Cobb

by Al Stump

  Grantland Rice, always a “friendly,” visited the Peach at the Commodore. An irate Cobb greeted him with, “United Press lied and now everybody is doing it. They’re saying that Chapman was slow in ducking and avoiding blame on Mays. Off the record, I’d like to see Ban Johnson run that bastard out of the league. But you know Johnson—always protecting the pitcher.” League president Johnson confusedly announced on that weekend that Mays might not pitch again, then exonerated him; big Carl was back at work within a week and won his next game with ease.

  Rice’s subsequent account of his Commodore meeting with Cobb on a Friday, published hours before a Saturday opener with the Yanks, went, “I found him in bed with a temperature of 102. He was as mad as I’d ever seen him. Both of his thighs were a mass of adhesive and torn flesh, testimony to some rough base-stealing. It was enough to turn your stomach. Ty was up to his chin in morning papers—all blasting him for that interview back in Boston … I told him the first thing he needed was a doctor.

  “He said never mind the doctor, he had to be at the game tomorrow and face the wolves.” He asked Rice to file a wire story that he had not criticized Mays. Rice did so, but it was too late.

  “On Saturday,” described Rice in his 1953 autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting, “33,000 stormed the old Polo Grounds—Yankee Stadium wasn’t completed until 1923. Cobb didn’t take batting practice, in fact didn’t appear on the field until ten minutes before the game. When he did show … making the long walk in from the center-field clubhouse, the crowd stood as one and booed.”

  On his way in, he roughly shoved out of his way the Yankee batting-practice pitcher. He stopped near home plate, stared at the audience, and bowed toward the press box, as if saying, There are the people responsible for this. Among those yelling crudities at him from the bench was Babe Ruth.

  Old New York gave him the worst jeering of his career. The Polo Grounds rocked. In a return gesture, seemingly aimed at his teammates for not speaking up in his support over the Chapman-Mays matter, he did not sit in the Tiger dugout. Until game time he sat in a lower grandstand seat, as if inviting physical attack.

  Detroit drubbed the Yankees, 10–3. Cobb had one single, one stolen base, and scored one run. He made a racing catch of Ruth’s long line drive. Next day, Sunday, before thirty-six thousand, he gained more substantial revenge. In an 11–9 slugout won by the Tigers, the Peach was next to unstoppable: five base hits in six times at bat, two RBIs, and another run-saving catch. Some Polo Grounders cheered him for that retaliation. One day later, facing a Carl Mays returned to duty, he added two more hits, even while Mays coolly delivered a 10–0 shutout. In the series’ fourth game, Detroit was the 5–3 winner. Cobb starred afield and doubled.

  Fans noticed no incidents between Cobb and Mays. But there was a concealed one. In his autobiography the Peach spoke of walking past Mays during the game and piping, “Hello, Bean-O, old boy.” Wrote Cobb, “I wanted to upset him.”

  His satisfaction was incomplete but pleasant. “The three games we won out of four killed the Yankees,” he pointed out. New York finished the 1920 season precisely three games out of first place.

  BACK IN Detroit to conclude a wasted season, Cobb awakened on the morning of September 28, 1920, to glaring headlines: “CHICAGO SOX PLAYERS CONFESS SELLING GAMES—EIGHT ARE INDICTED: ALL SUSPENDED.” The “unholy octet,” named by a Chicago grand jury, stood indicted of laying down to the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series, allowing the Reds to win the playoff, five games to three. All but one were still on the White Sox, who at that point were trailing Cleveland by only 6 percentage points in the standings, with a full week’s games remaining to be played. Chicago owner Charlie Comiskey had no choice but to suspend the dirty players, even though it brought a decisive end to the club’s pennant hopes.

  The news itself was not surprising to Cobb, who had long realized that the 1919 Series had involved rottenness to the core. What may have been astounding even to baseball insiders like himself, however, was the magnitude of the operation. The stunning fix had been wholesale. Those facing prosecution were two starting pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams, almost the entire White Sox infield—George “Buck” Weaver, Swede Risberg, and Arnold “Chick” Gandil—along with outfielders Shoeless Joe Jackson and Oscar “Hap” Felsch and utility man Fred McMullin. They had committed the incredible frameup for gamblers’ money. Cicotte, one of the more artistic of pitchers, and celebrated slugger Jackson confessed all, leading to implication of six others. The main gamblers involved were identified as New York’s gangland-connected Arnold Rothstein, ex–boxing champ Abe Attell, John “Sport” Sullivan of Chicago, and Philadelphia’s Billy Maharg. Investigation would indicate that the fixers had offered sums ranging from a reported $10,000 to $100,000, with some portions of that paid to some of the players. Rothstein, later shot and killed in 1928 by unnamed underworld parties, left behind in his files affidavits showing that he put up $80,000 in bribe money.

  In the role of commentator for the Wheeler Syndicate, Cobb had attended the “bagged” Series and for the past twelve months had known what had happened. He had no comment to make to the press after the scandal broke. Privately Cobb remarked to Jennings, “When they get to the bottom of this, Charley Comiskey’s cheap pay will come out.” Jennings didn’t need a reminder that the Sox owner paid Cicotte, after his fourteen years in the league and recent won-and-lost marks of 28–12 in 1917 and 29–7 in 1919, $5,000 per season. Happy Felsch and Buck Weaver were at $4,000 and $4,500. Joe Jackson, currently hitting .351, drew $6,000. Cobb knew that the White Sox—now universally called the Black Sox—had quietly been talking team strike. Comiskey’s payroll was said to be the lowest anywhere in the majors. (In point of fact his salaries were not markedly lower than other owners’, but that’s what people thought.)

  Drawing 236,928 customers, the infamous Series had richly rewarded Comiskey and some other franchise holders. It grossed $722,110, or nearly one-quarter of a million dollars above the former record set in 1912 for games between the Boston Red Sox and New York Giants. Cobb claimed that it had been only a matter of time until the Sox found relief through the Rothsteins and Attells. “A dead lock to happen,” he said later on.

  Cobb remembered certain on-the-spot observations made before the dirty work began. He had registered at Cincinnati’s Sinton Hotel the day before the opening game. The Sinton’s lobby teemed with flashy types—not only the usual ticket scalpers, but gamblers in number. Although no New York team was involved, he noticed that a large eastern contingent had showed up. Cobb recognized Sport Sullivan, odds-setter and bookie. Six or so years earlier, Sullivan had been banned from Detroit’s clubhouse area. Arnold Rothstein, too, was greeting people in the lobby and laying bets. This was Cobb’s first tip that the Series’ outcome might be predetermined.

  Another tip was that early odds strangely favored the White Sox only slightly, and then moved, in a rush of money, to favor the Reds by 6–5 and 7–5. That didn’t add up. Chicago definitely was the stronger team, with a club batting average on the season of .287 against Cincinnati’s .263. The winner needed to take five of nine games of a Series that had been extended from the usual four of seven—and the Sox had a 29-game winner, the knuckleballing Cicotte, and Lefty Williams, a 23–11 pitcher.

  Cobb was warned away from making a bet. White Sox manager Kid Gleason, who had once tried to obtain the Peach for his team, remarked to him, “Some funny things have happened to us [over the past season]. Damned funny.” Cobb replied, “Yes, Kid, I’ve noticed.” He sat in the press box as an observer and watched the Reds in game number one knock Cicotte out of the box in the fourth inning and win 9–1. In game two, the Reds won, 4–2, over Williams. Some writers were suspicious about the White Sox’s erratic play. Then Cobb learned by the grapevine that Gleason secretly had gone to Comiskey to report something fishy going on. Comiskey reportedly consulted National League president John Heydler, who refused to believe the story. Other alarms
were sounded to high officials. Nothing was done to stop the Reds from closing out one of the greatest of upsets in eight games. Cincinnati won twice by shutouts and once by a score of 10–5.

  “Another thing I heard before the rats got busy,” recalled Cobb, “was that it had been arranged for Cicotte to hit the first batter up in the first inning with a pitch. That was the signal that the fix was on … Well, Cicotte hit Maury Rath right off … so I knew for sure we had a stacked deck.

  “Any ball game can be easily fixed,” mused Cobb as an elderly man. “All you need is a pitcher to take a little off his fastball and a shortstop–second base combination to mess up the doubleplay.”

  In Cobb’s book and that of many others, Comiskey was as despicable as the Black Sox. Much evidence accumulated in the winter following the Series indicated that Comiskey had to be aware of the facts. Yet he dismissed all the evidence as hearsay. Before exposure came, he signed suspected players to 1920 contracts, and in fact gave salary raises to Cicotte, Williams, Jackson, Felsch and others.

  The “Square Sox,” those players who had been guiltless, had to play the 1920 season alongside teammates they loathed. Honest Sox second baseman Eddie Collins, a future Hall of Famer, one day confided to Cobb, “I almost quit the game, Ty. Everytime I looked at a guy I wondered if he was trying.” Yet such was the talent on the team that they almost won again, before the suspensions were announced.

  NATIONWIDE, THE reaction to the news of the fix was shock, disillusionment, and disgust. The World Series had attained such a devoted, quasi-religious mass following that in the century’s second decade it outranked all native sports classics—heavyweight title fights, the Indianapolis 500 auto race, the Kentucky Derby, any tennis event, and even the Olympic Games when the U.S. was heavily represented. A leading historian of baseball, Harold Seymour, years later quoted a pre-1920 sports-journal poem to show how naive the public had been:

  For the baseball season is so soaring

  High above all, serene

  Unaffected by the roaring

  For the grand old game is clean!

  But now conspiracy of a high degree had been uncovered, and public faith tottered. Cicotte, Shoeless Joe, Felsch, and Williams signed confessions. On September 28, 1920, a Chicago grand jury brought in indictments against eight Black Soxers. But then the paperwork and confessions were stolen—perhaps by the state at the probable instigation of Arnold Rothstein—and cases against the accused were so weakened that the state’s attorney general admitted that he could not win in a trial proceeding. After legal and other delays, on August 2, 1921, a jury returned a decision of not guilty of intent to defraud for all the Black Sox, along with some of the gambler-fixers. It was said that some of the jurors, after the verdict, threw a courtroom party, bringing in drinks and carrying the acquitted players around on their shoulders. To much of the U.S. press, the decision was a terrible miscarriage of justice, an official whitewashing from the league’s top on down.

  The rejoicing was of short duration, for organized baseball was now being run by a man named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Even before the Black Sox came along, a struggle had gone on among owners and league presidents to reshape the game under a commission of no more than three men, able to rule broadly over everything that occurred. The three-man idea was dropped after long wrangling, and the magnates hit upon hiring a single czar who would prevent more scandal, with its potential to cause fan boycotts and reduce receipts. Fifty-four-year-old federal court judge Ken Landis, small in stature and without a college degree, was a famously tough jurist, incorruptible, and a lifelong baseball fan. He was also a notorious egotist, a prohibitionist, and a man who hated gambling in all its forms.

  Landis took office as the game’s first high commissioner in January 1921. Owners ceded him unlimited power. By contract Landis had the authority “to take punitive action against leagues, clubs, officers and players found guilty of detrimental conduct.” Among his first acts as suzerain was to disregard the jury’s verdict and banish all of the Black Soxers from professional ball for life. Landis was a law unto himself. Beyond his initial crackdown, Landis threatened to blacklist any player found taking part in a game in which one of the ineligibles appeared. “Landis batting cleanup,” went the expression; “God help the unholy.”

  LANDIS’S OBVIOUS intent to investigate ballplayers’ habits worried Cobb in the winter of 1920–21. The commissioner’s office interrogated various prominent players on many teams, including Cobb. He was clean. Other Tigers were checked out. It was clear that Landis’s purge was far from ended. One result was that John McGraw and owner Charles Stoneham of the Giants were forced to divest themselves of the ownership of the Oriental Park and Jockey Club racetrack in faraway Cuba. Any form of gambling was out for management and players. Cobb had plans to buy stock in a Canadian track at Ontario, but this was now prohibited by Landis.

  He wasn’t talking, but Cobb knew of corruption in locations other than Chicago and Cincinnati. He was not surprised when Landis, between 1921 and 1924, after a lengthy survey of conditions, excommunicated four New York Giants—outfielder Jimmy O’Connell, pitcher Phil Douglas, outfielder Benny Kauff, and coach Cozy Dolan—for gambling and other violations. Still more fell, among them infielder Joe Gedeon of St. Louis and infielder Eugene Paulette of the Philadelphia Phillies.

  The fixed 1919 Series seemed more and more to be a backdrop to what went on behind scenes at ballparks, bars, and poolrooms. “Back then anything went you could get away with,” Cobb stated in 1960. “There were crooks all over the place … I advised Navin to hire himself a detective.” One day in 1921 Cobb walked past a Detroit pool-ticket room where for a dollar and up you could buy a chance on who won or lost, an Americanized form of parimutuel betting. Three Tigers were there, just leaving.

  “Get the hell away from here,” ordered Cobb.

  “Oh, we’re just looking around,” they protested.

  “Get away now and don’t come back or I’ll turn you over to Navin’s cop. Or would you rather talk to Landis?”

  Navin, indeed, had employed a detective, a huge, retired policeman named “Sheriff” Crowe. The Tigers were said to resent Crowe, but with Cobb maintaining his own watch, there were no Detroit scandals in the early 1920s.

  Weighing heavily upon Cobb in 1920, and inexorably gaining in popularity, was the figure of George Herman Ruth, who was upstaging all of the four-hundred-odd men in the big time. The Babe in his beginning Yankee years was moving more and more into the national consciousness, collecting more columns of press space than any individual other than Cobb had produced. Moreover, Ruth was coming along in the role of savior of scandal-wracked baseball. His clubbing was helping in a major way to minimize the damage done by the 1919 World Series, although that damage was ongoing, as evidenced by Judge Landis’s ejections of more players. The Babe hit more homers than entire ball clubs. He provoked an atavistic longing for someone not confined to the old game of science, and who blasted five-hundred- to six-hundred-footers into “Ruthville,” wherever the park might be. He was lovable and magnetic. People dogged him on the streets. United Press would soon run a newspaper box feature each time he furiously lofted a ball out to the Knothole Kids waiting in the streets and parking lots.

  It would become news when a bee stung the Babe, when he was jailed for speeding, when a “crazed” fan threatened him with a knife, when he bought his wife a mink coat, arrived at work with a hangover, smashed his bat in two after striking out, had lunch with a movie star, or even lit a big Havana cigar. Following 1920, in which Ruth averaged .376, with an unbelievable 54 homers and a record slugging average of .847, Cobb’s detractors in effect told him to step aside. Hercules had arrived to take over.

  Veteran baseball people still saw the Peach as the best in the business. Tris Speaker declared that “it goes without saying that Cobb still is the greatest ballplayer around.” Yankee manager Miller Huggins, of the old school, also stuck to his view that to those who knew inside baseball, Ruth sti
ll had a way to go to catch Cobb for ability to start a rally and sustain it, to supply the clutch base hit, lay the bunt, and generally disrupt the defense. Although he was Ruth’s manager, Hug confided what he believed to insiders. At the approach of 1921, as Cobb perceived it, Ruth was not yet totally proven, and things might change to the Peach’s advantage. Greatness, to him, meant something that came after only ten years of performance.

  Yet the Bambino’s prowess undoubtedly figured in a crucial change of mind on Cobb’s part. At various points since 1918 he had brushed off Navin’s offers to him to replace Hughie Jennings and assume the position of player-manager. Yet to take over as manager would obviously center fresh attention on Cobb. Where Ruth would be confined to hitting, fielding, and spot pitching, Cobb would have the status of commander of the whole show. Should the Tigers start winning—that chance was there, if not likely—he might top anything he had yet achieved. Acquiring new personnel would be the key to a comeback. That, and kicking some lazy Detroit tails or trading them.

  He had gone on turning down Navin until late 1920, when Walter O. Briggs, an auto-body millionaire of Detroit, made an emotional appeal. Briggs had recently bought an estimated $250,000 interest in Navin’s franchise, and was pledged to make Detroit once again a contender. It was Cobb’s duty, he declared, to save the Tigers by taking over as manager.

  Said Cobb to Briggs, “I don’t want the responsibility. Also it would hurt my hitting and I won’t have that.”

  “Give it a try,” urged Briggs. “It could lead to a partial ownership in the franchise.” Briggs knew that Cobb very much wanted that.

  “Hire Kid Gleason,” advised Cobb. “He’s a winner and you can forget the Black Sox thing. He had no part in it, as everyone knows.” The fifty-four-year-old Gleason, nonplaying manager of the despised Sox, was tactically as smart as they came.

  Cobb continued to say no to managing while off game hunting in the South. Then, at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans early in December 1920, he ran across E. A. Batchelor, a Detroit sportswriter in town to cover the University of Detroit–Loyola football game. “There’s no two ways about it,” coaxed Batchelor. “The whole town wants you to manage and, if you don’t, Navin will give the job to Pants Rowland.”