Cobb

by Al Stump

  Unable to relax when benched by his injuries, Cobb suggested that Hughie Jennings restrict himself to coaching only on the first-base line, while Cobb took over the more-important third-base pathway. Umpires hated him even more at close range. He invaded the batter’s box to kick dirt and dispute calls. He would go into an act, putting the ball through a semimicroscopic examination, slowly turning it, claiming that it had been doctored. Some said that Cobb carried a little glob of pine tar in the palm of his hand, which he would apply during the ball testing. When the pitcher was angry enough to lose control, Cobb would toss the ball on the grass nowhere near the batterymates, and say, “Well, pitch it—what the hell are you waiting for?”

  About home runs he was phobic. Except when the bases were loaded, homers carried much less value than the single base hit ringing clear, he claimed, followed by more singles and concomitant stealing. Yet one of his own hits he liked best was a homer struck in St. Louis, following a long triple in his previous time at bat. This one soared out of sight over the left-field bleachers—so far that writers judged it as even longer than earlier blasts by Shoeless Joe Jackson and Babe Ruth, which had carried an estimated five-hundred-odd feet. When he felt like it, this percentage player could hit for distance.

  After going 7 for 9 in a Cleveland doubleheader in August 1918 and behaving like a good guy for weeks, Cobb took on an unlikely opponent: the U.S. Customs station at the Canadian-American border. There he threw a tantrum so obnoxious that Customs considered arresting him. Jack Miner, a Canadian big-game guide, famous for his woodcraft and a close friend of Cobb, came across on a ferry to be the Peach’s guest at a ball game. Customs closely checked Miner’s luggage for illegal booze. Cobb, fuming over the delay, got into a squabble with ferryboat passengers, whom he felt crowded too closely around him. Most of them only wanted to shake his hand.

  He threw elbows and yelled, “Goddammit, nobody pushes me around!” A Customs man suggested that jail might cool him off, at which point the Greatest Ballplayer on Earth make a complete fool of himself. “I can lick any son of a bitch here!” he raged at officials. Finally, Miner, much embarrassed as a guest in the United States, calmed Cobb and they proceeded to the ball game.

  “I never could understand why he would do a thing like that,” said Miner when long later a Canadian newspaper asked about it. “I liked Cobb, but never could understand him.”

  The United States was at war now, and Cobb knew it was inevitable that he would join one of the services. But before he signed up, he wanted to be guaranteed a commission, preferably with the Army. During a late-season 1918 road trip with the Tigers to Washington, D.C., he set out to wear a captain’s bars.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  POISON GAS AND THE BABE

  As Ty Cobb saw the waging of war, it was inevitable and natural to mankind—and could even be beneficial. He planned martial arts training for his sons when they reached prep-school age. Early in 1918, lecturing American patriots on warfare at a rally in Atlanta, he declared, “When you have a winner and loser, it settles disputes over territory. That might not last long. But after the Germans get their asses kicked in the one going on now, you won’t be hearing from them for quite a while.”

  His combative nature and his intelligence made Cobb ideal officer material in World War I. Yet as the United States entered the second summer of conflict against Germany’s massive forces, he surprised the public by staying on the sidelines. Through some of the heaviest fighting, from late 1917 until well in 1918, Cobb remained a noncombatant.

  In so doing, he was far from alone within baseball. So many big-leaguers elected not to join up that charges of slackerism were leveled against the game. In the summer of 1918, while 600,000 American troops were pouring into French ports and the Great War’s outcome hung in the balance, Cobb and other stars called unwelcome attention to themselves by continuing as civilians and playing out an abbreviated big-league schedule.

  The Georgian put on his usual brilliant show. In a 1918 season shortened by War Department decree, he outhit everyone in the league. That was not surprising. But then, suddenly, belatedly, he reversed himself and made headlines by joining the Army.

  FORTY-TWO YEARS later, at a 1960 social get-together of Cobb and Casey Stengel at Cobb’s home in the northern California millionaires’ colony of Atherton, the two old friends spoke of their World War I experiences and other matters. Stengel had come to visit a man he had always idolized. In the past, during crises in Stengel’s career, Cobb had given helpful advice and practical assistance. He had been there with counsel on where Casey could find another job when the Brooklyn Dodgers fired him as manager in 1936. And he had recommended the Dutchman for employment when the Boston Braves let him go as field chief in 1943. In both cases, Cobb’s word in the right ears had helped the vagabond Casey—he was with thirteen teams as player or manager in fifty-six seasons—survive in baseball. Then, six weeks before Stengel came visiting at Atherton, it had happened again: the Old Perfesser had been ousted by the New York Yankees, even though he had just won another pennant for the owners. After the Yankees narrowly lost the ensuing World Series to Pittsburgh, Stengel had been dropped by owners Dan Topping and Del Webb.

  Over whiskey sodas at Cobb’s mansion, the two talked at length. An aging Stengel was confused and hurt. He wondered if at this point he should retire. “I win ten pennants for the Yanks and I’m out on the street,” he said gloomily.

  “I tried managing,” said Cobb. “It’s the shits.”

  “For twelve months of the year,” said Stengel.

  The practical Cobb asked, “Did New York pay you off in full?”

  “Every dime,” said Stengel. “I was makin’ a hundred and sixty thousand and that’s what I got upon leavin’.”

  Said Cobb, “Oh, well then . . .” He meant that with his friend paid off, Casey really had no big problem. Baseball managers were born to be fired. In Cobb’s view, $160,000 should relieve the pain Casey was feeling.

  “The mayor of New York and some rich people are startin’ up a new club, the Metropolitans,” mentioned Casey. “They are talkin’ to me about comin’ in to manage.”

  Aware of the formation of the Mets of the National League, Cobb disliked the idea. “They have about a dozen bosses and damned few players,” he warned. “Don’t touch it.” However, the Old Perfesser did make a comeback with the Mets in 1962, lending his quaint personality to the most hilarious and inept band of losers yet to step on a major-league field. During the four seasons in which Stengel led them, the Mets finished in tenth and last place all four times. Finally they jumped all the way to ninth place. By then, Stengel had beaten his critics to it; he had retired, permanently. “What I needed with those Mets,” he remarked later, “was an embalmer.”

  As I listened in on their rambling conversation in 1960, the seventy-one-year-old Stengel and the ailing seventy-three-year-old Peach fell to recalling World War I. Casey remarked that he had experienced an easy war. “Remember Eddie Grant?” he asked. “Got himself killed in France with the artillery.”

  “Grant of the Giants,” said Cobb. “Third baseman. Good field, fair hitter. Too bad about him.”

  “I never heard a shot fired,” carried on Stengel. “All I did was hand out baseball equipment to some fellas when they made me sports director at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I just waited it out until I could get back playin’ with Pittsburgh.”

  “Well, I heard some shots,” retorted Cobb. “Once I almost got blown up coming out of a toilet.”

  Casey found that funny. “You should have stayed out of the war like so many baseball guys did.”

  “For God’s sakes, Casey, how could I do that?”

  “No, I guess you couldn’t,” said Stengel.

  Cobb’s point was obvious. If he had not voluntarily enlisted in the armed forces, his public reputation would have been permanently blackened. He was too famous, and too well known for supporting President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war with Germany, issued
back in April of 1917, to remain an observer. Americans were dying by the thousands on the western front. The country’s watchword—“every able-bodied man should do his bit”—had become more and more a critical issue. As 1918 wore on, editorial writers, seeing how few professional athletes had responded to the call, urged a crackdown by the government.

  Cobb’s status as the father of three children, ages two to eight, left him ineligible for conscription by his Georgia draft board; he was rated Division Two and exempt. Yet from spring training time on, he had felt uneasy about staying out. While not singled out as a war-dodger, he was included by association in press broadsides directed at organized baseball for its reluctance to part with prominent talent. During preseason spring training, teams had marched in infantry-type formations, with bats on their shoulders simulating rifles. Army sergeants in some cases handled the drilling. Players found the exercise both a waste of time and deceiving. Eventually the program was cancelled.

  It would not suffice for Cobb to stand on dugout roofs with movie stars and other celebrities and sell Liberty Bonds and war stamps before games. Nor would the Peach take a war-connected job in a shipyard or munitions plant, as some big-leaguers had done. It was not his style.

  Still, there was nothing precipitous about Cobb’s way of doing things when away from the ball field. He took his time about enlisting in the Army, and prepared for a possible long absence by turning over his complicated business affairs to safe hands. “I figured on maybe a year or more of war,” he said. His principal investments were in auto shares, among them Ford and Cadillac, in textile buying, real estate, cotton futures, and in product endorsements. Much of this activity was concentrated in Detroit. The City on the Straits had grown from 488,766 citizens in 1910 to more than 900,000 by 1918. In (or out) of a wartime boom, people were approaching Cobb with a new financial proposition every few weeks, “some of them hard to turn down.”

  One outstanding offer came from Carl Fisher of Fisher Auto Body Company. Back in 1904, racing driver Fisher had put acetylene lamps on his Packard, thereby introducing the night driving of cars, and became a millionaire. As of 1917–18, Fisher had the Indianapolis 500 event going, drawing large crowds, and he had invited Cobb to buy in and join his board of directors. Cobb had held off on accepting, since he was unable to give Indy much time and his future was so undecided.

  OTHER COMPLICATIONS preceded his departure for the war theater. One of his children, Herschel, had been ill and might need him around. And in a small way, or so he said, he had already contributed to defeating the German war machine. He told an odd, unconfirmable story of the French running short of recoil mechanisms for their big-cannon 75s, and their appeal to the United States for help. This led to War Department armorers visiting John Dodge, of Dodge Motors in Detroit, to determine whether Dodge had the manufacturing capability for such precision parts. “Dodge was having trouble making the deal,” claimed Cobb. “I wined and dined them and showed the government boys such a good time at the ballpark that they decided Dodge was okay … and finally signed a contract.” So he told it. Malcolm Bingay’s history, Detroit Is My Own Home Town, reports the incident, but does not include Cobb as a go-between.

  The decisive factor in the summer of 1918, convincing Cobb that perhaps he had delayed too long in signing on with the American Expeditionary Force, was public opinion. The press renewed attacks on the maneuvering by ball-club owners to keep their rosters as intact as possible through draft-exemption loopholes. “With only a few boxoffice names in uniform,” the New York Times declared, “the so-called ‘magnates’ have proclaimed their adherence to the sleazy fallacy of ‘business as usual,’ a policy not calculated to make us proud of the game as an American institution.” Stars and Stripes spoke coldly of the notion of baseball as an essential American recreation. “Bullets, not bats” was the way some put it.

  The crunch began for team owners on May 23, 1918, when Provost Marshal Enoch Crowder issued a “work-or-fight” order, setting July 1 as the deadline for players to enter needed war work or face induction into service. Slackerism was charged, not just hinted. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker held firm, brushing aside exemption requests by owners, even when Woodrow Wilson, on July 27, 1918, issued a letter stating that he saw “no necessity” for stopping or curtailing major-league play. But Baker did give the owners until September 1, or through Labor Day, to finish a shortened schedule of 126 to 128 games.

  The World Series remained imperiled. About to win the National League pennant, the Chicago Cubs, fearing drafts of men before the Series, asked for a written federal guarantee that the Classic would be saved. A special two-week grace period was granted to the Cubs and their likely opponent, the Boston Red Sox, to meet in the Series.

  Between the months of June and October many of the top big-leaguers went off to war. Among them—poorly trained for the battlefield in the short preparatory time available—were Eddie Collins, Grover Cleveland “Old Pete” Alexander (who would be badly shell-shocked in trench combat and have his hearing permanently impaired), Jimmy Dykes, Sam Rice, Ernie Shore, Harry Heilmann (injured aboard a submarine), Herb Pennock, Wally Pipp, Eddie Grant (killed), and Rabbit Maranville. “They gave the boys a short-arm inspection, handed them a gun, and that was it,” Cobb recalled. Some men reached the front, while others staged exhibition games for the troops. Reportedly, 124 American Leaguers and 103 National Leaguers entered the armed forces. Three ballplayers were known to have become fatalities. Such commitment was seen by most citizens as considerably more satisfactory than the thousands of bats, balls, and mitts earlier sent overseas by the leagues, and the declared $7 million in Liberty Bonds and for the Red Cross raised by sixteen teams.

  Teams could field only patchwork lineups. Other than reactivating recently retired players, the only source of resupply in late 1918 was the minor leagues, themselves playing shrunken schedules. Records disagree, but one source shows that of nine lower leagues starting the 1918 season, only one, the International League, completed it in full. Class AA and A talent moved up to fill holes. If the war continued into 1919, there might be no baseball at all, at least not of a caliber worth watching.

  Ban Johnson, head of an American League that he had personally created in 1901 and toughly, inflexibly ruled thereafter, saw little or no profit ahead. On May 24, one day after the work-or-fight edict, he had announced that the AL would close for the duration. The member clubs, however, defied Johnson and—in a strong indication that his power was slipping—kept going to Labor Day. Cobb was able to get into 111 games, where he finished first in AL triples and second in runs scored. His .382 batting average handily led both leagues. Zack Wheat of Brooklyn topped the National League with .355 in 105 games. Toward the truncated season’s end, in Boston, the Peach hammered a home run—“about the longest I ever hit”—into a brewery across from Fenway Park. The story went that workers were bottling beer when the ball crashed through a window, hit a tub, and sprayed suds around. Cobb’s “beer-buster” was almost as impressive as his nine base hits in three games at St. Louis.

  Income from the World Series, which began September 5, withered to the extent that each Boston Red Sox player was paid an $890 winner’s pittance, while each losing-side Cub drew $535. What went down as the lowest Series payout in history was caused in part by a controversial new format dictated by the National Commission, whereby second-, third-, and fourth-place teams of each league shared in the division. That peremptory ruling—players were not consulted by the commission in making it—cut the already meager pie into so many pieces that the Red Sox and Cubs demanded that the split be postponed until after the war.

  Commission members met to settle it with some forty players of both sides under the stands before the fifth game at Boston. Beginning as a shouting match, it blew up into a near riot. Shoves were exchanged. Police with paddy wagons had to be summoned. Players threatened not to take the field and shut down the Series. Ban Johnson of the National Commission was of no help. Known to be
a hard drinker, Johnson showed up half-intoxicated and made a maudlin appeal to “you boys” to play ball.

  For an hour the field remained empty of contestants, while a crowd of some twenty thousand booed and irate umpires considered an unprecedented double forfeit of the proudest pageant of American sports. Cobb, seated in the press box as a guest of Boston, did not join the brannigan. “I might have punched someone,” he said later. He saw the rebellion as presaging wholesale strikes in the future against the owners’ greed. Ballplayers he thought, would be forced to take drastic measures in future labor-management negotiations.

  The commissioners held fast on the division of money, until finally, with wounded soldiers in the stands as guests, the game began. Cobb cagily advised the teams to have a public statement from them read before the first pitch was made. Commissioners objected, but ex–Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald stood at the home plate with a megaphone to announce the teams’ message: “We will play not because we think we are getting a fair deal, which we are not. But we will play for the sake of the public, for the good name of baseball and for the wounded Army and Navy men in the grandstand.”

  “The owners are entirely to blame,” Cobb charged in an Associated Press interview. “The teams were not doing their best out there today, and that’s deadly for baseball.” In confirmation, the Red Sox won the Series with an incredible .186 team batting average in six games, against a .210 for the Cubs.

  Players were angered by another management tactic. Those who were not absent at war or engaged in war-related industries were hit by an owners’ scheme for avoiding payment of the balance of their salaries for the shortened season. This was done by the blatant subterfuge of “releasing” all of those still in baseball uniform with ten days’ notice. Normally, such releases would have made them free agents, but the owners of franchises avoided that with a gentlemen’s agreement not to deal with other clubs’ players. The early releases saved owners an estimated $200,000. Cobb thought it an unconscionable act and said so, terming it worse than slicing up World Series receipts among clubs finishing far out of first place: “Some logic that is.” As for himself, Cobb was paid in full by Detroit.