Cobb

by Al Stump

  COBB WAS truly trapped by the arrival of the Big Bang epoch. It went against everything he practiced and believed, opposing his conception of knitting together team offense. “The home run could wreck baseball,” he warned. “It throws out a lot of the strategy and makes it fence-ball.” Originally he had believed that the craze epitomized by Ruth would go away as fans regained their senses. But when the Tigers traveled to the Polo Grounds one summer day, he met more evidence that he had miscalculated Ruth’s influence on the man on the street. Like the battleship admirals after World War I who lobbied for bigger hulls and eighteen-inch firepower, the customers wanted noise. Babe homered, his twenty-sixth of the season. But Cobb homered, too. He also cleverly maneuvered as the runner at second base to be hit by a pick-off attempt, allowing Heilmann to score the winning run. In the outfield, racing far back, he leaped and robbed Ruth of another homer. It was inspired play. Yet it was Ruth whom the crowd cheered all day.

  Detroiters knew that, in 1919 and at times thereafter, their man was playing at a distinct handicap. At Chicago he cut his toe upon colliding with an outfield fence, and the toe swelled up. Later on, also at Chicago, he was carried off the field, all but unconscious, after colliding with teammate Ira Flagstead in the field. A knee ligament was ruptured, and for a while the Peach was out of it and on a cane. Just as throughout the pre-1920s era, he continued to be in one sort of physical distress or another. The knee, reinjured while sliding, caused hospitalization, costing him twenty-seven days on the sideline. What he feared was happening: his resilience was diminishing. In his “memory book,” Cobb describes his ordeal as “the worst I ever went through. I thought for a while that this was it. Surgeons couldn’t help me I was so bad off.”

  He came back, as always. As a boy he had accidentally shot himself in the upper chest with a rifle. In Canada he had fallen down a steep slope while hunting and been on crutches. He had, by count, in 1919, two dozen stitches in his lower legs. From all these injuries Cobb had recovered with a swiftness that greatly impressed his doctors. “Mind over matter, I guess,” he said. Somehow, after a serious setback he always regained good form.

  In August of 1920, while he was still limping, the Yankees came to Navin Field. His competitiveness and rare recuperative power led T.C. to insist on playing in the four-game series. He managed eight hits in the set before sellout crowds, and no man could say how he did it. “I was just getting it along … hoping to come back,” he spoke of his distress. Ruth, however, upstaged him with three home runs in two games to reach number 46 on the season. When the Babe next appeared at the plate, Detroit gave the enemy player a standing ovation lasting several minutes. The Tigers’ honorary captain had to wait in the outfield in his home ballpark and endure hearing the cheers of thirty thousand being accorded a man who had yet to win a league batting title.

  Ty Cobb’s emotion at that moment was revealed to me in 1960 at his California retirement mansion: “Well, I had to stand there and take it. That was it. In Detroit or anywhere the fans were treacherous bastards. I knew Ruth couldn’t hit with me—that is, real hitting—or run bases with me—or [play] outfield with me. As long as the guys in the league knew that, I didn’t care very much.”

  That last assertion is, to say the least, questionable. In repeated ways over the years he displayed his distaste for and jealousy of Ruth’s flamboyant rise. In the 1924 off-season, Ruth was invited to Dover Hall in Brunswick, Georgia, a rich man’s hunting spa long patronized by Cobb. The mistake of housing the two in the same tent was made. Cobb openly objected to the campmaster. “I’m not living with any nigger,” he announced. Cobb left camp and did not return for several years. Ruth stayed on, possibly unaware of the intended insult. Ballplayers who had seen the Babe’s pale body in the showers knew that despite his flattish nose and rather thick lips, he was German-American. Still, rumor circulated among white supremacists, and Cobb’s words were quoted. During Tiger-Yankee matches, T.C. would call Ruth “nigger,” “ape,” “polecat,” and so on, as he sauntered past the New York dugout, holding his nose. A fight between them was shaping up. T.C.’s bench-jockeying was as crude as he could get, and by 1924 the two would come to blows.

  Jimmie Reese, who had been a coach with the California Angels and once Ruth’s roommate on the Yankees, said of the Dover Hall affair, “It was just like Cobb to call Ruth a black man. Because back then it hurt a fellow. Cobb was no good in the opinion of almost everyone in the league.”

  THERE WAS no bending to him, no mellowing with age. Perhaps pressure from Ruth made him only the more Draconian. Yankee outfielder Ping Bodie told of an incident showing Cobb as incurably out of control as ever. During the warm-up before a Detroit game, Bodie left his bat on the sideline. Cobb tripped over it. He grabbed the bat in a rage and threw it into the stands, which, luckily, were not occupied. Bodie had witnesses who heard Cobb call him “a dirty damned wop.”

  In one of his worst flareups he made the notorious statement of “I fight to kill.” In every dugout it was known that the Georgian did not like Billy Evans, a respected American League umpire since 1906. Feelings heated up in 1919 and thereafter when Cobb questioned many of Evans’s ball-strike counts. He jawed away until Evans drew a line in the dirt; if his critic stepped over it, he would be “run,” or ejected. Along came a late-season game with the Washington Nationals in which Cobb twice was called out on close base-stealing attempts. Evans, a former semipro boxer and Cornell University athlete, made the second of these decisions. He left after the final out for the umpires’ dressing room. Close behind him came Cobb, his face mottled. He banged on the door, cursing and yelling, “Come out of there or I’ll come it and get you!”

  Evans, emerging, was heard to say, “Take it easy.” His hands were out in a peacemaking gesture. But Cobb demanded a fight and Evans obliged him. They met under the stands and players stopped dressing to watch. Walter Johnson of the Nationals tried to stop it and failed. As reported by Rogers Hornsby in his autobiographical My War with Baseball, Evans asked Cobb how he wanted to fight. “No rules,” was the reply. “I fight to kill.”

  For forty-five minutes the two punched and gouged it out. Evans was badly cut at the outset and had his nose broken. An orthodox fighter, he found himself up against blows below the belt, rabbit punches, and knee kicks. Evans had Cobb down at one point. They rolled in the dirt, both bleeding. Cobb’s eleven-year-old son, Tyrus Junior, allowed to watch, danced about, crying, “Hit him harder, Daddy! Hit him harder!”

  Hornsby called it as vicious a scrap as had happened. Cobb pounded the umpire’s head into hard ground. He was still pounding away when players and groundskeepers mercifully broke it up. Evans was carried off to see a doctor. Observers felt that had the brawl continued, Evans could have been gravely hurt, perhaps had his skull fractured.

  Cobb had broken his own rule about turning violent against officials, who had the power to expand the strike zone on a hitter. Evans made no protest to the league office. He took his humiliation silently. But somebody talked, and Cobb was suspended for the balance of a season all but ended.

  “I wasn’t proud of it,” said Cobb to newspapermen who headlined the fight. “But Evans had it in for me and his calls were prejudiced. I had to stop that.”

  THE TIGERS complained that it had been hard enough to live with him before Ruth came along; now it was becoming impossible. After a Navin Field game where he went hitless, home fans booed loudly. One fan invaded the field to jeer. Cobb kicked him in the stomach, then the groin. And kicked him again. An angry crowd grew so dangerous that Frank Navin ordered an escape car to be rushed to the players’ gate. Grouped outside were some two dozen Detroiters leaving the park. A white-faced Cobb walked down a line of fans. To each of them he called, “You want to fight? You want to settle this?” He was alone, no teammate backing him up, while he sought to take on someone—anyone. “I never saw anything like it,” marveled veteran Bobby Veach. “All alone like that, he could have been murdered by that crowd.”

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bsp; “If you’re all cowards—then fuck you!” was the Peach’s last word. He walked to his own parked car and drove away. Detroit had plenty of tough truck drivers and steelworkers, but the insane look to Cobb held them back.

  His rampages were senseless, ongoing, and frightening. His warpath included his home territory of Georgia. There would be a pathetic scene in Atlanta in 1924 involving a paddywagon and another trip by him to a municipal jail. He was many miles from the big league that winter, but when a waitress at Atlanta’s railroad station restaurant handed Cobb his luncheon bill, he threw a tantrum, “That’s a dollar-fifty too much!” he objected. When the waitress replied that the bill was correct, she was subjected to a cursing. The $1.50 matter became a yelling match with the house cashier and manager, during which Cobb tore up the check and used ballpark guttertalk. He raved so wildly that the cashier, until now a Cobb admirer, broke a heavy glass platter over his head, staggering him.

  Policemen arrived. Outside on the street the Georgia Peach felled one cop with a punch to the head. A crowd gathered to watch him wrestle with other officers. Overpowered, he was removed to a nearby jail, where he ranted at a desk sergeant while authorities debated what to do with him. It was all too sad, and after a few hours he was quietly released from custody on his personal bond and without incurring a formal booking.

  Word of his latest outbreak reached Detroit’s front office. Navin was said to have shrugged. It was only one more instance of a destructive neurosis in Cobb whereby he stood above the crowd, enabled by some twisted thinking to inflict pain as he went, to assault people, and feel himself justified. Behavioral scientists didn’t exist in baseball then, but if they had been on the scene, Cobb might well have been found to be suffering from some form of grandiosity or advanced megalomania, or perhaps delusions of persecution. Modern medical men might trace it to the boyhood trauma of his father’s killing by Cobb’s mother—accidental or otherwise. Whatever motivated—or possessed—him, he was the most chilling, the eeriest of all American sport figures.

  His 1919 season performance was more than satisfactory, considering. Although Cobb had been plagued by a succession of injuries, his bat, along with those of Veach (.355 average) and Flagstead (.331) had lifted the surprising Tigers to a fourth-place finish behind the champion Chicago White Sox. For once he had a few members of the team responding to his own standard, a league-leading .384 average—the seventh time he had topped .380—his twelfth batting title, and 161 runs produced. His springtime doubters agreed that he was as difficult as ever to put out, to catch in a rundown, or to deal with on well-placed bunts. Navin had made a reported profit of $110,000 at the gate.

  The dark notes were Ruth’s sustained progress with the radical home run, and unsubstantiated rumors that the Chicago White Sox had thrown the World Series just ended to Cincinnati. The early “buzz” on a fixed Series reached T.C. in October, when he was back hunting and fishing at Bob Woodruff’s ranch in Wyoming. He was notified by President John Wheeler of the Wheeler News Syndicate in New York that manager Kid Gleason’s White Sox had played to lose in an eight-game Series believed to have been choreographed by big-time gamblers.

  Cobb did not need Wheeler’s information. He had attended that Series, once more in the role of press commentator, and came away fully convinced of crooked work. Privately, he told Woodruff, “Fixes have been going on since 1910 … when they tried to beat me out for the batting title.” He had always seen the hand of gamblers behind that attempt to make Nap Lajoie the champion, a scheme that came close to succeeding.

  In San Francisco that winter he predicted to Yankee pitcher Frank “Lefty” O’Doul, a Bay Area resident, “This is going to cause a lot of hell.” The American public did not learn of the Series scandal until almost a year after the fact, when stunning disclosures were made and, finally, eight White Soxers were banned for life.

  BEFORE LEAVING Wyoming, Cobb bought a dozen head of white-faced cattle for a beef herd he planned to develop on land outside Augusta. There was still some farmer in him. In San Francisco for part of that winter he managed the local Seals club of the four-team Pacific Coast Winter League. This was a sort of Ringling Circus operation. Fans walked right into the dugouts—to chat with players—and were kicked out by an irate Cobb; gamblers laid bets at fieldside; the Los Angeles entry in the PCWL had a chimpanzee mascot, “Hairy Harry,” who wore a little umpire’s cap. Phil Douglas, a pitcher with the New York Giants in the regular season, was assigned his own private detective to keep “Shuffling Phil” out of saloons.

  In the PCWL he experienced local scandal. On October 20, 1919, the deputy district attorney of Los Angeles County charged before a grand jury that some of the PCWL clubs and the parent Pacific Coast League were controlled by a powerful gambling ring “which has cleaned up enormous sums and distributed thousands of dollars to ballplayers who did their bidding.” The accusation named other league members, but not the San Francisco Seals, led by Cobb. In the end, four players were thrown out of baseball, a regional prelude to the “Black Sox” affair now brewing in Chicago. Cobb quit the Seals soon after, fearing that the infection might have spread into his camp.

  On top of everything else, there was gunfire in the still-untamed West. Cobb reported, “I did okay in California in 1919 and 1920 [when he returned to again manage San Francisco] except when gamblers got to shooting at each other in the stands … Bullets were flying around the park.” Quarreling gamblers used pistols in this league. “But I stuck around for a while. I was paid twelve hundred dollars for every game I appeared in as a player, too, and I hit those western boys for about fifteen thousand dollars in a few months.” In the minor league, any game with Ty Cobb in it was a sellout or close to it. Against the Los Angeles club one afternoon, he toured fifteen bases—three home runs and a triple.

  Enjoying the California weather, he considered moving there when retirement came—if he could sever his Georgia roots. He was still out west in November of 1919 when several Detroit businessmen called to say that Hughie Jennings would not be retained much longer as Tigers’ manager. Twelve seasons in a hot seat had driven the Scranton Irishman to frustration and to drink. He might last one more season. Cobb was deep-sea fishing off Catalina Island with author Zane Grey when he was advised that Navin was thinking of offering Jennings’s job to him. Cobb replied informally that he would not accept the Detroit post, if it was offered. “I made that clear to Navin,” he noted in his memoirs. “Running a team like Detroit was a trap.”

  Yet he couldn’t go on hitting at a .380 pace indefinitely, and Detroit people hoped he would change his mind during the coming months. He wrote to a friend, “What I figured was that I’d get a manager offer somewhere else. Maybe at Philadelphia. Connie Mack was in terrible shape—five straight last-place finishes.”

  No offer from Philadelphia appeared in late 1919, nor in 1920. The Peach’s soaring averages would fall by 50 percentage points to .334 in the latter of those two years, and his steals would diminish. He would be advised by specialists that he again needed to consider eye surgery. Eye trouble of the past, which came and went, had left him prepared for an operation someday. Time for a thirty-three-year-old to reconsider his future.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  NEW DECADE—NEW ENEMIES—NEW JOB

  Bell Syndicate of New York City, a sports-promotion agency, arranged a vaudeville tour for Cobb early in 1920. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio small towns he stood onstage and hit balls fastened to a cord suspended from above—out over the audience. When the ball returned he would whack it again to the bang of a drum. A brief lecture by Cobb on grip and follow-through ended the performance. In the hustings it filled theaters. “Made me two hundred, three hundred dollars per night,” he said.

  Frank Navin and the ace of his team reached an uneasy peace in 1920. For his part, Cobb, in the clubhouse, laid off disparaging his boss’s knowledge of baseball. Insiders were surprised when they stopped barking at each other and appeared to be amiable. Navin even left h
is private train compartment when on road trips to play poker with Cobb, Harry Heilmann, Jennings, and others. “Navin couldn’t play poker any better than he knew ballplayers,” related Cobb. “We cleaned him out at cards.”

  Regarding his then-current contract, Cobb was jaunty in recollection: “I had Navin whipsawed. The town would have boycotted the Tigers if he tried to deal me away … so the fat man was paying me twenty-five thousand dollars without too much moaning and groaning.”

  Median salary of a team of also-rans was an estimated $6,500, or about average pay in the two leagues. The lowest-paid Tiger received about $2,000. Navin often quoted a survey that showed that 60 percent of American families existed on $2,000 or less yearly. Players had no complaints, he argued.

  But if Cobb were to agree to take over field-managing the depressed Tigers for more money—$40,000 was a bruited-about figure—one person who would not be pleased was Charlie Cobb. Her marriage of 1908, at age seventeen, was disintegrating. Her husband habitually didn’t return home for dinner, while using his rooms at the Detroit Athletic Club as a social and business-conference center. Charlie, delicate of health and needing his companionship, was distraught. Once the 1920 season opened, she packed up and left Motor City with their four children, Ty junior, eleven, Shirley, nine, Herschel, three, and Beverly, just a few months old, for the family home in Augusta, an act of independence now becoming habitual with her.

  Reconciliations would follow, during which another child was born. Yet it had been a mismated marriage from the beginning—a girl from the well-bred, affluent Lombard clan of Georgia tied to a brawler from a world of foul-mouthed roughnecks. “Mr. Cobb,” as Charlie still called him, provided well, but offered little more in the area of shared enjoyment, of companionship.