by Al Stump
Word passed around the league that some managers were levying fifty-dollar fines on any battery allowing Cobb to steal home on them. In St. Louis he doubled, and while prancing and feinting at second base worked on pitcher Grover Cleveland Lowdermilk. “You couldn’t get me out in a month!” he taunted. The next batter, Sam Crawford, tapped back to the mound. Lowdermilk was upset enough to fumble the chance and, seeing Cobb streaking to third, stumbled and in his haste to throw did a forward flip. He sprawled on the ground, cursing himself, as Cobb passed third and sped home for another uncanny score.
On the bases he continued to pay for his daring in bruises and blood. In press boxes the rumor circulated that anyone who disabled Cobb would get bonus money. Evidence of this accumulated. Cleveland’s first-basing Wheeler “Doc” Johnston caught up with him in a rundown and instead of making a clean tag, slammed a knee into Cobb’s lumbar region. It caused spasms. Cobb was out for four games. Heavily taped, he said, “I didn’t see anyone coming off our bench to fight for me when they broke my ribs.” That had happened at Boston when Rube Foster’s intentional duster cracked two ribs, sidelining him for nearly three weeks.
Buck Weaver of the White Sox, six years away from involvement in the “Black Sox” who fixed the 1919 World Series for gamblers’ money, stuck a spike into Cobb’s knee; not properly cleaned, the wound became infected. Once more he was on the bench. When a sufficient scab formed, he tried his luck playing second base. All out of position, making errors, he returned to a doctor’s care.
When not in the lineup, Cobb in 1914–15 saw himself as tenth man on the ball club. He sat off by himself on a reserved chair, as sensitive to the game’s pulse as a hawk to shifting wing. He watched for tendencies—did an opponent play the center fielder shallow so as to quickly trap hits down the middle, leaving an area open to line drives? Did the catcher show any telltales in signing for pitches? Did a pitcher pound his glove or hitch up his pants before loosing a fastball? No one minded his silent search for clues, but the Tigers resented his habit of piping to one of them when batting, “Go getcha self a swing!” He was as critical as he was analytical.
Returning to duty, but still notably short of having good legs under him, Tyrus within days touched off another riot. Against the Athletics he seemingly spiked catcher Jack Lapp with intent on a play at the plate. As Lapp lay on the ground, groaning, Cobb spat upon him. Something like twenty fans climbed over railings to try to lay hands on the villain, and cops beat them back. Outside Shibe Park afterward, several dozen Philadelphians gathered to rush the departing Cobb with fists and sticks. Luckily a trolley car came along and he jumped aboard. Down the track rattled the trolley with a small mob in pursuit. Cobb punched and kicked off all he could, but a few climbed onto the car’s roof to tear loose the electrical rod. While the conductor struggled to replace the rod, Cobb was glad he’d changed into civilian clothes at Shibe. Ducking away into a sidewalk crowd, he disappeared. “The only cure for Philadelphia is to blow it up,” he snarled on a train leaving town.
IN AUGUSTA the situation at home was troubled. Charlotte “Charlie” Cobb, twenty-three, was often ill. Four times during Cobb’s annual duels with Joe Jackson and Tris Speaker in defense of his batting championship, she became sick enough to require his breaking off and hurrying home. Three of their five children were born between 1910 and 1916; twice their mother suffered postpartum complications. Cobb always dropped what he was doing and responded to the call, but not always with good grace. “He didn’t come home for long—he acted like it was an imposition,” said Shirley Cobb Beckwith, his daughter, in a conversation with this author in 1960.
At such times Baseball Magazine’s F. C. Lane was one of the very few journalists allowed to visit the spacious Augusta home into which the Cobbs had moved in November of 1913. When missing times at bat to stay at his wife’s bedside, Lane’s host appeared to be nervous and distracted. Lane found Mrs. Cobb, while sickly, to be “a woman of uncommon judgment and good sense.” Their three young children, Ty junior, Shirley, and Herschel, were neatly dressed, respectful.
“It is well that Mrs. Cobb is of this character,” wrote Lane, “what with Ty’s quick, nervous disposition and scrappy, hotheaded temperament.” The reporter added that while Cobb consulted medical specialists about his wife’s health, he also spent much time majestically taking bows on Augusta streets, “mitting” admirers. On a side trip to Florida he even took aeroplane flying lessons. Manager Hughie Jennings, hearing of the flying, was said to have hit several roofs.
One more tidbit from Lane concerned five-year-old Ty Junior’s backing off from a schoolyard fight with an older kid. His father’s instructions were: “This boy insulted you and if you don’t go out and lick him, then I will lick you.” Lane wrote, “Little Ty lived up to the reputation of his dad in a strenuous manner and since then there has been no doubt whatever of his wish to insist upon his rights.”
At home at 2425 William Street, in what a curious Lane called an antebellum southern semimansion with a broad veranda encircling it and shrouded by trees, Cobb spoke of why he was constantly on the warpath up north: “I get into a lot of trouble and have made many enemies. But my philosophy is brief. I think life is too short to be diplomatic. A man’s friends shouldn’t mind what he does or says—and those who are not his friends, well, the hell with them. They don’t count.”
That was enough for Lane—the man intended to go on playing outside the rules, challenging baseball to stop him.
Upon his return from one of these forced sojourns in Georgia, you could bet on it that Cobb would rebound in a batting streak. In July of 1913, to cite one instance, he resumed play after a week’s absence to find that Shoeless Joe Jackson was slugging at the .412 mark. He trailed Jackson by 11 points. In Cleveland, where Cobb-bashing was akin to a civic duty after a series of brawls with fans and hotel personnel and two near escapes from criminal prosecution, he had one of his all-time best offensive days with two triples and a double—in all, six hits in seven plate appearances. “Six-hitters” were so rare, just as they are nowadays, that Bill Yawkey came down from his owner’s box to extend compliments. Cobb shook his hand, but, said witnesses, not warmly. “Money, not compliments, talked with Ty,” said author Fred Lieb. “Hey! Hey! The Peach gets ten hits in nine tries!” cried newsboys selling papers outside Dolph’s Saloon in central Detroit. People would believe anything about him by now.
Final figures for that 1913 season were .390 for Cobb, .373 for Jackson, who faded before the champion’s late comeback, and .363 for Tris Speaker of Boston. In the National League, Jake Daubert’s .350 for Brooklyn led. Whatever the complaints, for the seventh consecutive campaign the Georgian had stood foremost.
Some statisticians sought to debunk the result. Because of lost time he had played in only 122 games to Jackson’s 148 and Speaker’s 141. Cobb retorted that total games and multiplicity of at-bats had nothing to do with it, that he had averaged .390 with a sixth-place team, and that pitching staffs were loaded with 20-game-and-up winners—six of them leaguewide—along with numerous moundsmen with low earned-run averages. Despite injuries he had hit the toughest of them well. As to slumping to 52 base steals in 1913, well below the 75 posted by Clyde “Deerfoot” Milan in Washington, he dismissed that as due to the knee infection, jammed back, turned ankle, and trips back to Augusta. Then, too, he was developing property he owned in Georgia; that had been distracting.
He had become a cigarette addict, complained Cobb, which was bad for his wind. By 1914 the tobacco industry was selling an estimated 2 million pounds of its products in the U.S. In exchange for tobacco stock assigned to Cobb he posed for cigarette testimonials—“and now it’s so that I’m smoking a warehouseful a month.”
IN 1914, during another late onrush to win an eighth straight batting crown, Cobb gave the national public renewed reason to question his sanity. In still another moment of madness he turned murderous. In this outbreak he twice landed in a Detroit jail and then in criminal court ove
r the ridiculous matter of a twenty-cent piece of fish—perch, as it happened.
His rampage began on a June evening after he had invited Clark Griffith to dinner at his rented Woodland Avenue home. Griffith, manager of the Washington Senators, abetted by Senator Hoke Smith, who by now was an advisor to Cobb, continued to make overtures to Navin to acquire the Tigers’ main man by cash or barter. Griffith was coming to dinner to talk it over. Before the meal could be served, a shocked Griffith witnessed his host under arrest and facing a jail term on an evening that confirmed the growing belief in sport circles that he was wrongheaded—twisted by some sort of unpredictable dementia.
Before dinner, Charlie Cobb, having joined her husband in Detroit, complained that a butcher down the street had acted insultingly to her when she returned some fish she felt was spoiled, her cook concurring. Cobb, excusing himself to Griffith, phoned the butcher and called him a series of names. Then he pocketed a revolver he always kept handy and took off for Carpenter’s Meat Market. An account of what happened later was summarized in Doc Greene’s “Press Box” column in the Detroit News:
“The Georgia Peach entered a meat market at 1526 Hamilton Street operated by one William Carpenter. He waved a loaded .32 revolver and declared ‘somebody has insulted my wife!’ The hassle turned out to be over a purchase of 20 cents worth of perch.
“A meat worker, Howard Harding, who was Carpenter’s wife’s brother, tried to protect the proprietor and finally the pair went outside. Cobb handed his revolver to one bystander, his hat to another, and proceeded to brutally beat up the youngster.”
Doc Green’s column didn’t detail the whole wretched affair. After a police paddy wagon arrived to handcuff and remove a screaming Cobb to jail, court testimony would establish that he had forced the butcher to phone Mrs. Cobb and apologize and meanwhile smashed glassed-in meat displays and wrecked some furniture. Harding, who was black, had brandished a meat cleaver in defense of the shop. Furthermore, before Cobb and Harding moved outside to the street, Cobb had fought indoors with Harding, hitting him over the head at least three times with the gun’s butt. Harding was bleeding even before they went outside.
He hadn’t fired a shot—which was all that saved the Georgian from a prison sentence. On a possible assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge, he spent the night in a cell. The cell was “flea-ridden,” he complained, unfit for a dog.
Griffith, a deacon of the American League, left Detroit hastily. Assistant butcher Harding decided not to take legal action. He told Bethune Station police that he was amazed by the berserk attack, but since it was Ty Cobb he would settle for an apology to himself and to Carpenter, repair of shop damages, and payment of his doctor’s bill. Detroit team attorneys were alleged around town to have quieted the victim by paying him something like one thousand dollars, as they had done to resolve other eruptions by their client. It was a cheap settlement; Cobb’s 1909 Cleveland knifing of a detective had cost Detroit ten times that much.
Carpenter wasn’t placated, however. He resented the claim that his fish were “rotten” and didn’t let it pass. Less than a week later he filed a disturbing-the-peace charge, and again his assailant was jailed. It was said that policemen drew straws to determine which of them would have the “honor” of making the arrest after a game at Navin Field. No handcuffs were used in this instance. Cobb spent another night in a smelly hoosegow, appeared in magistrate’s court next day, and at the advice of his attorney, James O. Murfin, pleaded guilty. If he hadn’t done so, observed the Detroit press, he faced a probable jail term of six months for using a deadly weapon.
Cobb stood silent before the bench with his right hand bandaged. He did no talking other than to identify himself. “He regrets this incident to the bottom of his heart,” stated Murfin. “He regrets it exceedingly on account of management of the Detroit team and his teammates. He feels that as they are struggling he should be in the game … He believes that he made a mistake and has promised to control his temper in the future. He has had his lesson.”
Discussing Carpenter v. Cobb in his old age, Cobb remarked, “I had some good contacts at magistrate’s court.” He was fined a paltry fifty dollars, with the warning that if he caused more such trouble he would be heavily penalized. As the judge may or may not have known, this was his fifth known assault on a black person, three of them coming inside Detroit jurisdiction.
In the fish fight Cobb fractured the thumb of his throwing hand. For fifty-two days, through June, July, and until August 7, he was sidelined. Up until then the Tigers had a chance to take the pennant, or come close. Frank Navin was enraged; without his number-one man the club turned stale, lost seven straight at one stretch, and finished far out of first place. There would be no World Series money, no pay raises for 1915. Hard words were passed when pitcher Hooks Dauss and an aging Sam Crawford flatly let Cobb know they realized what he was doing after his thumb healed—that is, hitting to boost his own average, not for the team’s general welfare. When a sacrifice fly or bunt was needed, instead of providing it he would place-hit a ball just over the infield. Many of these “nibbly” punched hits were worth little in a free-scoring game, failing to produce runs. But without him the Tigers were sluggish, lacked belligerency, and were not a contender.
What would he do next? According to several players, Navin had come genuinely to wonder whether Cobb’s repeated bizarre rages meant that he was not mentally sound. What else could explain it? Cobb’s reply was the usual: “Trade me.”
It was maddening to be caught in a situation in which one man was so essential to finishing even in third or fourth place that he could not be dealt away. Hughie Jennings thought he was managing a winner—“then in one hour in a butcher shop Cobb ruined us.” It wasn’t funny, but a Detroit quip went, “Lucky it wasn’t a porterhouse steak—he’d have killed somebody.” The convicted Cobb’s rationalization of his broken thumb was, “Everybody gets hurt sometime. It’s up to the others to take up the slack. And nobody around here did that.”
His own performance stood up well. With a hand still tender, he was held to about a .340 average before getting hot in the final months of 1914. In August he trailed the persistent Joe Jackson of Cleveland by 18 to 21 points. With one of his most superlative stretch of runs yet he moved ahead of Shoeless Joe and Eddie Collins of Philadelphia. His concluding .368 mark was enough to capture one more championship trophy—easily. Collins finished at .344, and in a tie, Speaker and Jackson hit .338. Joseph Jefferson Jackson had complained in the past, and now the South Carolina country boy moaned to writer Harry Salsinger, “Ah wonder what it takes around here to win somethin’? Ah did .408 in 1911 and Cobb did .420. Ah did .395 the next year and he did .410. Now he’s did it again. Ahhh-hell!”
Intimations by American Leaguers that Cobb was a looming case for the psychopathic ward faded for the time being. No one yet had battered pitchers so hard over a sustained period, none had shown such base-path craftsmanship. Signs seen in him earlier that year by the Sporting News of a “decay from glory” went unmentioned—no doubt much to the regret of the trade sheet—at the October finish. “He’s weird, all right,” said Rebel Oakes, manager of the Federal League’s Pittsburgh club. “He’s a nutter, but, by god, there’s nobody nearly so competitive. When he’s at bat you can hear Cobb gritting his teeth.”
General opinion was that Cobb was headed for a fall. But George Tweedy Stallings, highly respected New York and Boston Braves manager, college-bred Georgian, and Cobb’s companion on game-hunting expeditions, was protective and optimistic; “Kings don’t take orders. If Ty wasn’t so fiery and out to beat you, he wouldn’t be half as great a player.”
Detroit’s front office, along with Mrs. Cobb, expected him to return to Augusta that fall, and was startled when he turned up in Shelby, Ohio, playing with a nondescript team of minor-leaguers. The reason: he was paid $150 per game. It was precisely like Cobb to go after every loose nickel, no matter where located.
The “straw hat affair” demonstrate
d just how much Silas Marner there was in him. A custom had developed in Detroit on Labor Day for the more rabid fans to scale their straw hats onto the field when the Tigers were going well. Cobb ordered the grounds crew to collect and store the skimmers for him. In his book The Detroit Tigers, author Joe Falls told of how Cobb shipped hundreds of hats home to his Georgia farm at season’s end, where they were worn on the heads of his field-hands and donkeys as protection from the sun. “Each day after the players left,” wrote Falls with a grin, “Ty also would pick up pieces of soap left in the showers. These, too, would go back to Augusta with him—soap for the hired hands.”
Concerning the tipping of waiters and cab drivers, a practice then catching on, he was just as thrifty. Upon one cabby’s asking for a tip, Cobb snapped, “Sure, don’t bet on the Tigers today.”
“Mister Ty”—the salutation he came to prefer—had as his long-term aim to become the highest-paid player in history—and to take off from there. For the 1915 season, despite his transgressions, he negotiated a salary raise from roughly fourteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars, plus certain bonuses. That made him number one in the game for pay, ahead of Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and other golden names, and he set out to buy land and expand his sideline interests. At the Pontchartrain Hotel bar he had come to know such auto men as John and Horace Dodge, Ransom E. Olds, J. W. Packard, and David Dunbar Buick. From 1905 to 1914 Cobb had lacked investment capital. Now he was better prepared when Charlie Hastings, manager of Hupmobile, proposed, “Everybody down south knows you. I can arrange for you to take over an agency for us in Atlanta or Augusta. You’ll have to put up fifty dollars for each car we deliver, which will be twenty-five hundred dollars initially. Then you’ll need another twenty-five hundred for stock in the company.”
At first Cobb thought it was too big a deal to handle, but finally he signed on with Hupmobile, and in his first two years sold some 125 “Hups” under an ad banner strung near Augusta’s Broad Street: “TY COBB DRIVES ONE, THE GEORGIA PEACH SAYS SO SHOULD YOU.” His profit averaged 30–35 percent, money that he plowed into additional cotton-market shares. It was a thrill for some pecan farmer to have Ty Cobb motor into his place, accept a cup of homemade corn liquor, and sell him a car. Sometimes he would make sales on the sidewalk in Macon, Decatur, Kenesaw, or Savannah, with his autograph as a nice bonus.