by Al Stump
Historian Harold Seymour, in Baseball: The Golden Age
In December, midway through the 1905–06 off-season, Cobb reached his nineteenth birthday without receiving a Detroit contract. Weeks of silence by the front office passed. In November two events had seemed to signal his return to a minor league, and to a team not even based in the United States. Toronto of the Eastern League needed an outfielder, and the low eighteen-hundred-dollar asking price on Detroit’s rookie fill-in attracted the Canadians. In addition, Frank Navin had recently signed Davy “Kangaroo” Jones, formerly a stout outfielder with the Chicago Cubs. With Jones on hand and a Toronto deal percolating, Navin delayed resigning a marginal player.
Tired of waiting, Cobb did not help his shaky situation when he violated a Navin rule concerning outside employment. Near Atlanta, the University of Georgia operated a prep-school training camp for baseball and track athletes it was recruiting, and who needed coaching. Local boy Cobb was offered $250 and travel expenses to coach the kids. Navin and Armour, as a matter of policy, refused to allow it. Cobb defied the rule, signed with Georgia, and left for camp.
Years later, reviewing the dispute, he held a thumb and finger an inch apart, saying, “I came this close to giving up playing ball for a living—for good. I would not drop down to Toronto, which was out there in moose and snow country. Working for a university was a good deal for me … though I probably was the youngest college coach in the country.” The arrangement was an odd one: some of Cobb’s pupils were as old as their teacher.
In January a contract for fifteen hundred dollars—some three hundred dollars more than he had expected—arrived from the Tigers. He signed for his first full big-league season as a backup behind outfield starters Sam Crawford, Matty McIntyre, and Davy Jones and reserves Jimmy Barrett and Sam Thompson. He was, to borrow a current expression, “low dog in the meat yard”—the lowest-paid carryover member of the twenty-four-man squad. If a favorable trade or sales proposal came along, he figured to be dealt away by Navin. “His teammates,” said the Sporting Journal, “wanted no part of someone who might one day take somebody’s job. They banded to run him off the club with some of the hardest hazing ever seen.”
THE DETROIT Baseball and Amusement Company opened spring training in Augusta at Warren Park with low pennant hopes. The Tigers’ dump-Cobb faction wasted no time. It became busy—“in midseason form,” as Cobb described it—during batting practice. There was no room in the box for him. Big Matty McIntyre and others blocked his way; as soon as one hitter finished his ten workout swings, another crowded in ahead of next-man-up Cobb. He was dismissed with, “Go knock some flies to the yannigans [rookies].” Handed a long, thin stick known as a fungo bat, he drew the job of exercising fielders. It was insulting—fungoing was usually relegated to a coach or some retired player. Stuck with this duty, his chance to sharpen his eye against spring pitching was slipping away.
Practice games had barely started when he found his only good glove unexplainably ripped in the stitching, and a pair of his favorite bats gone from the rack. On a tip from a groundskeeper he looked behind a fence and in the weeds found the bats—both shattered at the handles. Cobb never found out for sure who did it.
Augusta’s antiquated Albion Hotel was the Tigers’ headquarters, an inn offering a single toilet with bathtub on each floor. Ringleaders Matty McIntyre and Ed Siever, with others, dawdled in the water while Cobb hung around a chilly hallway draped in a towel. After a hot, dirty game, he would find himself locked out of an empty washroom. At other times the hot water supply deliberately was exhausted. In the Albion dining room a pea flicked off someone’s knife would splat off Cobb’s head. Or he would find a piece of rotten fruit squishing in his coat pocket. His hat was impaled on a rack. In the clubhouse his shoes were nailed to the floor.
Cobb’s instinctive reaction was to punch someone. In his words, “I told that damned little Bill Armour I was about to settle this man to man if he didn’t move in. Instead of coming down on the gang he went on playing poker with them. Oh, he’d make a half-assed remark now and then that things were going too far. But he let me know it was my problem—and there could be no brawling on the team.”
Cobb asked a few uninvolved Tigers what he should do. They were unhelpful. In a slugout against a half-dozen players, he stood no chance. But to let them walk on him was something he could not tolerate.
Job protection, money, and pride—strong elements—kept the feud going. Matty McIntyre, with his swiftness and good arm, soon appeared to have won a starting outfield position. At twenty-six he was a club leader. Davy Jones was all but sure to handle another outfield spot. Steadily effective Sam Crawford was a star, and entrenched as an outfield regular in his eighth major-league season. There was Jimmy Barrett, formerly a .300 hitter but now declining, and coming off an unhealed leg injury. There was Freddie Payne, a utility type. And there was Cobb. Three of the six would not see much action, possibly be traded or sold. Survival was especially important to McIntyre, who was having trouble maintaining a .260 plate average as the spring tour meandered through the South.
Someone tacked a note on Cobb’s hotel door: “LEAVE HERE WHILE YOU CAN.” Suspects were plentiful, but he didn’t bother to ask around the Albion for any witnesses. He went out and for twenty-five dollars bought a gun. “I was catching hell by the handful,” he said later. “That gun was forced on me.”
COBB’S WEAPON was a snub-nosed Frontier Colt pistol, provided by a former teammate with his old hometown team, the Royston Reds. Ty saw the Colt as making all the difference in the event he was jumped some night by a group. He wore the gun, he told me, in a holster near his armpit. Practicing his draw, he became fast. He kept the pistol a secret for weeks. When Bill Armour heard rumors that Cobb was armed, he moved to confiscate the weapon. Cobb denied its existence. “I stood still for a search,” he remembered, “and they didn’t find a fucking thing.”
ON MARCH 30 Cobb left camp to attend his mother’s trial for voluntary manslaughter. More than seven months had passed since Amanda Cobb had pulled the triggers of the shotgun that had killed Professor Cobb. During the hiatus the trial’s outcome had hung as a miserable dead weight over her son. Amanda Cobb had run up medical bills while she slowly “recovered from shock.” She now needed a nurse, and had retained a battery of defense lawyers. Of the approximately $215 per month the Tigers were paying him, Ty was sending home $100 or more for family support and to apply to the debt against the Royston farm, a legacy of the late Professor.
The site of Amanda’s trial was Lavonia, Georgia, where a sizable crowd gathered to look on. Already Ty Cobb was a regional celebrity—no other local product had ever reached the major leagues—and people from across the territory slapped his back and shook his hand, when all he wanted was to see the ordeal ended. The thought of a Cobb going to prison was chilling.
Amanda had been free from custody on seven thousand dollars bond. At the opening of her trial the small, pale-faced woman was near collapse. Her son sat stonily by as the examination proceeded. For some seven hours of testimony and deliberation the widow awaited her fate. The state’s prosecutor focused his questioning on why there had been a five- to ten-second interval between the two shots she had fired through her bedroom window. On the morning after the killing Amanda had described such a time span to a sheriff. In court she explained that panic had overwhelmed her. In firing twice, she had reacted in ongoing terror.
The rumor of a lover some Royston neighbors insisted Amanda had taken—supposedly inciting her husband’s domestic break-in—was not mentioned during the proceeding. No “lover” was named or produced, although in Royston a name was whispered about. Supposedly the man was young, a well-to-do Royston planter, known to Ty Cobb only as a family friend and an occasional visitor to Professor Cobb’s farm and to his political gatherings.
Amanda was acquitted by an all-male jury. Cobb left the building in silence. Gossip would persist in his hometown; it would be one reason why in the future he
would not live in Royston, a place where his mother was seen by many as a murderer.
Bill Armour and Frank Navin objected to Cobb’s continuing absence from camp after the trial concluded. Why was it necessary for him to return to Royston with his mother for several days? Why, following that, did he go jaunting with his younger brother, Paul, to Atlanta? His answer was that business concerning the endangered Cobb acreage in Royston required him to speak with bankers. As for Paul, he had problems as a freshman student at Georgia Tech. Family came first. “Poor damned way to make my ball club,” Navin warned him.
As it worked out, Cobb did not catch up to the barnstorming Tigers by train, buggy, and trolley until they reached Birmingham, Alabama, on April 7, where he had three straight base hits. He continued to look sharp. Navin, for once, was quiet. The boy had recovered from an ordeal with remarkable speed.
ALWAYS ADAPTIVE, he now was “seeing” a pitched ball with more acuteness. His even shorter stride, with little forward movement of head and body, aided his balance and balance enabled him to focus with steady vision. He was fully committed to a choke grip, which allowed him to spread hits to all fields. He also went to a new “knuckles-on-down” grip, where he held the bat with knuckles of both hands tensed in a straight line. That way he got a sharper wrist snap at contact. He claimed that on some pitches, such as a slow curve, he could actually see the stitches on the spinning ball. Few since have claimed this.
En route to Detroit for the season opening, he awoke in the Boody House hotel in Toledo with a 102-degree temperature and in racking pain. Before then it had been noticed by infielder Herman “Germany” Schaefer—not one of Ty’s enemies—that he had been gripping his chair tightly while eating. Schaefer asked why. “Because it hurts like fury to swallow,” admitted Cobb. Even drinking soup was painful. He consulted the Boody House physician, who told him he had tonsillitis.
Tonsillectomies in the early 1900s were sometimes a risky procedure. This one turned into butchery. “Putting a stranglehold on my neck, without anesthetic, this doc cut me seven times before he was finished,” Cobb told of his agony. “Each time a piece [of tissue] came out, blood spouted and choked me. Between some of the seven cuts I’d collapse on a sofa. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. Germany had to half-carry me back to my room, bleeding and gagging. This went on for two days.”
A year later Cobb checked out the “surgeon.” He learned that over the winter the man had been sent to an asylum for the insane. According to Cobb, “the son of a bitch had some sort of brain disease.”
Twenty-four hours after the operation—Ty never forgave the Tiger management for this—he was sent in to play in an exhibition game against Columbus of the American Association. He was shaky, still weak, and in pain, yet Armour used him for seven innings. On sheer guts he made a two-base hit, then said, “I’m leaving,” and walked out and collapsed in bed.
By late spring his dislike of Armour had turned to contempt. Some Tiger fans liked Armour for his colorful ways; others felt that he had poor control of his personnel. Certainly he did little to help his promising rookie from Georgia. When his men were not misplaying fly balls and reacting late to double plays on the field, they broke curfew, hung out at bars, and gambled on the ponies. Struggling to win a job, Cobb limited his drinking to an occasional glass of ale.
Armour was critical when he messed up a play, and sparing with praise when it was deserved. To Cobb and his small Detroit following, no excuse existed for the manager’s inability to see what was under his nose—an extraordinary talent awaiting fulfillment. How Armour could fail to recognize someone so promising was mystifying. “I looked around and saw nobody who could do things that I couldn’t,” Cobb wrote in his diary. And: “I am as good a baserunner as the best of them.” (After the season ended Armour would be fired, and his replacement, Hughie Jennings, would hold office for only a few days before predicting around town, “Hear me! This boy has it. He has the makings to become the greatest player who ever lived.”)
More bad fortune—and a few good things—came along. A “slider,” an abrasion of the hipbone caused by hitting hard dirt in base-stealing tries, became infected and filled with pus. Cobb was hospitalized in serious condition. No teammate took the time to visit him at Detroit’s Fort Street hospital. Invalided for several days, Ty did see Frank Navin—once. Navin did not offer to pay any part of his man’s medical bill. Cobb recalled this with: “Although we had no injury insurance then and I was bad off, Navin kept his hands in his pockets.”
Cobb had about four hundred dollars to his name and owed considerably more than that on farm debts in Royston when the American League kicked off the campaign in mid-April. His weight had dropped to 168 pounds after the pair of illnesses. But he was cheered by the arrival of some fine new bats, custom-lathed to his liking by the Louisville Slugger plant in Kentucky and replacing those destroyed in spring camp by secret hands. Cobb felt hopeful of hitting .280 or so if he could gain weight and get into one hundred or more games on the season.
Bennett Field on opening day rattled to the rafters with the sounds of an overflow crowd of fifteen thousand, many of whom wanted to see Cobb play center field in his breakneck style. They were disappointed. Armour kept him benched, putting Davy Jones, Matty McIntyre, and Sam Crawford in the outfield.
After sitting idle for a week, Cobb got a break when Sam Crawford strained a leg muscle. Sent to right field, Cobb showed nothing special, went hitless at St. Louis, and made a costly error on a fly ball against Cleveland. Elsewhere he overslid a base for an out. Several times he was replaced for a pinch hitter.
With his hitting judged only fair and while drawing more complaints from Armour, he resorted to the bunt—both the sacrifice variety and bunting for the hit. He began to tap pitches down third- and first-base lines, scoring runners from third, and with his instant acceleration often beating out throws to first. It was a way to moderate a slump, and it worked, temporarily at least. (One day that summer Cobb was timed with a stopwatch at one hundred yards. His 10-flat sprint in uniform pants and baseball shoes compared well with world-record-holder Dan Kelly’s 9.6 seconds in underwear, track shoes, and with specialized training.)
Sniping continued from the McIntyre-Siever faction, inventors of new nasty tricks on road trips. A wet wad of newsprint would come flying down the train aisle to smack Cobb on the neck. When he came back with fists raised, no one would admit that he had done the throwing. Another device was to deprive him of a roommate. Only one player, Edgar “Eddie” Willett, a rookie pitcher, was willing to share lodging with T.C., and their teaming-up lasted but briefly. A southerner, Virginia-born, pleasant and good-looking, the twenty-two-year-old Willett bunked with the Georgian at home and away until one day he announced that he was moving out. Willett admitted that he had been warned by certain Tigers to find other housing or “get hurt bad.” Cobb reportedly told Willett, “You are at the crossroads, Edgar. Those men just want to get at me through you. And they’ll make a whiskey-head out of you, like them. If I was in your place I’d tell them to go to hell.” But Willett, further unnerved by the gun Cobb carried with him on team travels, moved out of their small quarters in Detroit’s Brunswick Hotel.
Cobb never forgave him for that surrender. In his 1961 autobiography, My Life, Cobb wrote, “The sporty life caught up with Willett. In six seasons he was finished.” This was a Cobb fabrication; Willett pitched eight years for Detroit, winning 95 games between 1908 and 1913.
But then Matty McIntyre and his clique went too far. In Chicago a line drive split the left-center-field spacing between Cobb and McIntyre. The latter waved off the chance and pointed a finger at Cobb—who did not go for the ball, either. Skidding on the grass between them, the ball bounded to the fence for a three-base hit. When this occurred a second time, Armour blew his straw hat. The story goes that he asked McIntyre, “How is it that you don’t make plays that are yours and never bear down when Cobb’s on base? You do nothing to advance him.”
; “Why should I help that no-good son of a bitch?” shouted McIntyre, making his motive clear. Even if it cost Detroit ball games, McIntyre was not cooperating.
To the bench—suspended—went the veteran, and into the outfield on a steady basis went Cobb. His hitting improved; within weeks, with a .317 mark, he was leading the team both in hitting in the clutch and for average, while on defense he was making outstanding catches of difficult flies. By July he had stolen a dozen bases. In Boston one of his spectacular catches and his double won a game; against New York he walloped pitching, mixed in bunts, and scored from second on an infield roller, forcing errors at two bases. Around the league there was speculation about this prospect, not yet twenty years old, who played baseball with his head and not just his body. Connie Mack, leader of the defending champion Philadelphia A’s, remarked, “I wouldn’t mind having him on my side.”
Mid-1906 was always identified by Cobb as the beginning of his counterattack against his enemies on the Tigers. But it was no more than a start, an indication only of what he could do on the field if not impeded.
As the season rolled along, Joe Jackson of the Detroit Free Press began calling Cobb “a peach of a player,” then the “Georgia Peach.” The tag caught on. Descriptive nicknames were common as salutes to the famous, and Jackson thought Detroit’s youthful pepperpot deserved one, too. The trouble was that the honoree liked his own moniker too much to suit the other Tigers. He took to referring to himself as “the Peach.” To Detroit writers, and those of Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere, he would offhandedly mention, “The Peach went three for four yesterday and the buzzers [booers] were happy.” He posed for pictures eating a Georgia peach. How did he feel? “Peachy!” After he became a lineup regular he cultivated executives of the sporting press and tabloid publishers with wide circulation, among them Alfred Spink of the Sporting News and Richard Fox of the Police Gazette. When he began drawing as many inches of space as some of the game’s most admired players, his reputation as a grandstander (a “hot dog” today) was fixed. In the early twentieth century, ballplayers called a personal write-up “getting a splash.” Before long Cobb would be up to his haircut in publicity such as only a few other Tigers received.