Cobb

by Al Stump

  Ty Cobb would not go out of life known as a tightwad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SHATTERED DREAMS

  Babe Ruth, twenty-seven and approaching his peak, underwent what was seen as his comeuppance in 1922. He had a miserable season. After sweeping the league one year earlier in runs scored, home runs (59), and runs driven in, he now failed to place first in even one category.

  By comparison, and though hard used at thirty-five, Cobb was a joy to watch that year. He would hit .401—the third time he had averaged past .400. No man had hit so high on three occasions; only one man, Rogers Hornsby, would equal him in .400 seasons.

  The Babe’s flop was seen as a retribution for whooping it up in bars, hotels, and clubs, where he broke most of the codes against drinking, gambling, night-owling, and sexual reveling. He turned off his bosses and many of a nation of followers when he let his physical condition slide. His behavior opened the door to a renewal of the feeling that the sober, fanatical Cobb was the greater player, the most consistently effective and probably the most valuable of his or any time.

  Even before his home run output and other contributions nose-dived, Ruth was suspended by Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis for six weeks, beginning on opening day. Landis further fined the Yankee captain his share of the past autumn’s World Series purse—in the amount of $3,362—for violating a rule dating to 1911 prohibiting players of World Series games from appearing in exhibitions after the Series. Babe Ruth’s All-Stars had appeared in 1921 from Buffalo, Elmira, and Jamestown to Scranton, partying as they went.

  When Landis was a federal judge in Chicago, he was noted for his iron-handed decisions. He had sent men to prison for twenty years for violating the antidrinking Volstead Act. Hired to crack down on baseball and sanitize it, Landis cited other codes being ignored by Ruth. He hit the bottle with enthusiasm, gambled heavily at Jamaica and other racetracks—he once lost $25,000 on a single race in Havana—and at Hot Springs, Arkansas, casinos. “His horses finish about 5:00 P.M., but still he backs them,” jested Bob Considine of the Hearst press. Amidst it all, baseball’s Falstaff refused a $50,000 salary offer, insisting on $1,000 per week, or $52,000, for 1922. Yankee president Jake Ruppert paid it. Reading of his demand in the papers, Cobb informed Georgia friends, “It’s like I thought. Ruth hurts himself every time he opens his mouth—or a bottle.”

  Fifty-two thousand dollars, a huge sum compared to the $8,500, $10,000, and $6,500 annually earned by other Yankee stalwarts such as Wally Schang, Bob Shawkey, and Wally Pipp, caused a negative public reaction. New York writers spoke of fans from Manhattan to the Bronx to Queens asking, “Why should Ruth break the bank when everybody else is paid so much less?” The playboy was too damned greedy. Nor should he have brawled with Pipp, one of the best men with his fists on the Yankees. Ruth in midseason fought at fieldside with the hefty Pipp. The first baseman slapped him around, leaving Ruth with welts and the embarrassing disclosure that he was not much of a fighter.

  When the Babe came off the suspension on May 20, the Yankees stood in the league’s first place. They appeared not to need their key run producer. Five days after that, he was suspended for throwing dirt at an umpire and cursing fans who booed him for striking out too often. A second suspension followed on June 19, for similar malfeasances. Two more suspensions came atop that, until Ruth had lost $1,500 in unpaid salary while benched. Not finding his groove for weeks, he did not reach the 14-home-run mark until July 6, and he trailed powerful Ken Williams of the St. Louis Browns in what had been Ruth’s singular specialty. Also set back by a tonsil operation, a discouraged Ruth was on his way to a final 35-home-run season, a drop of 24 from his 59 of 1921. Williams would become the new home-run champion with 39. Babe’s hitting would fall to .315, a plunge of 63 points from his previous mark. The same was true for runs batted in—down from 171 to 99. His games played dropped from 152 to 110.

  While Ruth was engaged in faltering, fans and writers who had dropped off Cobb’s bandwagon after the Babe’s arrival on the New York scene were again paying close attention to the Georgian. If he had another big year personally, and somehow managed the Tigers to a better finish, Cobb might well find himself back on top in general opinion. Grantland Rice thought as much. Other writers followed his lead.

  “WHAT RUTH did concerned me not a damned bit,” said Cobb years afterward. “I had enough habitual dead asses on my second Detroit team to make a second-division finish almost guaranteed. The only reason I returned for another try was that I hated to go out with a loser. I was looking ahead to 1923 and 1924 when the right trades and deals with the best minor-league clubs could change everything.”

  Reading between the lines, it was evident that one reason why Cobb remained as manager was that he stood on the threshold of monopolizing the all-time record book as no man had done. Baseball Magazine editorialized, “His have been monumental achievements. Now he is about to break every longtime offensive mark ever set. Honus Wagner still is chief in total hits with 3,420 safe hits. Ty’s total is 3,055. In one more time around he will be all but assured of surpassing Wagner. He is also close to most seasons with an average of .300 or better. By 1923, Cobb no doubt will wipe that out with 18 straight years at over .300. It would be a tragedy were fate to deny him the crowning touches to his epic career.”

  He didn’t believe in fate. In luck, yes, to a degree, but fate was for the mystics. At Detroit’s spring camp at Augusta, he used fear as a motivator. Applicants for Tiger jobs who didn’t go all out were in town one day and aboard a train to elsewhere the next. In some people’s opinion, he was much too tough. “He suspended me three days without pay for missing one fly ball,” nineteen-year-old rookie outfielder Floyd “Babe” Herman went about saying. “And this was just in training.” Herman would leave Detroit before long for the Brooklyn Dodgers, his talent unrecognized by Cobb. There he would average .340, .388, and .393 to become, as one of the “Daffyness Boys,” the toast of Flatbush.

  Dutch Leonard cursed Cobb to his face during their running dispute over how to pitch to such batting machines as Sisler and Speaker. Leonard quit the team in the spring, terming Cobb “a horse’s ass,” leaving to run his Fresno, California, fruit farm and await his day of vengeance. He would return in 1924 in explosive form.

  A picturesque former border-guarding Texas Ranger, Harry “Rip” Collins, who had won 14 games in two of the previous three seasons for the Yankees and Red Sox, joined Detroit, and almost at once lined up with the disgruntled players. Collins’s published contribution later was, “Cobb stirred up bad blood in the club. I would say that more than half of us hated him. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to accomplish as Simon Legree. Finally, I stopped talking to him except when I couldn’t avoid it.”

  Within the next twenty-four months, fifteen Tigers would parade into Navin’s office, asking either for a trade or Cobb’s dismissal. Complaints ran from the tongue-lashings he handed out, to their disgust at having to supply water buckets in hot weather to Cobb’s pet dog. A cur who had wandered in that March had been adopted by the boss. Each player was under instructions to pet the dog at least once a day. Why such a requirement? Veteran players saw symbolism in it—they were a “dog” of a team. When the pet disappeared, Cobb replaced him with an ocelot cub from the South American jungle, who scratched people.

  It was evident to opposition scouts visiting Detroit’s camp that Cobb was desperate to restore the Tiger glory of the 1907, 1908, and 1909 championship years any way he could. If he achieved a turnaround, he could retire in satisfaction. In interviews he missed few openings to point the finger at Navin for the caliber of talent supplied him. “A ball team is like a machine shop,” Cobb was quoted as saying. “It’s a business. When you have a high state of efficiency, things run smoothly. You are turning out a good product, the workmen are happy. But if you fail to produce, if you are indifferent to quality, you can only blame the management. It is precisely the same problem of the field manager who takes a losing team
and tries to make it over into a winner. The Tigers, when I took them over, were like a broken-down machine shop … filled with the losing spirit.”

  That lackadaisical condition, he strongly implied, was due to the failure of Navin and Briggs, over the winter, to sign infield replacements and dependable pitching. When the Yankees beat them to two sure-handed infielders, Jumping Joe Dugan and Everett Scott, they had to settle for three unproved infielders in Fred Haney, George Cutshaw, and Topper Rigney. Next, pitcher Howard Ehmke, a former 17-game winner for Detroit, asked to be traded. Ehmke’s relationship with Cobb stood at the breaking point. The seven-year veteran found his manager too frantic, too hypercritical. His wish to go elsewhere was rejected. For now, Ehmke stayed with Detroit.

  The Tigers lost their season’s opener to the Cleveland Indians, 7–4, before dropping six straight games on the road. A little later, rubbing it in, on April 30 rookie Charley Robertson of the White Sox beat them, 2–0, with a rare, perfect, no-hit, nobody-reached-first-base gem. It was only the fifth such blanking in big-league history. In game footnotes, the Peach was portrayed as raging on the sideline, kicking bats and jockeying Robertson in an attempt to unsettle him. His temper was heated all the more because that spring Cobb was on the disabled list with injured leg ligaments, torn again when he tripped over a divot in the grass. Laid up for a month, walking with a cane, he returned on May 1, with the Tigers seemingly sliding out of contention.

  PERHAPS THE club was fed up with his ranting. Perhaps it was the example he set, beyond fiat, through his own performance, with a hitting outburst that put him close to the .400 mark in June and July. Perhaps the American League, with the exception of the Yankees and the surprising St. Louis Browns, was not as strong a league as judged. Possibly, too, it was gross overemphasis on the Ruth-style home run and neglect of all-around, timely hitting, as suggested by the 1,050 homers blasted in the majors in this season against 339 hit only a few years earlier. Whatever the causes, the Tigers righted themselves, went on a tear, and became a wholly different organization. Happiness gripped the clubhouse in June when they won twenty-two and lost only four. In July and August, the Cobbmen had a pair of eight-game winning streaks. They climbed to only five games behind the Yanks and Browns for first place. “I can taste the pennant,” said Cobb, who was swinging at .415 and leading the league, 13 points above Sisler of the Browns.

  But the Yankees and Browns kept winning steadily, too, and yielded less ground than was needed for the accomplishment of a Detroit miracle. It was a dogfight. One of Cobb’s more unusual acquisitions, the blimp-shaped Bob “Fatty” Fothergill—five feet, ten inches, 260 pounds—responded outstandingly as a pinch hitter. Fothergill, wearing a size-52 uniform, came from the International League. His eating habits approached Ruth’s. In one Yankee game, when Fatty waddled to the batter’s box, New York pitcher Lefty O’Doul called to Cobb, “The rules say that only one man can bat at a time!”

  Cobb replied, “So what?”

  “Then why are there two men standing at the plate?”

  Despite his bulk and slowness afoot, Fothergill batted .322 on the season. The team’s climb to the first division brought on a rush for tickets. People lined up a block away to obtain favorable seats in a Navin Field about to be expanded to thirty-seven thousand capacity. Hundreds camped at the gate all night, sitting by bonfires. “Of course,” reported Fred Lieb, “Navin quietly raised the seat prices by two bits.” By October, Navin’s paid attendance would set a franchise record of 851,000 paid admissions, ranking with the leading teams.

  Cobb’s $50,000 contract was structured to pay him an override of ten cents for every ticket sold beyond 700,000, and he was also paid $2,500 for public-relations appearances during the season. That left him, according to several sources, slightly ahead of Babe Ruth in baseball-only income, with endorsements not included. “Ruth,” Cobb later caustically noted, “endorsed whorehouses by word of mouth. He talked a lot. I advertised milk and Cobb candy.”

  But misfortune arrived as the season moved along. During a dispute at St. Louis, Cobb tromped on umpire Frank Wilson’s foot with his spikes and was suspended by officials for three days. Harry Heilmann, with 21 home runs to date, fractured his collarbone in August; the big slugger was gone for the season. Two pitchers, Lil Stoner and Carl Holling, were caught drinking in Boston at a late hour; Cobb fired them on the spot. Team hitting cooled off. Only one pitcher, rookie Herman Pillette, threw well, and by September the back-to-normal Tigers were out of the race.

  Having been given the opportunity to reach the World Series and failing to have made it there, a frustrated Cobb left for Georgia within hours of closing day. His whip-cracking, punitive methods had worked for a while, but not over the long run. Detroit had barely beaten out Tris Speaker’s Clevelanders for third place, with a 79–75 final mark. However, a few bright spots encouraged him. The team had won eight more games than in 1921. Navin’s record box-office draw and Cobb’s personal batwork meant that he could negotiate for more money in 1923, if he elected to stay on as manager. His ability to improve a man’s hitting was again evident. Detroit as a unit had batted a spectacular .305, which was 18 percentage points above the pennant-winning Yankees, who averaged .287.

  Against that, the Yankees, now on the way to compiling a dynastic sweep of American League championships—in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1927, and 1928—had been 22 percent more effective on defense than Detroit. Cobb could only wish he had such double-play mechanics as New York’s second baseman Aaron Ward and shortstop Ev Scott. Despite the prevailing home-run mania, the cutting off of enemy runs remained as vital as it always had been.

  His other comfort was his own .401 bat average, at an age when most men were winding down careers as reserves and nearing retirement. Leg injuries in his thirty-sixth year had limited him to 137 games, but he made them count, with 99 runs scored and 99 runs driven in. His 211 base hits in 526 trips to the plate computed into a mark topped only by Sisler’s .420. In just one way could the Peach be seen as slipping—his stolen-base totals of the 1909–15 period had stood at 76, 75, 83, 61, 52, 35, and 96. Now he could steal only 9 times on battered legs. At the same time, few men in their prime could match Cobb’s 42 doubles and 16 triples of 1922.

  However, it was an ordinary ground ball struck by him in May that after the season ended caused more furor than anything involving Cobb and a Louisville Slugger stick since the ugly Larry Lajoie affair of 1910.

  At the Polo Grounds on a soggy field, Cobb had pushed a grounder to Ev Scott at shortstop. Scott juggled the ball and Cobb beat out the throw by part of a step. Fred Lieb, scoring for Associated Press, ruled it a base hit. John Kieran, the official league scorer, called it an error. In his Baseball As I Have Known It, Lieb explained, “Irwin Howe, who was the American League statistician, took his figures day by day from the Associated Press box scores. Howe did so in this case, and in October it meant the difference between a .401 for Cobb as against .3995, using Kieran’s scoring.” Lieb quite properly offered to defer to Kieran, since Kieran held official status. But Ban Johnson, for once taking Cobb’s side in a dispute, stood behind the AP’s judgment and certified the Peach at .401.

  With almost anyone else the dispute would have faded out. With Cobb it spread nationally. Some members of the Baseball Writers Association of America loudly condemned what became known as the “Case of the Two-Point Base Hit,” insisting that Cobb be given a .3995. Lieb reported, “Vitriolic telegrams were exchanged among the BWAA.” Balloting of the eleven chapters of the BWAA was held and the vote, two chapters abstaining, was 5–4 in favor of lowering Cobb’s average so that he would miss another .400 season.

  Cobb was furious. He saw his long-running feud with the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston press exemplified in this attempt to deny his just rights. From Augusta he spoke contemptuously of the BWAA: “Why should I give a damn what those twenty-five-dollar- and thirty-five-dollar-a-week newspaper sons of bitches think?” Visiting New York in November, he played host
at a dinner for a few famous sportswriters and editors whom he had found supportive—Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Granny Rice, Gene Fowler, and Bill Phelon. Their competitors were not invited. During the evening he was chided by his guests for abusing their fellow journalists. As the Georgian remembered it decades later, Runyon said, “They’re all for Ruth, of course, in picking the greatest player. I say they’re wrong. But you have to live with these writers.”

  “Not me,” said Cobb. “I’m fed up with those phonies and I may file a lawsuit.”

  “Worst thing you could do,” counseled Ring Lardner. “In a pissing match with the big daily papers, the press always gets the last splash.”

  Cobb claimed that a secret conspiracy existed to rob him. “In May of 1921,” he fumed, “the scorers took three safe hits away from me and added two more times at bat that I didn’t have. That happened in New York. It’s just one more example of knifing me.” He recalled 1913, a season in which he should have been credited with a .400-plus mark. Some “fancy pencilwork” had made it a .390.

  Long after, in the 1950s and 1960s, several retired eastern sportswriters I consulted pretty much agreed that, whenever made at home in Detroit, questionable hit-or-error decisions often went in the Peach’s favor; on the road it was the opposite. This was 1920s baseball, when unsupervised official scorers sometimes showed their own form of civic boosterism in reports they turned in. A little padding also gained the statisticians some favor with certain players.

  Umpire Billy Evans, once the loser in a bloody fistfight with Cobb, felt that Sir Tyrus arrogantly went out of his way to antagonize the game’s officials, scorekeepers included. It was then the standard practice of team managers to present the umpires and the evening newspapers with their starting lineups some ten to fifteen minutes before game time, which was usually 3:00 to 3:30 P.M. That enabled beat writers to wire their downtown sport departments and catch early editions with the nominated batteries. Almost alone, Cobb refused to cooperate. His starting nine was “confidential,” his own business, until the last moment.