by Al Stump
While Casey was a struggling minor-leaguer in Alabama, this later inventor of such managerial maxims as “he executed splendid,” “if a fella won’t change his nighttime habits, disappear him,” and “you could look it up,” noticed a manhole cover in the outfield. For the hell of it, Casey climbed in the hole. When a fly ball was hit his way, he wasn’t to be seen. “At the last second,” chuckled Cobb, “up popped the lid and Mr. Stengel shot from nowhere to catch the ball.”
“Bare-handed,” interrupted Casey.
THERE HAD not been too much that was humorous about the three-year period of Cobb’s career that followed the 1909 World Series defeat. One insurgent act followed another. He made it easy, almost routine, for the press outside of Detroit to demonize him, as when reporting on the day when several cops were needed to wrestle him down after Cobb charged into the bleachers to assault an abusive fan. In a Detroit hotel dining room he slapped the face of one more black, a waiter who served him the wrong order. Meanwhile the Tigers of three straight World Series appearances fell to third place and second, and then to sixth, sixth, fourth, second, third, fourth and seventh—only two runner-up finishes in almost a decade.
Renewed discord among the Tigers was blamed for their falling off in 1910. In Cobb’s earlier Detroit experience the bad feelings had been over attempts to maneuver him off the team. Now it was the opposite: how to live with his favored status. Matty McIntyre, Sam Crawford, Davy Jones, and other regulars criticized Hughie Jennings for not lowering the boom on “his pet,” who reported for spring-training camp on whatever date he wished, insisted on a set of batter-to-base-runner signs dictated and flashed by Cobb from the plate, and who required, and received, the only private hotel quarters provided team members when on the road.
When his three-year contract at nine thousand dollars per season was about to expire in 1912 he predicted, “They’ll be paying me twenty thousand dollars before long or I’ll be out of here … maybe to New York.” As he forecast, within two years Cobb was drawing twenty thousand dollars, when no one else on the club, not even Wahoo Crawford, with a twelve-year .313 average as of 1914, was paid anywhere near that. Navin, hardest of bargainers, weakened on their money differences when he saw the Peach step up with the bases loaded and Detroit trailing by a run or two and deliver one of his pulled-down-the-line singles or fence-reaching doubles. Cobb ran the bases with a high, jaunty step—“Look at me, folks, and see the best.”
One day after hitting a stand-up double, Cobb patted second baseman Eddie Collins of the Athletics sympathetically on the back. Collins screamed at him. One more opponent had been jarred out of his composure.
Sportswriters sought to interpret his behavior. As the New York Daily News’s Paul Gallico read him, “He is an endless paradox, the most outrageous yet the most inspiring of athletes. No one so aggressive and infuriating has come along. Cobb seems to understand that while Americans profess to be peace-loving people, we actually love violence. With his tendency to undress fielders and catchers with his slashing spikes, there’s always the chance that we’ll be witness to an accident. On top of that comes his immense conceit.”
The brilliant syndicated columnist Ring Lardner was notoriously cynical about baseball’s acclaimed importance to America’s masses, even its honesty. During the 1919 World Series, which turned out to be fixed by gamblers and eight Chicago White Sox players, Lardner would sit at his typewriter well before the fix was uncovered, whistling to the “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” tune, “I’m forever blowing ball-games.” Yet with Cobb he was as starstruck as a kid in the bleachers. ‘It defies human capability for anyone to average almost .400 in the past five seasons,” submitted Lardner in 1914. “Is he bribing the pitchers?” The multifaceted Cobb couldn’t be diagnosed: “He’s simply from a higher league than any we know.”
John “Little Napoleon” McGraw (also “Muggsy”), icon of the New York Giants and manager of five National League champions by 1917, rarely was called foolish, but he drew laughs for claiming that “Christy Mathewson is more valuable than Cobb. Christy wins twenty-five to thirty games for us every year; his pitching puts whole teams in slumps.” Mathewson, of course, was in action for about 300 innings per season, Cobb for 1,300 or so, while driving in and scoring 200-odd runs in his top seasons. Big Six Mathewson did not steal bases or hit enough to notice.
When he was playing well, Cobb kept his temper under control. When out of his groove, not hitting in high figures, he was all but impossible to team with. “If I went three for four and T.C. was blanked,” Sam Crawford once recalled, “he’d turn red and sometimes walk right out of the park with the game still on—same as he did when he left the Tigers to get married.” Outfielder Kangaroo Jones verified that.
Jones’s troubles with Cobb heated up again during a Chicago White Sox game when Cobb’s attention was drawn to an open iron gate in the left-field corner. Chicago had built a new ballpark, and the gate was not fully installed. “Watch me put one through it,” said Cobb on the bench. Jones hooted. The opening was about 5 feet wide and 340 feet away.
After a swinging strike thrown by Big Ed Walsh, Cobb placed a fastball over the left fielder’s head and through the gate on the bounce for a home run. His astonishingly precise drive won the game for the Tigers, 6–5.
Jones thought that a lot of luck had been involved. He said so, and hard words followed. Back in Detroit, against the Red Sox, Jones was on first base, watching for T.C. to give him the hit-run sign. Jones claimed the signal never was given. With one strike on him, Cobb backed out of the box to yell at Jones, “Don’t you know the go sign when you see it?”
Jones took the open insult silently. According to him, Boston’s first baseman, Jake Stahl, told Jones, “Anybody who’d holler down here like that is a rotten skunk.”
On the next pitch, for strike two, Cobb threw his bat away to shout, “By god, I won’t team with anyone who misses the sign twice!” He stomped over to the bench, pulled on a sweater, and refused to continue. Jennings ordered him to finish his hitting turn, Cobb refused, and a substitute hitter was inserted. Shortly afterward Cobb left the park, to the jeers and protests of the crowd.
It was obvious to the Tigers that he had used Jones as a scapegoat. Left-handed Ray Collins, the pitcher at work when Cobb left the scene, always had been a tough fellow for him to hit, so with two strikes on him, Cobb had invented an excuse. In Frank Navin’s office a hot exchange ended with Navin’s threat to suspend him, but Navin eventually backed off. (Another occasional Cobbian habit, when the hit-and-run or run-and-hit was on, was not to swing at a delivery in the strike zone that looked too difficult to handle, even though this could leave base runners committed and stranded. Almost to a man the Tigers were certain that he was principally out to advance his chance for another league batting title.)
Jones approached Cobb in the clubhouse, declaring, “I won’t be your fall guy.” Cobb heatedly replied, “Go to hell. I’m not playing until you’re out of the lineup.” He was serious. Either Jones, a good leadoff man, got the ax, or Cobb was leaving.
Jennings would not hear of trading Kangaroo Jones. Cobb sat in the Bennett Park stands during the following game with Boston in civilian dress. He was “sulking,” wrote Ed Spayer in the Detroit News. On the next day he entered the clubhouse just before game time and reached for his flannel uniform. Trainer Harry Tuthill was rubbing down a player.
“Don’t bother,” said Tuthill. “Jennings said to tell you that you’re not in there today. You’re benched.”
“Does Navin know about this?” asked Cobb.
Tuthill shrugged. “Probably does.”
Confronted in his box seat by a seething Cobb, Navin supported Jennings, but, wishing to avoid a major mistake, offered a compromise. Kangaroo Jones would be moved from the number-one or number-two spot in the batting order down to number six. That way Jones would not usually be on base when the Peach came to bat. The arrangement upset Jennings’s strategy, but what else was there to do? Cobb had
to be appeased. Jones was moved down. Returning to the lineup against New York, Cobb went on singling, doubling, and stealing when it counted most.
Davy Jones, in 1950, expressed to me what a relief it had been to get out of baseball and into business (he eventually built a chain of profitable drugstores). “Cobb was born without a sense of humor,” said Jones. “He was strictly for himself. He spoiled the game for me.”
COBB SUSPECTED that Detroit would not win the pennant again, and that the chances that he would take the field in a World Series again anytime soon were poor. “It wasn’t hard for me to guess,” he said. “Navin and his scouts couldn’t make a good trade if it bit them.” His own lack of teamsmanship must be counted in. An example of that came during another losing contest at Philadelphia. Fans were walking out after the Athletics ran up a 7–0 lead in the ninth inning. In such almost-hopeless situations the trailing team takes no chances: the percentage move is to play it safe and pray for a miracle. At the game’s near ending it is folly to go for a high-risk, no-gain stolen base.
A roar burst from the crowd. Cobb struck a high, slow bounder into the hole between second base and shortstop, which shortstop Jack Barry juggled, then recovered, as the Detroit News reported. Cobb kept going, and slid into second base before Barry’s throw. Detroit’s next batter caromed one off pitcher Jack Coombs’s glove that rebounded to Eddie Collins at second. Collins snapped a throw to first to retire the runner, thinking that if Cobb kept going, he would be retired 3–5—first to third. But even before Collins completed his arm action, T.C. was partway to third. Despite the lopsided score, he darted on for the plate, reaching it simultaneously with first baseman Harry Davis’s relay—a throw Davis had not expected to make. Cobb was safe in a tangle of bodies. The game ended minutes later with the score 7–1. He had improved his own record with a run scored, but at the risk of being thrown out when his team was behind.
A vaudeville-like name was given Detroit in the years when the club ran out of the money—“Cobb and others.” “Tigers” was spelled “Tygers” by some writers. Cobb himself seldom praised his teammates. His snubbing of Sam Crawford, who retired with bitter feelings in 1917, of Jones, of Matty McIntyre, was a way of getting even for the past. Steady-hitting Bobby Veach came to Detroit in 1912 and lasted in the outfield until 1923. Deferential to Cobb, the genial Kentuckian came around in time to saying, “If T.C. didn’t like you he could run you off the club. He had that kind of drag with the front office from about 1914 on. He was a sorehead. I hit .355 one year to his .384 and I swear he was jealous of me. What an odd bird.” Veach could not forget that in 1914, with postseason exhibition games left on the schedule, their leader dropped out to attend the World Series between the Boston Braves and the Athletics. He was paid a high fee to write a commentary, “Cobb Says.” “You can guess what that did for our morale,” said Veach.
McIntyre left the Motor City earlier, in 1911, glad to be gone to the Chicago Americans. He, too, could not fathom a Cobb who would prowl the clubhouse before games, darkly muttering to himself, gritting his teeth with game time two hours away. Players who saw a decade or more of him admitted that the teamwide cruel hazing he received when he was a rookie could explain some of his behavior, but not all. The aftershock should have worn off. It had not. Others who knew the facts about his father’s death felt that this tragedy relentlessly preyed on his mind. He was still getting even for that loss, in some mentally contorted way. Or so they guessed.
Sam Crawford had said it before and said it again. He felt rather sorry for the one who walked mostly alone, not sharing in team camaraderie. Crawford noted, “That’s no way for anyone to live. But I know one thing—he was never sorry for what he did.” For as long as he lived Cobb retained a copy of a letter he sent to J. G. Taylor Spink of the Sporting News, reading:
Dear Taylor:
Crawford never helped in the outfield by calling to me ‘plenty of room’ or ‘you take it’ on a chance. Not only that, when I was on base and tried to steal second to get into scoring position, with Crawford at bat, he would deliberately foul balls off so I’d have to go back to base, so that the first baseman would have to hold me on … giving Crawford a bigger hole to hit through. I ran hundreds of miles having to return to first.
Crawford, upon learning of the letter in 1946, shook his head. “Cobb dreamed that up,” he told several reporters. “He could come in on a ball with the best. He wasn’t so good going back for a big lofter in the wind. So he blamed me. As to my fouling them off, it was always my way to pick at pitches until I got one to my strength. Cobb was just the same way.”
Far worse than that charge was Cobb’s postmortem to Jack Sher, writing for Reader’s Digest. To Sher he claimed that some teammates actually tipped off opposing pitchers to his batting weak spots. “They were out to get me so much they’d risk losing ball games to see me strike out,” he swore. “I never knew of another case where men would do anything so scurvy as that.”
In making this charge Cobb neglected to mention what was known as the “pitchers’ underground.” Cobb, whatever he believed, was not alone in becoming the object of shared intelligence. He was only one of a number of victims of a clandestine union. Moundsmen would pass on information gained from hard experience to others of their kind who were in the employment of opposing teams. If a Red Soxer could be put out with a sinker, or a St. Louis Brownie was susceptible to a change-of-pace, or a new slugger with a weakness entered a league, the “book” would be quietly exchanged by pitchers. Club owners knew it went on but could not stop such fraternizing. The exception was said to be that no tipster ever revealed information on hitters of his own team.
Providing aid to an opponent, in whatever form, bordered on game fixing, which would condemn baseball in the public eye as dishonest. Cobb’s supposed detection of plots against him came as early as his third year in the majors. Here and there he saw hands raised to hurt him, he claimed. He named names, “There was Baldy Louden [an infielder]. He and McIntyre failed time and again to score from second on a play where I followed them with a single. Plays were designed to score them, but they didn’t make a good enough start off the bat with the pitch. They’d pull up at third, giving the fielder a chance to throw me out going to second. I’d look foolish. They were out to keep me from setting records. When I jumped Louden on it before the whole club he alibied that his legs hurt. When my own legs carried dozens of stitches.”
If such double crosses did exist, they failed to hurt his cumulative numbers. From 1910 through 1913 he was all but unstoppable. While the Tigers were sliding to third place in 1911 and then to a 69-wins, 84-losses sixth-place mark in 1912, Cobb himself was slamming all manner of pitching, from screwball to knuckler to spitter, from fastball to greaseball. The Peach’s averages at ages twenty-four to twenty-seven were so formidable that in the 1980s his statistics were retroactively examined by researchers, to make sure that record-keepers hadn’t erred.
Connie Mack, whose Athletics won three pennants in 1910–13, with but one A’s hitter, Eddie Collins, coming in above .365, was supposed to have blurted, “If we had Ty Cobb there’d be no point in holding a season.”
Ungovernable as he regularly was, often using the black ashwood bat he had kept beside him during his 1908 wedding, Cobb hit .385, .420, .410, and .390 in four successive seasons. Along with that came 261 stolen bases. No one since then has matched that performance. It included 818 hits, 829 runs scored or driven in, 233 extra-base hits, and 1,202 total bases, and brought him his fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh consecutive AL batting titles. In his 1911 rush Cobb swept every offensive category except home runs, set a record of 248 base hits that would top all major-league hitting for twenty-two years to come. “He hit me hard with runners on or not, in daylight or twilight,” said Washington’s Walter Johnson, spectacular winner of 118 games during that same 1910–13 stretch. “He would get two or three hits and figure it should have been better. Nobody would wait for the right pitch better than Ty. He just wo
re you out. The balls we used would get black in the late innings and he’d still hit.”
Only one other hitter in history has equalled Cobb’s back-to-back .400-plus seasons of 1911–12. Rogers Hornsby, greatest right-handed batsman of all time, hit .424 in 1924 and .403 in 1925. From 1901 onward, to average .400 even once has eluded all but eight hitters—George Sisler, twice; Nap Lajoie; Shoeless Joe Jackson; Harry Heilmann; Bill Terry; and Ted Williams, along with Cobb and Hornsby. No others—not Wagner, Tris Speaker, Al Simmons, Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Paul Waner, Lefty O’Doul, Joe DiMaggio, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron—ever reached that exclusive circle. No one since Williams in 1941, more than fifty years ago, has registered that high. Batters have come close, but failed. When Cobb hit .401 in 1922, a full decade after his last previous such performance, he would stand, along with Hornsby, as one of the only players to do it three times.
“Be sure and put in there,” T.C. instructed me when we collaborated on the chronicle of his life and times, “that from 1910 through 1914 I outhit both the American and National leagues easily. The Nationals had nobody close to me … their best with the bat were at .331, .334, .372, .350, and .329.” His memory on this was faultless, his arithmetic exact. At the same time, the Georgian wished to express his contempt for “two-bit, one-gear” hitters of the post–World War II era, who while swinging for the fences—“moneyland”—led entire leagues with “puny” marks of .320, .327, .328, .336, .338, .325, and once even .309. (He did not live to see Carl Yastrzemski win a batting championship in 1968 with .301.)
His .420 and .410 marks of 1911 and 1912 came during seasons in which Cobb spent some days in bed with another dose of bronchial infection, and while hurting from a banged-up knee acquired in chasing an automobile thief. Upon leaving a Cadillac Square restaurant in Detroit, he found a man cranking his car and taking off. Roars from the owner did not stop the thief, and Cobb sprinted after him. Sporting Life marveled in its account of how the driver had reached a speed of almost twenty miles an hour when the pursuer caught up, leaped onto the tonneau, grabbed the driver’s neck, and knocked him aside. Driverless, the auto swerved around the street, almost hitting a trolley car with people boarding it, in a replay of Keystone Cops comedies then playing in theaters. Cobb gained control of the car and stopped it in time not to kill anyone. The jailed thief, identified as John Miles, nineteen, exclaimed, “If I’d known it was him, I’d never have lifted it!” Cobb came out of it with cuts and a knee bruise, but soon recovered.