Cobb

by Al Stump

  Cobb usually avoided funerals, but that one he attended. “Big Six looked peaceful in his coffin,” he said. “That damned gas got him, the doctors said. Almost got me.”

  Within days of the gas episode, and still not fully recovered from his own exposure, the Peach had another close escape when a stray shell exploded close by the Hanlon encampment. He had just left an outdoor latrine when the shell burst and a sliver of metal grazed his head. The fragment missed one of his eyes, but not by much. He envisioned the headline that might have made—“TY COBB KILLED LEAVING CRAPPER.” A bit closer and he could have been half-blinded.

  Germany capitulated on November 11, and he was aboard one of the first troopships home, the Leviathan. Douglas MacArthur, winner of nine medals in the war, sent one of his aides to the dock at Brest to bid a lightly bandaged Cobb bon voyage. En route to New York Cobb visited the wounded, saw men die. He reached New York on December 6. He had been at war for sixty-seven days—“a cup of coffee” in baseball parlance.

  Sportswriters waiting at the dock asked for verification of his startling earlier word that he had swung his last bat. “That’s right,” replied Cobb snappily. “I’m retiring. I’ve been in eighteen hundred games and sixteen thousand innings in fourteen years. That’s enough at my age.” He was just turning thirty-two.

  Skeptical Damon Runyon of the New York American told readers that he much doubted that “a legend,” Cobb, was bowing out. Runyon thought he needed strife and the crowd’s roar too much to leave the stage.

  WHILE THE nation celebrated the coming of peace, Cobb, the inveterate investor in prime business properties, made good use of his threat to leave baseball. During the war years his financial portfolio had steadily expanded, and after 1918 he systematically increased it. Possessing an independent fortune placed him in an all but unique position among ballplayers, giving him bargaining power against stipulations of his holdover Detroit contract. By now his overall holdings had reached approximately $700,000. Cotton shares that Cobb wisely had bought in the past half-dozen years had tripled in value because of wartime demand and current shortages. Furthermore, he had retained his United Motors and Timken Roller Bearings blue-chip stocks, and he remained partner in a consortium building housing for low-income whites and blacks in Georgia and Alabama.

  Magazines and feature syndicates paid him up to two thousand dollars for “signed” articles. Some of baseball’s first bonus clauses had been shrewdly designed by Cobb back in 1915. One bonus covered his averaging .300 or more at bat in subsequent seasons (“which was like stealing the Detroit organization’s money”). Another concerned his playing in at least 120 seasonal games (he missed this only once between 1907 and the war year). He also demanded payment for certain team public-relations appearances.

  Before gaining sophistication, Cobb had been a poor platform speaker, self-conscious and stumbling over multisyllabic words. By attending speech classes financed by the Wheeler Syndicate, which acted as his booking agent, he gained sureness on his feet. At one post-war banquet held in his honor at Detroit’s Hotel Statler, T.C. spoke to six hundred people with such lines as “Out where the grass is green I feel best placed to express myself. I am a hitter and fielder, not an orator. However, since you have seen fit to stage this appreciated affair, I shall do my best to accommodate your interest—which, like mine, is baseball.” He ended to an ovation.

  He was among the first, as far back as 1910, to answer letters from his fans. Using the green ink he favored, Cobb scrawled notes to anyone from a barber in Iowa to a small boy in California. Often worshipers writing in would be startled and overjoyed to receive from him a whole letter, signed, “Your Friend—Tyrus R. Cobb.” (In later years his practice would be very different.)

  He was home in Augusta in December 1918 for his thirty-second birthday celebration and to resume mowing down more wild game. He bagged thirty turkeys in one shoot. Team owners, meeting that winter for the purpose of recouping wartime losses, voted to place limitations on club payrolls. The cuts, in some cases, ran deep—several thousand dollars per man. Colonel Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, wealthy contractor and partner with brewery millionaire Jacob Ruppert in ownership of the Yankees, was quoted, “The players can sign at the new salaries offered—or not at all.” Payroll realignment meant reductions across the board.

  Frank Navin barely had broken even on Detroit receipts (or else lost forty thousand dollars, as he claimed) in 1918, while finishing seventh and being forced to use as wartime stopgaps six different first basemen and such nonentities as Joe Cobb (no relation), Tubby Spencer, Archie Yelle, and Art Griggs. Navin joined those owners who feared a continuing recession at the gate. The number of roster players per team was lowered from twenty-five to twenty-one. Spring-training time was shortened. Cheaper road hotels were used, and both leagues set the schedule at only 140 games.

  The short-scheduling proved a costly mistake. The big leagues rebounded in 1919 to attract 6,432,439 customers, a major gain; had the “wise men” promoters been perceptive enough to foresee the trend and return to the traditional 154-game format, they would have drawn another estimated 650,000—a lost opportunity. American show business, by contrast—Broadway shows, Hollywood movies, cabarets, and concert halls—was bulging at the seams in 21,897 houses nationally. Its operators had seen the spendthrift Jazz Age arriving and did not retrench on capital investment.

  Cobb was not retrenching. He was casing ventures right and left. “Any bright guy could see,” he spoke of the period, “that this was the time to get going. I had a friend, a movie stuntman named Claude Graham-White. He bought Rolls-Royces during the war for as low as four thousand dollars each. Owners couldn’t get the gas for them. Afterward, Whitey sold the cars for up to eleven thousand dollars per copy—and I had invested with him. Cleaned up.”

  Preposterously, the payroll slashes of preseason 1919 included Cobb as an intended victim. Detroit had not stood in the winner’s circle for nine years, and evinced no sign of becoming even a contender. Fans were bored. In December 1918, Navin wrote to Cobb that, due to the pinch, he must take a pay reduction. Navin named eighteen thousand dollars as the figure—a two-thousand-dollar cut. At eighteen thousand the Peach would remain the game’s number-one earner.

  Cobb ignored the offer. He let other communications go unanswered. Silence, as he had often demonstrated in holdouts of the past, truly could be golden. The American and National leagues’ trading markets were operating briskly after the war. Cobb was worth at least $100,000 to Detroit in a sale, but only if he remained in uniform. After a long silence, T.C. put out a story that he was serious about quitting to enjoy life, as he had promised the previous September. He had long wanted to travel abroad, see the Colosseum, the Louvre, and Leaning Tower, go grouse hunting in Scotland. At a family reunion in home-town Royston—two-hundred-odd of the Cobb clan attended—he spoke out about Navin: “Eleven [batting] trophies, and Navin tries this on me. He goes to the race tracks and loses thousands and then goes out to shaft me.”

  Defiance was one thing; the shackling, unbreakable reserve clause, permanently tying an employee to a single franchise, was another. In his wish to leave Detroit, Cobb was in a bind. The owners reportedly had agreed to strengthen the reserve by refraining from signing another team’s players. The new one-for-all action by employers was a reenactment and reaffirmation of the closet plots of the past, tightening the indenture of employees. A disgusted Cobb was interested in moving to Cincinnati of the National League for more money. Under new manager Pat Moran, the Reds had powerful hitting from Jake Daubert, Edd Roush, and veteran Heinie Groh (of the famous thick-barreled “bottle bat”). A strong pitching staff was headed by Hod Eller and Slim Sallee. Cincinnati was set for a pennant and, as it turned out, would easily defeat McGraw’s Giants for first place in the 1919 race and beat the White Sox in the World Series.

  Cobb persisted as a holdout. Shifting strategy, he stopped speaking of retiring and hinted that he would jump to the Reds or not play at
all. “A bluff by me,” he later called it. “A way to shake up Navin.”

  Emphasizing his point, the Peach was far away from the Tigers when they opened spring training at Macon, Georgia, in March. He did his campwork with Clark Griffith’s Washington Nationals at handy Augusta. Word circulated that owner Griffith was plotting to steal Cobb in an outlaw act against the reserve. “That story was a fake, too,” Cobb long afterward explained. “I did talk to Griff … but he would have had to pay Detroit a hundred thousand dollars and players to get me … which he didn’t have … and I didn’t care for Griff’s bunch of .250 hitters.” Griffith did not have a World Series contender, and the Series was an arena to which T.C. very much wanted to return.

  Throughout March he left Navin waiting to resolve their dispute. In that month came the death by heart attack of William Hoover Yawkey, timber baron and multimillionaire chief stockholder in the Tigers. Yawkey had intervened in previous Cobb holdouts over salary, usually favoring the player whom he greatly admired. Yawkey was a big, florid-faced, lumbering man, naive about baseball and an ornament of Detroit’s fun-loving set—“he never passed a saloon unless it was closed.” Tipsy or sober, he was on Cobb’s side, and Navin had to jump when told to do so by the boss. At a later time, T.C. said that Yawkey gave him “a very nice present” when Yawkey’s $100 million (or so) will and testament was privately read. Cobb didn’t say how much the gift amounted to, but with a lavish spender like Yawkey it could have been $50,000.

  Although Navin now had complete control of a next-to-last-place, stumbling team, on April 1 he backed down, reinstating the $20,000 salary that his main attraction commanded and agreeing that established bonus payments remain intact. Cobb informed Navin that if and when they talked contract for 1920, it would be in the $35,000 to $40,000 range.

  And yet, to inside observers, a measure of doubt remained. His headlong, brutal style of play meant more injuries, reducing Cobb’s longevity. It was wondered if his black rages—outbreaks that several times had come close to causing his disbarment—could ever be controlled. Attention was drawn to his outside business distractions, and the discouragement of being stuck with a Detroit team that was going nowhere. Any or all of these could detract from Cobb’s ability to remain a dominant force. And there was another consideration: new young stars were rising across the leagues, including one named Ruth.

  Away from his Georgia homestead for seven months of the year, and in his sexual prime, Cobb became involved in a love affair in 1919. He had fame, money, and lean good looks and had to fend off women. He did not like “used goods”—girls recommended to him by his associates—and found his fun while making his own social rounds. Secrecy prevailed.

  One romance of the late season backfired. “Met her in Boston at a society dance,” he remarked one day to Muddy Ruel, the one-time Yankee, Boston Red Sox, and Washington catcher who in 1960 would help Cobb assemble his memoirs for publication. “I was doing a lot of ballroom dancing in those days in my time off. She was a redhead, a hot number.”

  “Did you—?” inquired Ruel.

  “Well, what do you think, Muddy? We had open days on the road schedule and I was tired of going to banquets.”

  “What happened?”

  “She wanted me to get free and marry her. When she made trouble about it, I cut her off my list. Never spoke to the bitch again. She married a tennis pro.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “Oh,” said Cobb airily, “there were plenty of others around.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I FIGHT TO KILL”

  After the Great War the elastic in Sam Crawford’s throwing arm showed wear, and in 1918 the veteran of nineteen major-league years was dealt by Detroit to Los Angeles of the Class AA Pacific Coast League. Wahoo Sam left behind an important record, one that in 1994 still stands—312 career triples. No hitter since Crawford has surpassed him in cumulative three-basers—not even Cobb (297), Ruth (136), or Willie Mays (140).

  Crawford’s durable feud with Cobb continued after he left the Tigers. When I asked Cobb why the breach never healed, he said, “Crawford was a hell of a good player. Hall of Famer. But he was only second best on our club—a bad second. He hated to be an also-ran.”

  However, in Los Angeles, the normally mild-mannered Sam told Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times, “If a blind man rattled his cup on the corner, cheapskate Cobb might throw in a dime. I spent fifteen years in the same outfield with him. He never helped any of us with a loan, even when we were broke. And he had a rotten disposition, too.”

  The widely held opinion was that Ty Cobb was a tightwad. He would share a stock-market tip with a few teammates, but that was the extent of his generosity. As a youngster he had seen his schoolmaster father find it hard to subsist on modest earnings, and die in debt; now the son was out to become independently well-off as soon as possible. Ancillary income that came his way was plowed back into low-risk investments. He once said to me, “Fuck luck. Those who depend on it wind up busted. I go out and make my own luck.”

  Only in one case, Cobb said, did he fail to cash in on a bright new idea. “Bright” was the precise word for the invention of George Y. Cahill of Holyoke, Massachusetts, who in 1916 produced a system for illuminating outdoor events such as night baseball. Cahill’s assembly of twenty lights flooded fields with nearly two million candlepower. Although players were expected to object that under such brilliance they would go blind, the majority of them liked the innovation. Yet it was so radical and experimental that major-league officials passed up the idea until 1935, when Larry MacPhail of the Cincinnati Reds installed lights and with President Franklin D. Roosevelt turning a switch in Washington, D.C., presented the first nocturnal major-league game in history. “I tried to buy into Cahill’s business [in 1918–19]—hell, lights revolutionized the game—but got there too late,” regretted Cobb.

  Soon afterward he came close to losing out on another venture, one that in the 1920s made him financially secure, then rich, and, finally, put him in the millionaire bracket. It was perhaps the largest commercial coup made by any athlete in any sport. “My ace in the hole,” he termed it; “my annuity.”

  Cobb’s gold strike went back several years, to Augusta, where he had regularly golfed with entrepreneur Robert Winship Woodruff. Woodruff’s company bottled a beverage that had been originally sold as French Wine Cola Nerve and Tonic Stimulant. The drink was the 1885 creation of John S. Pemberton, an ex–Civil War cavalry officer, later an Atlanta pharmacist. As the legend went, Pemberton sat on a three-legged stool, stirring tubs of homemade batches with an oar. In 1889 Georgia businessman Asa Candler bought out Pemberton, patented a “soda fizz” now named Coca-Cola, and franchised it out in the South. Everybody wanted to know the recipe, but Candler wasn’t talking. So the ultra-secret Coke formula became a permanent mystery.

  Cobb had known of Coca-Cola’s history since he broke into the majors. Back in 1908, when he had won the second of his AL batting titles, he had posed for photos on the bench with a Coca-Cola carton conspicuously at his side. After the war, Robert Woodruff came calling with offers to sell company stock to his fellow Georgian at a very favorable figure.

  “You have to remember that things were balled up afterward … nobody knew how the cat would jump on some propositions. I wasn’t interested in Coke right then.” So Cobb described negotiations that followed.

  A key discussion came at New York’s Ansonia Hotel on a day when a Detroit-Yankee game was rained out. Cobb quoted himself as telling Woodruff, “Bob, I can’t afford to go in with you. I’ll pass on it.” His real objection was that Coca-Cola was then unlisted on the Big Board of the New York Stock Exchange.

  “Ty, you’ve just got to buy some of this,” insisted Woodruff. “We’ve formed a syndicate to buy out Asa Candler entirely. We’re capitalizing the company strongly. If you buy now, the price to you is only thirty-six dollars per original share.” Woodruff predicted the stock would rise sky-high.

  A banker and
director of important Georgia companies, Woodruff revealed that his syndicate was paying $25 million for all Coca-Cola rights, the largest financial transaction to date in the South. That was how much he thought of the product.

  “That made me sit up and whistle,” Cobb recalled. “I could get in at three hundred shares for ten thousand, eight hundred dollars. And Woodruff offered to loan me the money through his bank, Georgia Trust, payable back through Coke dividends.”

  Through a rainy New York afternoon, T.C. stalled, until, finally capitulating, he set himself on the road to financial independence, though with little enthusiasm. Within eight years his annual income from Coca-Cola would reach $350,000, and would triple that figure as time passed and he made more stock purchases. At various points the value of his Coca-Cola holdings would reach $181 per share. In time he came to own twenty-two thousand shares of a company selling its drink almost everywhere on earth. “Played golf one day in the fifties with Ike Eisenhower,” T.C. would relate. “Ike told me that during the second war soldiers drank five billion bottles of Coke.” With his other investments, particularly in oil, cotton, and motorcars, a ballplayer whose highest team salary never passed $85,000 reached millionaire status and more when he was still well under age forty.

  It was not so much eccentricity as gratitude showing in him when in later years Cobb would patronize only those service stations selling Coca-Cola, not some other soft drink. If necessary he would detour out of the way to order a Coke. One day in 1960 I was driving with him from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and on Highway 99 he left the route and veered off to a gas pump. Ordering fuel for his Lincoln, he told the attendant, “And I want a Coke.” The attendant said he carried only Pepsi. “The hell with you!” barked Cobb and drove off.