Cobb

by Al Stump

  In the fifteenth, war-spoiled World Series, Babe Ruth, who remained out of the Great War, pitched a six-hit, 1–0 shutout for the Sox. During the regular season of 1918, the Babe, who had begun to play outfield when not pitching, had hit 11 home runs to tie Tillie Walker of the Athletics for the league title. He thereby established himself as the foremost two-way threat since mustachioed little John Montgomery Ward won 158 games as a pitcher for Providence, the New York Giants, and others from 1878 through 1894, while batting .371 and .348 in good years. On the mound against the Cubs, Ruth carried with him a mark of 13 consecutive scoreless innings pitched in previous Series competition. In this Series he extended the record to a phenomenal 29⅔ shutout innings, which would stand until Whitey Ford, the superb southpaw of Casey Stengel’s Yankees, topped it in 1961.

  Cobb happened to be on the same New York Central train that was taking Ruth to New York on a business matter after the Series. Out of curiosity, Cobb asked Ruth, “Why were you throwing at Max Flack?”

  “Flack, hell,” said Babe. “That was that other fielder—Mann.”

  “No, it was Flack you got right between the eyes in the first game,” corrected Cobb. “Les Mann is a right-hander. Flack is a lefty.”

  “Jeez, whattayaknow,” said Ruth. “I was throwing at the wrong monkey all afternoon!” (This same story has been told by others, with variations on Cobb’s version.)

  These and other events were of lesser interest to the masses of Americans. In August and September, German forces retreated in Flanders, U.S. troops eliminated the Saint Mihiel salient, attacked in the Argonne, and helped break the powerful Hindenburg line. As a theme song, “Over There” sounded more and more optimistic. By the time that Germany gave up on November 11, 1918, the United States had embarked 2,045,169 men for European service, and suffered 320,710 casualties.

  DURING THE weeks before the 1918 season ended, Cobb made four long-calculated moves. He notified Frank Navin that he would never be interested in field-managing the Tigers, if offered the post, but only in a front-office position—perhaps as chief operations executive—provided the salary was right. Secondly, he moved his wife and children from Detroit back into the family’s comfortable Augusta residence on William Street, with its two black houseboys and cook—“Mr. Ty’s mansion,” as townspeople called it. Further, in consideration of going into battle, he wrote a will (later on the testament was canceled and eventually a new one substituted). Fourthly, in August, with the baseball season still on, Cobb voluntarily enlisted in the Army. His activation was to come on October 1.

  “I did a little negotiating,” he said of his insistence upon becoming a commissioned officer. Cobb generally got what he wanted and, while the Tigers were playing at Washington, he met with a general involved in recruitment. “We talked,” said Cobb, “for about an hour.” He was recommended for a captaincy. With that arranged, he underwent a physical and a standard psychological test. “Funny result on that,” he remembered. “The doctors made the finding that I was normal, but on the shy side. I wasn’t an ego type because of the ‘shyness.’” That gave the Peach a wry laugh.

  For an assignment Cobb requested and received duty with the Chemical Warfare Service. It was a puzzling choice. With his expert eye for distance and experience with hunting and guns, the Field Artillery would have best suited him. Why become involved with notoriously deadly gas when other options existed? German strategists had introduced airborne poison gas at the second battle of Ypres in 1915 and thereafter employed it widely. Use of the weapon horrified neutral nations and set the U.S. high command to seeking counter-measures. Chlorine-based “mustard” gas seared the lungs and often asphyxiated its victims. Phosgene gas was as bad or worse; before they died, soldiers turned a livid purple in the face.

  Gas knew no rank: six weeks after Colonel Douglas MacArthur reached combat, his eyesight was threatened by gas exposure and he went around blindfolded for a week. “Silent death” attacks were all the more terrifying because the available gas masks were distrusted by the men in the trenches. “I knew the masks were not much good, but they were working on improvements,” Cobb said.

  Cobb was well aware of the high risk with chemicals. Charlie Cobb and many Georgians had urged him to enlist elsewhere. At the time, Cobb offered only one explanation: “Christy Mathewson and Branch Rickey are in Chemical—they are guys I like and friends.” Another reason could have been the hard criticism by newspapers of sports figures not in uniform for the United States, so that he felt the need for an act of bravado. Still another reason might have concerned the amount of publicity he attracted in the press; Cobb habitually checked out newspapers and magazines, assuring himself that his notices came regularly and in prominent type. Sometimes he would approach editors of sports periodicals with ideas for punchy articles, such as “How I Flash Signals from Center Field.” The resultant ghost-written pieces would appear in the form of “as told by Ty Cobb” or as mislabled straight byliners. “Cobb of Chemical War” was sure to make a newsplay. Poison gas carried a special image. Finally, there was reason number four: he was absolutely fearless.

  His Army orders were to report to a troopship on October 1 and be given crash training in France as a technical advisor attached to the so-called Gas and Flame units. Before leaving, he turned over one of his businesses—selling Bevo, a soda pop—to friends in the South. His franchise for Bevo covered an area containing numerous Army camps. In dry-state Georgia a soldier could not legally buy a hard drink. Cobb recalled, “The local boys introduced them to ‘White Lightning’ [native liquor so potent it could lift a man inches off the ground] and my Bevo sold well as a mixer.” At least it reduced the wallop.

  In the weeks before his embarkation for Bordeaux, he was at his playing best—and at his most waspish. There had been steady friction through 1918 between Cobb and a majority of the Tigers. Many of them complained to Jennings, and thus to Navin, that Cobb was more and more undermining existing methods, and that he had caused at least three semiregulars to lose their jobs through his influence with team stockholders. Recently he had “demoralized” Harry Heilmann. That highly promising twenty-four-year-old outfielder, discovered by Cobb in the bushes in 1916, was in T.C.’s doghouse for not hitting .300 from the start. Cobb had loaned Heilmann some of his special-model, thirty-nine-ounce black bats, but a defiant Slug seldom used them. He liked his own clubs. “Stubborn goddamn hayshaker,” Cobb called Heilmann, for whom he had predicted so much, and who in the 1920s would arrive to deliver no less than 640 doubles, triples, and home runs, and gain stardom.

  A dispirited group, the Tigers had reacted poorly to Cobb’s steady prodding to snap out of it and at least make a pass at a pennant. As Jennings became increasingly ineffective on the bench, his captain at times took over as surrogate manager, going so far as to call time-out, run in from center field, chew out the pitcher, and with arm-gestures correct his throwing motion. By custom, mound conferences were quiet, private affairs. Cobb humiliated pitchers in public view.

  Pitcher Happy Finneran, in retirement, thought that Cobb incited spite to make himself more visible. Finneran and others also pointed out that, although without military training or a college education, he was soon to become an Army captain. It did not hurt to have played poker with U.S. presidents.

  Except for the Series, the baseball season shut down as a wartime casualty on September 2. Fred Lieb, in The Detroit Tigers, noted, “In a dismal team season, only Tyrus kept the old batting eye aflame. He was two things—fierce and fiercer.” Opponents searched for signs of slowdown in him thirteen years from the start of his career, and found none, other than a drop-off in stealing output. There were intervals when he went hitless in doubleheaders. Usually that came when he was recuperating from an injury. In May he missed ten games with a torn right shoulder, in July he was out for six more with a left shoulder jammed in sliding. A shinbone bled and he played on in a bandage. Overriding his latest list of setbacks, his double and triple beat the Yankees that fall. He
went 6 for 9 against Cleveland in a double bill, a blazing 9 for 12 in a St. Louis series, and against the battery of catcher Cy Perkins and pitcher Scott Perry of the Athletics stole home base twice in nine innings. “I watch the catcher’s eyes on a steal,” he explained. “He can’t fake me waving his mitt. Where he looks will be the ball and I come in accordingly.” In effect, Cobb was playing both offense and defense simultaneously. “His secret is,” said Connie Mack, “that he thinks two plays ahead of everybody else.”

  His home-plate stealing was based on more than speed and surprise. He had the ability to swivel his neck, see the ball’s course, and react. Another tactic was to wear extra-long uniform sleeves, which flapped and distracted the pitchers and also protected his elbows while doing a “deep slide,” one in which he dug up a curtain of dirt to confuse basemen and umpires.

  In stretching hits he still had no master. Among his more show-stopping feats was a play at Boston in which Cobb, at second base, scored on an infield out without an error being involved. This one he conjured up by taking an extra-long lead, so that when the ball was bouncing along—a slow roller to shortstop Everett Scott—he had nearly reached third base. While Scott was routinely throwing out the batter to first baseman Stuffy McInnis, Cobb sped onward, reached home in a tie with McInnis’s fairly good throw, crashed into catcher Sam Agnew, deflected the ball with his hip, and was safe. Cobb’s postgame analysis: “It took six separate actions by three players to get me, didn’t it?”—the shortstop’s catch and throw, the first-sacker’s catch and throw, the catcher’s reception and tag. In combination the ball had to travel some 320 feet, as Cobb had long before calculated. For other fast base runners this would not work. They saw the odds as much too long. As Cobb viewed it, other base runners were not in the right frame of mind to face long odds and beat them. It was a matter of confidence defeating geometry.

  New players up from the minors as wartime replacements, who until then had not seen Cobb in action, were amazed. Even some old pros still fell for his sleight of hand. In a Washington game, he caused Clyde “Deerfoot” Milan, the base runner at second, to presume that a seemingly sprinting-in Peach could not reach a humpbacked liner hit to him in center field. Milan thought he saw Cobb running hard, but too late to make the catch. He hesitated, then lit out for third. Suddenly making the catch, Cobb easily doubled Milan off second base. Explanation: T.C. had been pumping his legs up and down, with glove outstretched, depicting a missed catch and practically running in the same spot—applied pantomime. It was all in the deceptive timing.

  Old tricks or new, the war-bound Georgian left them something to remember him by in two 1918 season-ending games with the defending league champion Chicago White Sox. Cobb especially enjoyed beating the proud Sox. He held a low regard for the methods of their manager, Clarence “Pants” Rowland, and maintained a holdover dislike for the Sox’s fine pitcher, Eddie Cicotte, with whom he’d fought with fists in their minor-league Augusta days. T.C. suspected that during Tiger appearances at Chicago, fans were encouraged by Cicotte to curse him and throw junk. Formerly losers, the Sox had advanced by the season from third to second during 1915–16, until in 1917 they had wrested the league championship from the Boston Red Sox. But for now, at the end of 1918 play, Cobb was motivated by the Chicagoans’ fall from the top to a sixth-place finish. He took the opportunity of catching the Sox on a downswing to even up old scores. Any Detroit–White Sox series was played up because it might mark the end of his career. Cobb broadly hinted of retirement, saying that chronic back and leg pain left him unable to concentrate; he sensed that it was time to get out. He confided this to St. Louis columnist T. C. David that September. David wrote a sob-story piece—“Is the Fabulous One Lost to the Game?”

  On Labor Day before the start of the season-ending home doubleheader with Chicago, Cobb walked past the White Sox bench, singled out Cicotte, and growled, “You’ll get it today, bo. That’s for sure.” Helping to knock Cicotte out of the box early, he had three hits, two triples included, in each of two games. The aroused Tigers pounded their opponents, 11–5 and 7–2. One field fight broke out. Cobb stayed out of it. He was concentrating on Cicotte.

  WHILE PREPARING to report to the Chemical Warfare Service in October, Cobb issued a statement that seemed to reflect his sensitivity to arriving at such a late date in his country’s service. His statement, published by Baseball Magazine, was headlined “Why I Went Into The Army” and was subheaded by the publisher “What Induced The Great Star To Renounce A $20,000 Job For A Difficult And Dangerous Commission In France.” His explanation was written in the first person. In tone it sounded like a defense against recent newspaper slaps at ballplayers. He wrote: “A few more days and I shall have played my last big league game. I am bowing out. Some years ago I signed a long-term contract [with Detroit] which expires this Fall. Ordinarily I would be interested in renewing that contract on favorable terms. Now it doesn’t occasion me the slightest concern. For I have signed another contract. I have taken another job.”

  In his rambling announcement he said, “By the time my bit in the Army is finished I shall probably be too old and used up to resume my former profession.” And then came: “After a good deal of deliberation I came to the conclusion that I could not afford to stay out of the war. And when I say afford, don’t think that I mean anything in a business sense. I am surely not taking the job for the money there is in it, as everyone must know.”

  Then: “The public has knocked baseball unmercifully. This knocking has been uncalled for. Anyone who calls me a slacker is dead wrong. That I am going in as a captain will be criticized … but none can say that I will be protected from danger more than the humblest private in the trenches. If I were a general, it might be different. As a captain I shall be in the same position as an enlisted man.” Cobb also called attention to the fact that he had chosen chemical warfare duty, “which,” he mentioned, “is well known to be the most hazardous of just about any service.”

  In a well-tailored uniform and trench coat he wore for photo-taking, the captain was off to France by ship on October 6. He carried with him his own pistol, his “varmint” gun.

  Cobb’s fame counted for little in the way of earning him special treatment after he arrived and was assigned to Hanlon Field, near Chaumont, France, southeast of Paris. Hanlon was an auxiliary airfield not in a combat zone, but vulnerable to aircraft attack and night infiltration by Boche raiders. In three cases Cobb had close escapes. In one instance, a party of Germans crept in to hit the Hanlon installation with grenades thrown at parked U.S. aircraft; Cobb, jumping from his nearby bunk, fired shots with his revolver. “Don’t know if I hit anyone,” he spoke of it. “But with the whole camp shooting back, the bastards pulled out in a hurry.”

  At Hanlon he took instruction in the use of a developmental charcoal-filtered mask effective against aerial spraying of several different gases. In the trenches, doughboys never knew when and where the killer vapors would be concentrated. The AEF’s Gas and Flame section was protective, not offensive; it required clamping of the mask onto the face upon first smelling an assault. Masking had to be done immediately, if not sooner.

  Cobb described what happened near Chaumont. “We had hundreds of soldiers to train. We wound up drilling the damnedest bunch of culls that World War I ever grouped in one outfit. And the masks were very awkward. They were attached by a tube to a canister dangling around the neck … The soldier inhaled clean air through the tube held in his mouth and which was filtered through a charcoal-soda lime … A nose clip was supposed to prevent breathing through the nostrils. But men forgot and sometimes they panicked.

  “One day we marched about eighty of our culls into a dark, airtight chamber for practice. Real mustard gas was to be released right after a signal was given warning us to snap masks into place and file out in an orderly way. Then we were to dive into trenches as if under machine-gun fire. Well, the warning signal was poorly given and a lot of us missed it, including Christy Mathewson and
me. Christy was an instructor in Chemical, too. So were Branch Rickey and George Sisler.”

  Men screamed when they breathed a smell of death. Crazy with fear, they piled up to escape, a hopeless tangle of bodies. “As soon as I realized what was happening,” went Cobb, “I fixed my mask … groped my way over to a wall, and worked toward the door. I fell outside … was damned lucky. Most of the poor bastards were trapped inside. When it was over there were sixteen bodies stretched out on the ground. Eight men died within hours of lung damage. In a few days, others were crippled.”

  Cobb had been exposed to enough poison gas that for the next weeks a colorless discharge drained from his chest; he felt weak and had a hacking cough. He remembered Christy Mathewson telling him, “Ty, I got a good dose of the stuff. I feel terrible.” Mathewson had not only been in the chamber with Cobb, but earlier had inspected trenches for gas residue.

  Following illness and hospitalization, Mathewson was shipped home, where in 1919 he became John McGraw’s right-hand man with the Giants and in 1923 president of the Boston Braves. Developing tuberculosis of both lungs, he was sent to a sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York, known for its work in dealing with the “white plague.” Four years later, Cobb went to visit Mathewson. Big Six was a cripple, unable to move anything but his fingers and forearms. He died at Saranac at the age of forty-five on October 7, 1925, on the day the World Series opened. Thirty-six thousand Series fans stood as the flag was lowered to half-mast and sang “Nearer My God to Thee.”