He told the Tigers that just maybe, in a pinch, Cobb might be useful.
By early August, hundred-degree heat blanketed Augusta. Players dunked their heads in buckets of shaved ice. Many slumped. Cobb seemed immune. In midmonth, against Macon, Georgia, he hit a single. Macon’s first baseman grinned at him. “I hear you’re going up.”
“Up where?” asked Ty, not understanding.
“To the big time—Cleveland or Detroit.”
“Don’t fun me,” said Cobb, thinking it a joke.
“No joke,” said the baseman. “It’s supposed to be true.”
Years later, at a Hall of Fame affair, Cobb confirmed the story: “It hadn’t crossed my mind that any club that high up was interested in me. The Augusta owners hadn’t said anything about it. Just before I talked to Youngman and some other scouts, I’d jammed my thumb sliding … it was swollen up, and hurt like hell. So it went right past me when the rumor started.”
A
lthough he lacked the sophistication and perception to understand what was going on around him, he stayed in the news. He ran his base steals to a league-leading 40 and was hitting at a .320 figure, also near the Sally League top. Leidy’s weeks of schooling had made a difference in most departments.
ON THE night of August 8, Cobb attended a barn dance until a late hour, and slept in next day. About 10:00 A.M. the following morning a messenger boy handed Ty a telegram—from Royston. It was signed by long-time friend Joe Cunningham, the schoolmate he once had made bats with out of leftover lumber. Joe’s words leaped out, leaving him stunned:
COME AT ONCE STOP VERY SORRY STOP YOUR FATHER DEAD IN SHOOTING ACCIDENT STOP HURRY.
To Cobb’s best recall, everything after that was a blur. He was dazed, speechless. When he could speak he phoned Cunningham. Everything in his hometown was in confusion. Cunningham cried, “The Professor’s been shot! … We don’t know how it happened … looks like someone got him with a shotgun … God, Ty, he’s dead!”
Others came on the phone. In the babble Cobb thought he heard it said that somehow his mother was involved in the shooting. Ty’s younger brother, Paul, came on the line to sob, confirm the death, and add a few details.
Hurrying home by train, Cobb had to face the circumstance that his father, the man he most admired and honored, who had opposed baseball and thought it a great mistake for his son, yet had bowed to Ty’s wishes and made it possible for him to test himself, never would see him in a game. Now he could not repay the trust shown in him. The man he looked up to as wise and saintly was dead. And not by accident, some in Royston were saying.
When his train reached Royston, friends among a crowd at the station told Cobb that this was no ordinary gunplay. He quickly learned the facts of an affair that was rocking northeastern Georgia. For—no doubt whatever about it—it was Ty Cobb’s mother, Amanda, who had pulled the triggers of the double-barreled shotgun that had blown off his father’s head.