Cobb

by Al Stump

  It became baseball lore that as much as he hoarded money, and as little as he tipped waiters, hack drivers, and Pullman porters, Cobb would share inside dope on stock-market buys with people he liked. According to one of his brokers, Elmer M. Griffin of Beverly Hills, California, his timely advice made considerable profits for retired ballplayers with small incomes or in distress. “I can name you a dozen or so of old big-leaguers that Cobb rescued through speculations which he often financed,” stated Griffin in 1940. “He’d buy you a house if you hadn’t crossed him in the past, if you didn’t have the rent and he liked you.”

  One of the beneficiaries was Paul Cobb, his two-year-younger brother. Few athletes have stood in deeper shade than this Cobb. Almost as tall and heavy as T.C., Paul had played outfield at Georgia Tech, then spent nearly a decade trying to reach the majors and always falling short. “You’re Ty Cobb’s brother?” managers at minor- and semi-pro-league stops would ask. Paul Cobb’s only substantial accomplishment as a player was to be drafted from Joplin, Missouri, in Class C ball by the St. Louis Browns of the American League in 1909, where he failed to make the grade.

  “Having the Cobb name hurt Paul when it should have helped him,” grumbled his older brother. “Hell, I taught him to hit and steal. He’d have hit .290 or more if given the chance.” Some felt it was Ty Cobb’s unpopularity with the game’s ruling powers that mitigated against the “other Cobb’s” chances. T.C. believed that to be true. Hates and jealousies impeded the boy’s efforts to advance, he was convinced. Eventually Paul went into Florida real estate, helped, T.C. said, by the bonanza accumulating after the Coca-Cola tap was turned on.

  Bob Woodruff of the bottling empire remained so close a friend of his celebrated stockholder that the two always hugged each other when reunited after a long separation. “I was never so tight with any man,” Cobb declared. Woodruff owned a forty-six-hundred-acre cattle spread in Wyoming, formerly the homestead of Buffalo Bill Cody. An expert horseman since his farm-boy days, the Peach rode the high trails there, shot bobcat and elk, and soaked naked in outdoor mineral springs, letting his scarred legs heal for the seasons ahead. His body was nearly hairless and the regional Arapaho tribe gave him the honorary name of “Smooth Eagle.” Once Woodruff remarked, “Ty could trap game with anyone. I think he was part Injun.”

  Reminisced Cobb, grinning: “There were plenty of Arapaho girls around our camp … they didn’t go neglected.”

  High in the remoteness of the Grand Tetons may have come an obsessively driven man’s happiest times. “Goddamn, how I loved it,” he said of those expeditions in 1919 and 1920. Out there he was temporarily free of family obligations, pressure from fans, salary wrangles, beanballs, business and legal troubles, and the matter of staying ahead of rivals named Speaker, Jackson, Sisler, Heilmann, and the rising, right-handed-swinging Rogers Hornsby of St. Louis. That Hornsby could hit. And in Boston was a twenty-five-year-old pitcher with an outstanding fastball, who was converting to playing the outfield. In five Red Sox seasons, Babe Ruth had compiled an impressive 80–41 win-loss mound record, while simultaneously averaging well over .300 at bat. The large, moon-faced left-hander was a rarity, a pitcher-slugger. Ruth hit plenty of doubles and triples, but when he connected fully, the ball disappeared from sight.

  His 11 home runs of 1918 had tied for the league lead. Since the all-time American League record was 16, by Ralph “Socks” Seybold of Philadelphia in 1902, this was an eye-opener. Veteran critics could see him striking as many as 20 homers if he concentrated on batwork.

  Opponents’ scouts studied his six-foot, two-inch and close to two-hundred-pound body up and down. The Babe was as peculiar as the mythical Hippocameleopard. No one else had his ability to be a star on the mound and be abnormally powerful on offense. Pitching seemed to be his calling—but, then again, perhaps not. In one week he had pitched two wins over St. Louis, while also pounding three homers. Ruth had what insiders called “unknown potential.” How much brandy he could drink at a sitting was also unknown.

  RELUCTANTLY COBB left the Wyoming plateau in February to prepare for 1919 play. His mind was divided. “I was thinking more of Jackson and Sisler than this Ruth,” he told Bob Woodruff when they met in March. “And how much longer I could go on playing twelve hundred innings [per season] with bad legs.” He considered the idea of buying a ranch like Woodruff’s—something smaller—and taking early retirement.

  ONCE THE season began, there were plenty of signs that young “two-way” Ruth was far more than merely another good ballplayer. On July 15, at Detroit’s Navin Field, Cobb, in center field, played Ruth extra deep. The Babe poled one so far over his head that it cleared the bleachers and landed in the street, the longest home run ever seen in Motor City. It might have traveled five hundred and some feet. In the next few days, at Boston, Ruth added two more mammoth homers in one game.

  Before that, in June, pitcher Ruth had beaten Walter Johnson of Washington. Four days later, against Cleveland, he had thrown a shutout. At Detroit, Cobb faced him with two men out and the bases loaded. Ruth’s big hands gripped his fastball loosely, which was unorthodox. Not so unusual on this day was that his first pitch took off, sailing so widely that umpire Billy Evans threw the ball out as probably illegal. On the next pitch, Cobb loudly complained that the ball had to be doctored with a foreign substance, to veer a good eighteen inches as it had done. Again Evans threw out the ball.

  “Here comes one down the middle!” Ruth shouted.

  It started straightaway, then dived for a strike. Evans let that one stand, but tossed out the following pitch and then another, until during a single Cobb at-bat, six deliveries were declared suspicious and not counting either way. Cobb ended the farce by striking out. It was one of the most satisfying “fanners” of Ruth’s mound career to date; he rubbed it in by saying, “Cobb’s easy.” And Babe added a home run as the Yankees won by just that margin, 1–0.

  In this immediate postwar season, Cobb watched and wondered as Ruth upped his batting average from a previous .300 to .322, while also pitching nine victories to five defeats. Yet those feats seemed insignificant when he also went on to produce 29 home runs that season, breaking the modern major-league record of 24 set by Gavvy Cravath of the Phillies in 1915. There was no question now about where Ruth’s talents would be best used. He was a star, and the now well-heeled New York Yankees were maneuvering to buy him. Price didn’t much matter.

  Ruth’s batting average of .322 might not be close to Cobb’s .384, but the Babe had something new to sell: propelling the long ball—the very long ball—in quantity. The boisterous, fun-loving Ruth was on his way to turning ballparks into theaters of tumult. His most spectacular seasons were coming up, and one of them, 1920, was just around the corner. On January 3, 1920, he would become the property of the Yankees, acquired in a $400,000 transaction in which Ruth represented $125,000 of a sum embracing cash, credits, and a loan to Boston owner Harry Frazee. That record investment would be justified when that season Babe drove an unbelievable 54 balls over fences, close to four times as many as National League home-run champion Fred “Cy” Williams of the Phillies collected, and roughly five times more than any other Yankee delivered. The next-best Yankee power men—Wally Pipp, Bob Meusel, and Aaron Ward—had 11 apiece.

  At first Cobb had nothing much to say about Ruth. But when Babe was mentioned as a possible successor to his crown, he visibly reacted. When Ruth appeared in Detroit, Tyrus would be seen looking in the other direction, boning his bats or making some other sideplay. To a growing number of fans around the league, Cobb was beginning to come off as no longer so uniquely colorful, not quite so enjoyable to watch. In press boxes it was felt by some Cobb-watchers that perhaps he had met a man he couldn’t beat. Perhaps.

  “We are alike in only one way,” Cobb said in his sparing public comments on Ruth. “We’re both hard losers.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true. T.C. notched some of his bats with the initials of pitchers he did particularly well agains
t: “W.J.,” “E.C.,” “F.B.,” and so on. Ruth cut “win” notches in his close to three-pound bats. In temperament they would on occasion turn out to be equally combative. In May of 1923, against the St. Louis Browns, the Babe threw dirt into the face of umpire George Hildebrand. Kicked off the field, he climbed into the stands after hecklers. Scaling a dugout roof, a frenzied Ruth invited everyone present to a fight. “You’re all yellow!” he hollered. “Come on down here!”

  In that same month, the reigning record-holder for misconduct in a ballpark was similarly occupied. During a Detroit–St. Louis Cardinals exhibition, Cobb threw dirt into the face of umpire Cy Pfirman and offered to fight anyone at all. Ejected, he refused to leave, resisting the umpires so long and hard that at last the game was forfeited to the Cardinals.

  Ruth was suspended and fined two hundred dollars. Cobb was suspended and fined one hundred dollars, apparently receiving a discount as a longtime customer.

  BEGINNING IN 1920 and continuing for the better part of a decade, the Cobb-Ruth rivalry was a close matchup of Old School versus New School, not to be equaled in intensity until the 1940s, when Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams competed for batting honors. As a delighted press played it, here was Cobb’s flashing rapier against Ruth’s cannon. Ruth would scratch his groin, glance at the fences, tap the plate, flick his bat, and launch another of the 113 home runs of his first two New York seasons (54, then 59) out of the park. Cobb would shift around in the box, feet together, eyes fixed on the pitcher, crouch slightly, and slash a single or double to the opposite field.

  In total bases, T.C. had led the American League six times, but after 1919 it became more and more a matter of George Ruth reaching the most stations. What else, when the “big baboon” would during his lifetime average a home run every 8.5 times at bat?

  Cobb’s base-stealing skill could not be matched by the less swift, less expert Ruth. This was particularly true of successive, multiple steals. Defensively they were close enough not to matter. Ruth’s arm was stronger; his opponent could catch some balls beyond the heavyset Babe’s reach. Ruth made fewer errors.

  They were not really comparable. It was a matter of taste—clout or scientific tactics. Sportswriters doted on a situation in which they could carry on at length about “a whale versus a shark.” Casey Stengel joined in: “Nah, it’s a bomb against a machine gun.”

  For a time, Cobb evinced little outward concern, looking upon Ruth as vulnerable to baseball’s inexorable forces. He had met such challenges since 1907, and beaten back all of them. “Ruth’s unfinished,” he said to Detroit writer Harry Salsinger. He meant incomplete, lacking. Cobb felt that the contender was too fixed in his style to adapt, even partially, to Cobbian baseball philosophy, and that it would prove his downfall. The hard-line, traditionalist Cobb was convinced that pitchers would soon adjust to such an undisciplined free-swinger, a muscleman whose bat control was limited by its big, uppercutting arc. Here was no Shoeless Joe Jackson, with the ideal, flowing, level swing. Ruth, swinging from his heels, was flawed. Through impatience and guess hitting, he would strike out and pop up too often. He was a sweep-hitter with stiff arms and wrists. He had a curveball weakness.

  And he would grow fat early. Along with everyone, Cobb had heard tales of the Babe consuming six club sandwiches, a platter of pig’s knuckles, and two pitchers of beer at a sitting. It was publicized that he breakfasted on three-pound steaks, six eggs, a heap of potatoes, and a quart of rye whiskey with a ginger-ale chaser. He became renowned, with the Babe not particularly objecting, for his ability to outdrink anyone in the American League (the National had its own good bottle men). Immature, everyone’s hero hit Prohibition beer and rum hard, avoided bed-checks, and habitually stayed out all night. Supposedly, during these sprees, Babe was with a pickup girl or in a bawdy house with ladies of the demimonde. Around 6:00 A.M. one morning, when the Tigers were in New York for a series, Cobb was up and doing roadwork on Park Avenue when he ran across Ruth arriving home. “Been having a good time?” asked Cobb, pleased to see him breaking curfew.

  “Pretty damned good,” replied Babe. “There were three of them.” He was tipsy.

  Yankee manager Miller Huggins and his spies often caught Ruth in the act, and a body of reportage, some of it much exaggerated, came to picture the former Baltimore bartender as a Falstaffian character who could combine dissipation with getting base hits to a degree never before seen—or imagined. In part this was true. And Ruth was slow in reforming his ways. Another instance that Cobb said he knew to be a fact was that Babe had rented hotel rooms in Detroit after an important win over the Tigers and threw a team party at which all of the invited females were bluntly told to “put out” or depart.

  Ruth’s vital juices overflowed. His legend was building. In his first Yankee years he flipped and wrecked a car, was jailed for speeding, lost forty thousand dollars within days at a horse track, ate most of a straw hat as a gag, and had a fifty-thousand-dollar paternity suit filed against him. Fans everywhere loved him no less for his infractions; vicariously they were right with him.

  “Most of the American League figured he’d eat and fuck himself right out,” said Cobb in later years. It was an admission of poor judgment that he would heartily regret.

  Within a few seasons Cobb tempered his view with an observation: “After Ruth had been around awhile and no longer was pitching, I could see what made him so different. His pitching days made him a hitter [of home runs]. As mostly a pitcher, he didn’t have to protect the plate as I did and other regular hitters had to do. He could try this and that. Experiment. Learn timing. As a pitcher, if he flopped [at bat], nobody gave a damn. Pitchers always had been lousy hitters. Now and then over those six years at Boston one of his big swings was good for four bases.” (Between 1914 and 1918 at Boston, Babe hit 0, 4, 3, 2, and 11 home runs.) “Once he got smart and grooved his cut, he had a whole new career.” He averaged 45 homers a year for the next ten years.

  John McGraw, not known for his extensive silence on issues, and whose word was considered gospel truth by multitudes, agreed that Babe Ruth was a perishable commodity. Early in 1920 the Giants manager was quoted as telling New York writers, “Ruth is a bum. He can’t play the inside game. Can’t hit and run. If the Yanks use him every day the bum will hit into a hundred double plays before the season is over.” Like Cobb, the Little Napoleon was confronting a phenomenon who was threatening to change the way things were done on offense.

  A NEW, uninhibited breed of ball fans showed no such reservations. “Built like a spinning top” or “a bale of hay,” Ruth had arrived at the ideal moment, the saturnalian 1920s. Not even Jack Dempsey with his knockouts, or touchdown-running Red Grange, better suited the decade. After the war the U.S. adopted Prohibition and then defied it, drove fast cars, speculated wildly in a bull market, erected skyscrapers, made sexual freedom commonplace, and let crime lords run loose. Prosperity, and the need in urban centers for thrills, created $2-million boxing gates and filled such cavernous arenas as sixty-five-thousand-capacity, $2.5 million Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923 and soon to showcase Ruth at $2.20 per grandstand seat. As of that year, fifteen of the sixteen parks housing major-league teams had an average capacity of thirty-five thousand. The Giants could accommodate fifty-four thousand. Brooklyn’s updated Ebbets Field held thirty-five thousand. The size of parks brought new touches: electric scoreboards began to replace rickety wooden ball-and-strike indicators. Hot showers for players came along. Teams were required to provide canvas infield coverings in event of rain.

  Babe, now paid twenty thousand dollars per season, hit balls “into the next county,” and there was a wonderful go-for-it defiance of gravity in his act. Yankee attendance in 1920, 1,289,472, broke the record by a 380,000 margin. With Ruth, Bob Meusel, Wally Pipp, Ping Bodie, Carl Mays, and Bob Shawkey in the lineup, the perennial also-ran Yankees were edging toward becoming a pennant winner, a goal they would reach in 1921. Detroit, meanwhile, sputtered along in fourth place, purportedly up for sale
by Navin.

  Not overnight, but very rapidly, Ruth popularized the new focus and form of attack. His connect-or-bust style, so wholly opposed to the Cobb school of finessing runs, advancing base runners by pre-plotted degrees, and using his spikes freely, changed the central object of the game, the official ball. Three hundred to 400 home runs were registered in the majors in prewar seasons; by 1930 the figure would be 1,565. Ruth in 1919 was only one year away from smashing more homers in a season than any entire American League team other than the Yankees. He and other young power specialists were a main factor in the 1920 introduction of a more tightly wound “rabbit,” “kangaroo,” or “cannon” ball of Australian wool. At least, that’s where the leagues said it came from; apparently nobody traveled down under to verify it.

  Announcing the end of the deadball of past years, the Wilson Base Ball Equipment Company came out with an advertisement on its version of the new baseball:

  THE ACE OF DIAMONDS

  Conforms to specifications of the National and American Leagues. Due to a special winding process the balls are ABSOLUTELY SPHERICAL and guaranteed NOT TO BECOME LOPSIDED FOR 200 GAMES.

  For fifteen years of the deadball period, Cobb had faced balls more befitting the sandlots than the majors—dented and “soft,” blackened from overuse and by original poor quality, causing “twilight blindness” in some games starting at 3:00 or 4:00 P.M. in unlit parks. Cobb to date had been painfully beaned three times, and on each occasion he had completely lost sight of the ball as it neared the plate. Now, at long last, umpires were instructed to discard balls every few innings and throw in glossy new ones to replace the “mushy potatoes.” As the lively ball took preeminence, several club owners, as an aid to higher scoring, pulled in their fences. Consumption of baseballs was convincing proof of what was transpiring. In 1919 the National League alone used 22,095 balls; by 1924 the total went to 54,030. Another indicator: the World Series had been replete with 1–0, 2–1, and 3–2 total scoring; from 1920–30 the Series produced twenty games with nine or more runs tallied by the sides, even with such superior pitchers on hand as Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Sad Sam Jones, Rube Marquard, Stan Coveleski, Lefty Grove, Waite Hoyt, and Herb Pennock.