Cobb

by Al Stump

  That disturbed Cobb. In his ghostwritten book, My Life in Baseball, he stated, “Big leaguers considered Rowland a bush-league manager. He’d never appeared as a player in a game of major league ball. He was a lucky phony … had been released at Chicago to bring in Gleason. I hated to think of Rowland in charge.”

  Batchelor went on, “If they sign Rowland, could you play under him?”

  “I’d have to think that over,” returned Cobb.

  Batchelor phoned Navin in Detroit to report that his man seemed to be wavering.

  Cobb summarized what followed. “I was in a unique position for a ballplayer. Newspapers had a stock line, ‘Ty Cobb, the only millionaire ballplayer in history.’ By 1921 I had added investments in the auto industry, stocks and bonds, real estate, cotton, and Coca-Cola … had accumulated a fortune outside of baseball. I was independent of my salary and not tempted by the pay raise accompanying the manager’s position. But the reputation of the Tigers as steady losers did bother me. I could see many things that had to be done.”

  Two weeks before New Year’s Day of 1921, he made the carefully considered decision to accept. His takeover would mean that Rowland would not get his hands on two dandy Tiger newcomers: catcher Johnny Bassler and infielder Lu Blue, both with .300 potential, both defensively solid. Nor would Pants Rowland be in charge and mismanage Harry Heilmann, by now a feared power hitter—one in a million, said Heilmann fans. He could play first base as well as the outfield. Another motive for Cobb was to show his versatility. Tris Speaker, his longtime rival for all-around honors, had managed the Cleveland Indians into the last World Series while hitting a big .388 in his role as player, a true mark of greatness. In the past there had been others who doubled as player-manager and won pennants: Frank Chance, Fielder Jones, Jake Stahl, Jimmy Collins, Fred Clarke.

  All factors duly weighed, Cobb agreed to talk with Navin, who in December was in New York for the American League winter meetings. They conferred at the Hotel Vanderbilt. Cobb insisted on a one-year contract. He would not commit beyond that. This appeared to be cautionary, in the event that the Tigers flopped (“It was for that reason—and because I didn’t get along with Navin,” he said in later years.) In negotiating, he required that Navin agree not to interfere with his direction of the team, and grant to him all decisions on scouting of minor-leaguers, accept his primary say-so on who would be signed, traded, or sold, and give him a voice on salaries paid. (“Otherwise Navin would have tried to tell me who to pitch and when.”)

  It was a lot to demand. Navin deliberated for most of a day at the Vanderbilt. A deadlock was broken when Walter Briggs sided with Cobb. He would be paid $35,000 per year—up from his present $20,000-with-bonuses player’s salary—and given the private office Jennings had enjoyed, along with expenses paid for the odd trip home to Georgia. At $35,000 and a few thousand more in previously established bonuses, he would become the highest-paid director of field operations in the game, other than part-owner John McGraw of the Giants and, possibly, Speaker in Cleveland.

  On his birthday, December 18, he signed to boss the Tigers in 1921. “I had my lawyers read the contract three times,” he wrote in a memoir. “I didn’t trust Navin.”

  Thereby he also became, along with Speaker, one of only two player-managers then active in the majors. In the lobby, newsmen waited for the official word. “Well, I did it, boys,” announced Cobb, while Navin and Briggs stood smilingly by. “I feel like I’ve undergone a change of life.” To questioners he replied, “I’ll expect a hustling club. If I have to crack down on players, that will be time to clear them off the roster.”

  Damon Runyon of the New York American, who no longer wrote about baseball regularly and was gaining fame with his fiction, thought enough of Cobb’s signing to join the press turnout. “That’s quite a birthday present you’re getting—thirty-five thousand dollars,” Runyon said. The Peach had always liked Runyon, who as a sportswriter had not been one of the New York sect who attacked his every aggressive act. Yet now he was short-tempered with the writer: “You’re wrong. It’s anything but a present. This thing has been forced on me!”

  At a moment that called for a celebration—how many men ever got to manage in the big leagues?—he was experiencing doubts that he had made the wise move. His reputation would be on the line. “I had signed away my independence,” he told me, forty years later. “Up to now I’d been judged on what I did, alone. But no manager who ever lived could beat the blame when his men fucked up—didn’t give it everything they had, boozed it up, alibied their mistakes, faked injuries. There were enough of that kind on Detroit’s contract list to give me a headache. I’d be judged by what they did. And there wasn’t much time before training began to hang a price on some and run them off.”

  Asked by Georgia friends that winter what would happen to his career, Cobb pulled a long face. “My hitting will get back to normal, because this time I’ll be bearing down,” he predicted to his cousin, Harrison Gailey. “But I won’t stay more than one season as manager if Veach, Sutherland, Young, Bush, Jones”—naming 1921 roster men—“lay down on me and we finish far out. I won’t be associated with quitters.” He told Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola, “It will take three years for me to rebuild this team. Seventh place was where they belonged last season. The first thing I’ll do is teach them to hit for percentage, not for the fences. I expect to see that job through.”

  In February he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to inspect the Tigers’ new training camp. Breckenridge Park was rutty, but no worse than the poor fields where Detroit had worked out in the past. If Navin wanted to save money in renting the place, Cobb did not propose to begin their changed relationship by putting up a squawk.

  Back home, he met with associates who were negotiating to buy the minor-league Augusta franchise and physical plant. Cobb’s end of it would be nearly fifty thousand dollars. He could afford the investment. When the deal went through, it meant he was co-owner of minor-league teams in two states, Rhode Island and Georgia, the wintertime manager of the San Francisco Seals in the Coast League, player-manager in Detroit, the owner of auto dealerships, cattle and cotton acreage, and holder of what he hoped would be a continued strong position on Wall Street.

  One busy fellow … and pushing his luck.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “WHY CAN’T THEY DO IT MY WAY?”

  “How much help are you prepared to give me?” I asked of Navin and his partners at the start of 1921.

  “Everything you need to win,” Navin came back. “My partners go along with that.”

  ……

  “His weak spine showing all the way, Navin did nothing of the sort. He sabotaged his own ball club. In my six years as manager, I had the worst ownership any manager ever suffered. At the same time, Navin wasn’t giving the government an honest tax account on his gate receipts.”

  Ty Cobb

  My Life in Baseball: The True Record

  Thunderstorms and lightning off the Gulf of Mexico slowed spring-training workouts for a while. Some observers joked that Cobb had brought the stormy weather with him. He arrived early in San Antonio in 1921, took a suite at the Alamo Hotel, and called in the press. The “pussycat” Tigers, he declared, would be a different group than the one the fans had been seeing. Item: they would reform their off-field habits. Item: infielders would turn more double plays or be benched. Item: the Tigers would come out fighting.

  “Anyone not hustling will be gone,” said Cobb. “If we don’t finish better than last year, I will give up the job—that I guarantee.”

  New York and other eastern writers were not overwhelmed by his offer. The seventh-place squad he had inherited was by no means hopelessly deteriorated in all categories. It still had some strong bats, in Heilmann’s, Veach’s, and Cobb’s, and an improving Howard Ehmke among the pitchers. A miracle worker wasn’t needed to elevate Detroit from a previous 61–93 in 1920 to sixth place or better.

  A harsh boss laid down new rules. Before the full ros
ter had assembled and while he was playing golf at a local course, he was asked by Harry Bullion of the Detroit Free Press, “What about golf for the players?” Under Jennings they had been allowed a game now and then. “That’s out for everyone,” he said. “I’ll confiscate the clubs of anyone showing up with them. It’s a totally different swing from batting, and fouls you up.” Yet Cobb, who planned to play 140 or so baseball games himself, could swing drivers, two-irons, and niblicks in his spare time.

  He also ordered practice on Sunday. Everyone was confined to camp on weekends except the boss, who was often gone from town, checking out minor-leaguers of the Southwest and visiting Texas-born Tris Speaker at his Cleveland Indians camp in Fort Worth. Cobb and Speaker had become mutual admirers, and that spring the Peach hosted a party for the Indians’ manager, a rock of a man who had pushed Cobb to some of his records and in 1916 briefly had usurped his batting championship. At the party, talk turned to the best way for a player to prepare for retirement.

  “Buy Coca-Cola stock for sure,” Cobb advised Tris and Philadelphia sportswriter Tiny Maxwell. “Don’t sell for a little profit. Forget about it for a few years and live off it when you want to retire.” By not taking the tip, Maxwell estimated, he lost out on $240,000 to $300,000 by 1929, when Coca-Cola, despite a national depression, declared three major stock dividends. Speaker did buy in, Cobb told me, and prospered.

  Speaker found the Peach to be more tense and nervous than ever before. He advised Cobb to slow down or he would burn out by midseason. In the mid-1950s, Speaker recalled to me, “He was taking it all too big, determined to make something overnight of a weak team.” Cobb’s hair had thinned out to about one-third of its former growth. Worry lines furrowed his cheeks. He had a new habit of clenching his hands during conversations. He took several more drinks than was usual. The gossip among the Tigers was that T.C. had become a closet drinker. That rumor was superfluous; by habit he had been taking on extra bourbon rations in private after games.

  Imposing a midnight curfew on the club at San Antonio, he drove the Tigers harder in the next weeks than clubs normally are goaded. Bunting practice by the hour was ordered for all. He worked long hours to infuse some of his passion for winning into an organization known for its malingering under Jennings. Cobb made no pretense of feeling anything but contempt for a confirmed second-division bunch. “All we hear from morning to night is baseball,” groused such veterans as Donie Bush, known at Navin Field as Error-every-other-inning Bush. Sport-page critics wrote laudatory columns about how Cobb was lighting fires under .230 hitters and “reorganizing” the whole team. They were intrigued by the way he passed out cigars to men who did well in exhibition games. To be seen smoking a “Cobb stogie” meant you were doing well.

  But seasoned hands such as pitchers Dutch Leonard and Hooks Dauss and fielders Veach and Heilmann liked a night out on San Antonio town, and Cobb’s device of hiring hotel bellhops to report on what time they checked in was considered lowdown-sneaky. Cobb said that he jumped on Leonard with, “The report shows you got in at two A.M.”

  “No,” protested Leonard, “I was inside the hotel at midnight.”

  “Where in the hotel? In some cunt’s room?”

  “No, in the bar—by myself.”

  “You were drinking from midnight to two A.M.?”

  “Well, I had a couple,” admitted Leonard. “Just to make me sleepy.”

  “You’re fined fifty dollars!” roared Cobb. And he made the penalty stick.

  John McGraw’s New York Giants, also training in San Antonio, lived across Alamo Plaza from the Tigers’ hotel. No Tiger was permitted to cross that square to visit with the Giants. Cobb refused unconditionally to schedule even one training game with his neighbors. Although San Antonio citizens were eager for such a pairing, and everyone from the mayor on down protested, Cobb was adamant. In part it was a case of reverberations from 1917, when the Giants and Tigers had staged a springtime brawl at Waxahachie, Texas, ending with Cobb twisting McGraw’s nose. McGraw had seethed ever since.

  To complaints that the feuding was unfair to San Antonio fans, Cobb said, “I have no use for that bigmouthed McGraw. He and his team don’t exist.” McGraw sent a messenger across Alamo Plaza to notify the Peach that the Giants would play Detroit only if Cobb personally apologized. “Tell McGraw he can go to hell!” jeered Cobb.

  It seemed silly, but if you looked closer, the matter ran deeper than a single vendetta. Baseball tradition as far back as the 1880s held that an opponent remains your enemy at all times. No fraternizing permitted. If Detroit met the National Leaguers now, the next thing you could expect was that the players would be talking back and forth. That would violate a precept fundamental to Cobb. His standing order for all preseason games, although inconsequential affairs, was that hostility prevailed, as in the proverb “Take not notice of the despicable enemy.”

  He held fast on this point for all of his retired life. “I can’t believe the hearts-and-flowers stuff I see in modern baseball,” he wrote. “Rivals practically stroll arm-in-arm. A runner on first base chats back and forth with the baseman. Hitters ask catchers how they’re feeling, and not to distract them. Off the field they play cards, have drinks together. The feuding, combative spirit that made the game idolized is washed up now. Pro football, where they don’t kiss each other, is taking over as the No. 1 sport. For shame.”

  So the two clubs never crossed swords in 1921. Casey Stengel was about to be traded by the Phillies to the Giants, and was in San Antonio. “We wuz old friends,” Casey recalled, “but when I passed Ty on the street, he wouldn’t speak to me. He had a lot of road apples [unskilled bodies] on hand that March. I understood how he felt.”

  Cobb banished his bull pen from open view and concealed it behind the grandstand. With logic he explained, “Why distract a pitcher by showing he might get the hook at any moment?” In Detroit he also ordered the pen situated out of sight. His mound staff already lacked confidence. His three best holdovers from 1920 had posted disappointing win-loss numbers: Dauss, 13–21; Howard Ehmke, 15–18; and Leonard, 10–17. “Far better for my men to see the other side warming up a new arm. Helps us in reverse.”

  COBB HAD not neglected getting in shape and tuning his own batting during the spring. At twilight in San Antonio he often was seen practicing, spraying hits to right field, then hitting a sizzler to center field, then a line drive to left field, followed by an hour of bunting drill. His mastery of hitting to all fields was at a lifetime peak. He demonstrated as much in the regular-season opener with the Chicago White Sox, who were now engaged in rebuilding themselves after the Black Sox debacle. On a chilly April 14, before twenty-six thousand at Navin Field, the rookie manager doubled in a run and scored a second run in a 6–5 nip-and-tuck victory. Harry Heilmann helped clinch it with a run-scoring double.

  Now there began one of the most captivating races for the American League batting title since Cobb versus Lajoie in 1910. This one, uniquely, was pupil against teacher. Slug Heilmann, age twenty-seven, Cobb age thirty-five. Since 1914, Cobb had coached Heilmann in the science of applying a bat’s center of percussion to a ball in or close to the strike zone. Because of the astronomical figures they achieved in their duel, fans everywhere were entranced. “I told Harry that I’d give him a fine whiteface breeding bull from my herd in Augusta,” Cobb said, “if he outhit me for average on the season. He was that far advanced.”

  Their intramural rivalry began with Cobb off to a poor start and far behind. Their chart from early to midseason read:

  Within that span, and with Heilmann well in front, another use was found for heavyweight Harry by his boss. Momentarily the Tigers stood in the league’s first division. Cobb’s stratagems of platooning, using pinch hitters, playing the waiting game, laying the bunt, and stealing were working better than expected. But, seeing no pennant in sight, he contrived a scheme. Outfielder Bobby Veach was too easygoing to suit his manager. Veach came to bat with a smile on his face, a friendly fellow to
one and all—even to umpires. Said Cobb to Heilmann, “I want you to make him mad. Real mad. You are batting behind Veach, so while you’re waiting, call him a yellow-belly, a quitter, and a dog. Call him everything in the book. Ride hell out of him. Take that smile off Veach’s face.”

  Heilmann objected. He liked Veach, did not want to lose his goodwill. Tearing into a teammate was not the amiable Harry’s style.

  “Just do it,” ordered Cobb. “No arguments.”

  Only upon Cobb’s promise that at season’s end he would inform Veach that it had been a setup done for his own good did Heilmann reluctantly agree. In his history, The Detroit Tigers, Fred Lieb quoted a source, Detroit Times sports editor Bud Shaver, on the result of Operation Veach:

  “Heilmann abused Veach as a bush-leaguer with no guts who feared enemy pitching. And he kept it up. Veach was puzzled at first, then infuriated. A slim, 160-pounder, the Kentuckian wanted to fight the burly, 210-pound Californian. Heilmann, of course, declined. But in not many days the harassment made a better competitor of the targeted Veach. From a .308 average, 113 runs-batted-in and 11 home runs of the previous season, he jumped to .338, 128 RBIs and 16 homers in the current affair.”

  Cobb cold-bloodedly added to his reputation as an agitator. According to Lieb and Shaver: “He did not honor his promise to Heilmann, but at season’s end left for home without bothering to lay it out for Veach on how it had been an experiment in psychology. Heilmann tried to explain to Veach, unaided, but Bobby snarled, ‘Don’t come sucking around me with that phony line.’ And a feud which had started as a trick grew into a genuine one that lasted season after season.”