Cobb

by Al Stump

  With no solution in sight, unrepentant and defiant, Cobb walked out of camp for Royston and home. He was on strike until the stalemate was resolved.

  Cobb’s state of mind was not helped by the knowledge that his mother’s name was still being bandied about in Augusta and Atlanta, in the matter of the fatal shooting of twenty months earlier.

  Cobb never learned who started the rumor, a new version of the killing, but it appeared that women in Royston had it as “God’s truth” that Amanda Cobb had deliberately shot her husband. Her acquittal had been a miscarriage of justice. The women’s tale went that Amanda had not fired at an “intruding burglar” from her bedroom window at midnight; far from it. Their story was that Amanda was two-timing the Professor, and that he heard of it when he asked a neighbor to close a house of ill repute the neighbor was running in Royston. The neighbor told him to look at his own home first. When Cobb asked him what he meant by that, the man tipped him that Amanda had a secret lover. Checking up, Cobb found clues suggesting his wife was guilty.

  An infuriated Amanda, so went the account, warned her mate that if she found him sneaking around the house, she’d shoot him—which she did when he came prowling. There had been some suspicious gaps in Amanda’s testimony at her trial. New rumor fed on it.

  Such a scandal was nothing the Georgia press dared publish, but the love-triangle story spread by word of mouth to southern ballparks. Such gossip was to haunt Cobb for years. Long after he stopped swinging a bat, the Detroit News Magazine and other journals would run the “love-nest” yarn in some detail. For now, early in 1907, it was something Cobb had to endure.

  When he quit the Tiger road trip that spring, what passed between mother and son in the several days he was gone to Royston remains unknown. But any fair estimate of Cobb must take into account that in 1907 he was still reliving a death that anguished him and undoubtedly was causing an extreme emotional reaction.

  THOSE WHO thought Cobb a mental case were vindicated by what happened next. Returning to training on March 23, Cobb had a rematch fight with Boss Schmidt. Of all things to do, taking on Schmidt was the most unwise. With a forty-pound weight advantage, the ex–pro boxer could handle Cobb easily. Their second battle came because of Schmidt’s previous disgust with the way Tyrus had abused groundskeeper Bungy and wife, and because Cobb foolishly taunted Schmidt about his clumsiness at the backstop position. Schmidt called Cobb “a yellow dog.” They went at it on the clay infield of the park at Meridian, Mississippi, before an exhibition game.

  Cobb always claimed that Schmidt sneak-punched him and he never had a chance. “I had just laced my shoes and was walking toward the outfield,” he described it, “when I heard a voice growl, ‘Cobb.’ I turned and Schmidt’s punch caught me with both hands at my side … a wallop that knocked me down and broke my nose … From then on a terrible anger was on me.”

  A dozen or so Tigers gathered around to cheer while Schmidt handed Cobb the most one-sided licking of his career. In a nothing-barred fight, Schmidt hammered away until the smaller man’s mouth was gashed, his eyes nearly closed, and he was spattered with blood. Schmidt ended it only when Cobb went down for the fourth time, able only to rise to his knees. But it was noticed by players that at no point did he quit. The loser kept getting off the ground. “You did better than I thought you could,” consoled Wild Bill Donovan, the pitcher who had partially sided with Cobb during his 1906 clashes with his teammates.

  The damage was extensive enough to leave Cobb unable to play at Meridian that day. At Vicksburg, still limping, Cobb remained out of action. A doctor who stitched his mouth and chin asked, “What ran over you—a horse?”

  Everything about Cobb—the Colt pistol he packed was only part of it—left his teammates and even Jennings feeling uneasy. Sam Crawford, the club’s best run producer until now, once told how Cobb suspected him of not bearing down at bat when the Peach was on base and positioned to score. Cobb already had a beef with Crawford, believing he had been one of those who earlier had smashed his bats.

  “He walked up to me red in the face and wanted to fight,” Wahoo Sam said. “I didn’t know what he might pull on me—a knife, brass knucks, or a gun. I waited until some other players came along and said, ‘Let’s go.’ He changed his mind pretty fast then.”

  ONCE MORE Jennings tried for a trade—Cobb for Billy Hogg of New York. A curveballer, Hogg in two seasons had won 23, lost 26. President Yawkey, intervening, killed the deal. As the season started, fans saw small hope for more than another sixth-place finish. Adding up the past three years, it came to 242 losses to 212 wins for Detroit. Most of the same talent was returning: Pinky Lindsay, Charlie O’Leary, Bill Coughlin, and Dutch Schaefer in the infield, Matty McIntyre, Davy Jones, Sam Crawford, and Cobb in the outfield. Just one pitcher, George Mullin, could show 20 or more wins for the prior year.

  With McIntyre refusing to play alongside Cobb, his enemy, Jennings experimentally shifted Crawford to center field, thereby splitting McIntyre in left and Cobb in right, far away from each other. Jennings theorized that there would be no more wrangling over who should handle a fly ball or a drive up the alleys. That is what Jennings hoped for. But his problems had only begun.

  From opening day on, when his two hits, a key stolen base, and two runs scored helped beat Cleveland 2–0, Cobb lived in a four-second world. Stealing became his chosen instrument for putting runs on the board. Sprinting from first base to second was only the preliminary to traveling another 180 feet to home—sequential thievery based on getting the jump on pitchers by reaching full speed in three steps, and one way or another avoiding tags. At upward of twenty miles an hour, Ty Cobb on the bases was a big blur to fielders.

  He began keeping book on opposing batteries, noting their weaknesses and tip-offs. “Boston had a left-hander, Jesse Tannehill,” he named as an example, “who had a habit of squeezing and resqueezing the ball before he threw to the plate. I stole three times on him in nine innings. Long Tom Hughes of Washington stiffened his right leg just before he spun and threw to first. There were others around you could beat with mental speed.”

  By “mental speed” Cobb meant that he obtained a full picture of the pitcher who stood there deciding which way to go—whether to pitch or try for a pickoff. He took extremely long leads, often forcing as many as fifteen throw-overs as he dove back headfirst. “In the rain,” he said, “I looked like a mud pie.” But he wore out the pitchers. Through all of this he was memorizing the action of moundsmen’s knees, hips, and, in particular, feet and elbows. Cobb told me, “Cy Young [whose 511 total victories of 1890–1911 remain the record as of today] had me stopped for a while. Then I saw something. Other pitchers would throw a decoy ball over to first only fairly hard, then turn as if to pitch and shoot another one to first at full speed. Young’s speed never varied, except when he stood with elbows slightly away from his chest. That meant a hard pickoff coming. With his elbows pulled in, it was damn sure he was going to the hitter. Well, you can imagine what that was worth.”

  Leaving the park one day after double-stealing, he was asked by Young, “What am I doing, bo?” Replied Cobb, “Not a thing—you’re the toughest of them all to read.” Young walked away, shaking his head.

  Detroit started 1907 unimpressively, as did their right fielder. Not until the arrival of June and warm weather—Cobb thrived on the heat he’d grown up with in balmy Georgia—did he get going. Then his batwork climbed from .250 to above .350. He was fisting off-plate pitches for singles and doubles and running recklessly. Against Chicago, with Cobb on second base, on a ball hit deep into the hole at shortstop, Cobb ignored an urgent stop sign from third-base coach Jennings. Rounding third he sideswiped Jennings, sent him sprawling, and continued toward the plate. As Cobb analyzed it in a split second, the shortstop had to knock down a spinning ball, regain his balance, turn toward the plate, and plant himself for a longish throw home. Cobb beat the throw by inches. Umpire Frank “Silk” O’Loughlin hesitated, then yelled, “Yerrrrr—safe!”
And muttered, “Damned if I see how.”

  Unlikely plays of this type were constructed in part by Cobb spotting small advantages as he ran, and by forcing fielders, caught by surprise, to throw before they were ready or could get ready. Even experienced men would commit fielding errors when jolted by a totally unexpected tactic. Success depended upon two factors: gall and foot speed.

  Fastballing George Mullin was on the mound for Detroit when Cobb, whom Mullin disliked, won a game for him. It began with a single that Cobb stretched into a double. In moving to second, Cobb flashed his spikes at Cleveland’s Rabbit Nill, and the unnerved shortstop, ducking away, failed to make the tag. Moments later Cobb riskily moved to third, beating catcher Nig Clarke’s hurried, off-line throw. Then, after another Naps’ misplay on a pickoff attempt, he came home to score.

  A proposition, not well recognized until then, was stated by Cobb: a defensive play was at least five times as difficult to make as an offensive play. The potential was there for an unassisted fielder’s error, a bad throw, a misplay from a bad hop of the ball, the shielding of the ball by the runner, and a mixup of responsibility between two infielders or two outfielders. On offense you had fewer ways to fail after putting the ball in play. Therefore: attack, with the confidence that the odds are with you. Attack, attack—always attack. Once you put the ball in play, the defense has to retire you. Make them throw it. Let them beat themselves with a mistake.

  As the schedule moved into June, the surprising Tigers were in a close race with Chicago and Cleveland for the league lead, and without question the individual whom Detroit’s management had repeatedly tried to get rid of was the player making it happen. Sportswriters spoke of his “theory of suggestibility,” and even his apparent use of ventriloquism, as in the following: One World Series day in October, as Cobb remembered it, he romped down the line to second base against the Chicago Cubs and seemed a probable out. Second baseman Johnny Evers took a throw-in from shallow center field with his back to the bag and with shortstop Joe Tinker out of his line of vision. Evers heard the cry, “Tag him!”

  Hearing that, Evers swept his glove around—and touched only thin air. Evers’s first thought, as Cobb had expected, was—why did Tinker tell me to do that? His mind was on Tinker’s seeming call, not on the runner.

  It required a second or more for Evers to realize he had been tricked, that it was Cobb’s voice he had heard. It took a bit longer for him to recover from his lunge, wheel into a throwing stance, and fire to third base. Evers was slightly late. Not having paused, and with his broad back blocking Evers’s full view of third base, Cobb did a hook-slide and was safe by inches.

  Another element entered here, showing how Cobb’s mind worked. Crab Evers and Tinker, in company with first baseman Frank Chance, were a heralded (and overrated) double-play combination. But Evers and Tinker did not like each other. Most of the time they did not speak. Aware of this, Cobb, as he remembered it, figured that in the instant before Evers realized that he had been duped by Cobb, he would be all the more upset at Tinker and liable to err on the next play.

  Back to the regular season. To prevent or reduce Cobb’s multiple base thefts, league catchers began to use the trick of placing their heavy face masks—“birdcages”—squarely on the third-base line when Cobb was headed home. That gave him two choices. He could slide into and through the masks, at the risk of tearing a foot or ankle tendon, or come in over the top. Using the first route would be an act of surrender, so Cobb came in high and hard. In late June, against Cleveland’s Harry Bemis, who was an early-day Johnny Bench at blocking home plate, Cobb went for the score with spikes out in front like lances. He knocked Bemis back several feet. The ball rolled free. Cobb was still on the ground when an infuriated Bemis, retrieving the ball, began beating him over the head with it. Dazed and bloodied by repeated blows, Cobb tried to crawl away. Not one Detroit player came to his rescue. Jennings ran from his coach’s box, shoved Bemis back, and dragged his man away. Detroit fans threw odds and ends at Bemis, who was ejected by the umpire.

  A trainer bandaged Cobb’s head. He went on that day to score four runs in one game for the first time in his big-league career. Hurt or not, he never wavered from his doctrine: attack.

  In July he was better yet. Against Rube Waddell of Philadelphia he stole home, another career first, had a three-steal game versus Washington, and in the outfield was outstanding in doubling runners off base when they tested his arm. In New York, Clark Griffith, who would always deeply regret his failure to trade for Cobb that spring, said, “He does things I’ve never seen. And he doesn’t drink at all, from what I hear.”

  Whiskey and brandy did not attract him, and would not do so until World War I, when he would develop a taste for hard liquor. He did not chew tobacco or smoke cigars. Baseball men were impressed by his progress at so early an age. He was so damned young to be doing all this. “He could pose for Castoria ads for kids,” someone said.

  THE TIGER management and players fighting for an unexpected league championship were an odd mixture. One Detroit front-office figure, Jimmy Burns, was a wrestler, cockfighter, and saloonkeeper on the side. Secretary–general manager Navin originally had bought into the franchise with five thousand dollars won in an all-night poker game. He was a heavy horse-track gambler. Navin was called “The Chinaman” for his slitted eyes. Number-one boss Yawkey, worth millions in Midwest timber harvesting, feared pickpockets and mugs and went around with Tommy Ryan, light heavyweight champion of the world, as his bodyguard. Straw-haired second baseman Herman “Germany” Schaefer toured the Lyceum vaudeville circuit in the off-season with a soft-shoe and poetry-reciting act.

  One day Schaefer was sent in as a pinch hitter. His recent season’s averages had been a paltry .238 and .258. The pudgy Herman faced Doc White of Chicago, one of the best of spitballers, but he doffed his cap and bellowed to the crowd, “Ladies and gents, permit me to present to you Herman Schaefer, the world’s premier batsman, who will now give a demonstration of his marvelous hitting power. I thank you.”

  The crowd booed. Schaefer then smashed the longest home run seen in Chicago for years. He slid into first base, hollering, “At the quarter, Schaefer leads by a head!” He slid into second with, “Schaefer leads by a length!” At third it was, “Schaefer leads by a mile!” and at home plate he slid in with, “That concludes the demonstration by the great Schaefer and I thank you one and all!”

  The Punchinello of the ballpark once amazed the crowd by stealing second base and then crazily reversing his route, “stealing” his way back to first—just to see if it could be done. On some days, he could upstage even Cobb.

  The same was true of Hugh Ambrose Jennings, the thirty-six-year-old dramatist hired to revitalize the club. Jennings’s four-part act was to tear up grass on the sideline, let go his “Eeee—yahhhh!” yell, and blow a shrill policeman’s whistle. He also did an Indian war dance. Suspended for ten days by American League president Ban Johnson for “objectionable” noisemaking, Jennings moved into the stands, where he clanged a cowbell. Detroit fans loved Jennings—with all the nonsense going on, the Tigers were winning for a change, were they not?

  You could not love Cobb, only watch him with awe. He brought about “a miracle a day,” according to Jennings, and was “absolutely fearless—why, he’s running on legs so gashed and unhealed that he loses a cup of blood in nine innings of sliding.” Molded sliding pads were not yet invented. Cobb’s pads were of a cheap fabric that bunched around his hips and limited his maneuverability so much that at last he discarded them and ran “naked.” On bare flesh, he went on stealing with a high percentage of success.

  Amidst pennant fever, there appeared in Washington in his big-league debut a gawky, six-foot, two-inch right-hander who had started in southern California as a catcher and been discovered in the Idaho bushes by a traveling cigar salesman. The cigar drummer had passed the word that the hayseed, now a pitcher, had thrown 72 innings without allowing a run. Walter Perry Johnson was extremel
y long-armed, and with his slingshot delivery had shocking speed, along with good control. At nineteen he broke in against the Tigers on an August day.

  Routinely Cobb inspected all new players, even rookies, before facing them. After watching Johnson warm up, he told Jennings, “Have everybody stand deep in the box today. This farmer throws out of his hip pocket so fast that you can’t follow it.”

  As for Cobb, he bunted, and the rookie misfielded the bunts. Cobb also did the usual on the base paths, and Detroit beat Johnson, 3–2. That night, Cobb said, he urged Navin as follows: “Get this kid even if it costs you twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s the best arm I’ve ever seen. He’s so fast it scared me. When he learns a curve, nobody can stop him.”

  Big Train Johnson never did find an outstanding curve, yet the quiet man became a pistonlike career winner of 416 games, threw 110 shutouts, and once rang up 16 consecutive decisions. “And all he did for the next twenty years was beat Detroit,” said Cobb, sarcastically, long afterward. “Jackass Navin did nothing to sign him when Johnson was still available.”

  The Tigers continued to hover in first place or close to it until September, when Cobb was laid up. At Cleveland he consulted a doctor for his “sliders”—raw sores spread from ankles to thighs—and was advised to use salve and stay off his feet in bed. Otherwise infection was likely. Cobb on that same day went after a fly ball hit into a roped-back crowd bordering right field. Diving for it, he made the catch, but landed on a broken bottle. His right, throwing hand was gashed from thumb to palm. Except perhaps for players who have stayed in the game despite broken bones, nothing much in the records beats what then transpired. With a bandaged hand he remained in the lineup and made several mostly one-handed base hits.

  Making two to four base-stealing attempts per day, he gave his wounds no time to heal. In St. Louis the press spoke of him as “a model of bravery,” although he was as much disliked and feared in Browns country as in any locality. A bottle thrown by a fan and thought to be aimed at Cobb hit umpire Billy Evans in the head.