by Al Stump
All of this came on that May 5 in a “warm-up” way. His home-run eruption had given Detroit a 14–8 win. The next day he singled his first time up, running his string of consecutive base hits to nine. Then he homered twice, off two left-handers, Dave Danforth and Chet Falk, while Detroit pounded the Browns, 11–4. Five home runs in two straight games has not been surpassed since then, through more than six decades, whether by Ruth or any other batsman. It remains a modern-day record, equaled by only five other hitters. In the third game of the St. Louis series he missed a sixth home run by a matter of inches. In accumulating 25 total bases in two successive games, he set another still-existing mark. Years later, historians would peer at the old typeset and whistle at what they read.
Coming at the dusk of his career, this may have been Cobb’s most resplendent hour. For impact, it stood in company with his season averages of .420, .410, and .390, bunched between 1911 and 1913. In forty-eight hours of 1925 he made his point, massively, that home runs were not difficult to accumulate, that he could wallop for long distances with anyone when inclined to do so, but that superior, inside ways to play the game existed.
After his “Big Five,” he returned to spraying his hits, and at the 1925 season’s conclusion, had but 12 homers in all, but his average was a soaring .378. His message went: It could have been five times that many round-trippers if he had so determined. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Ty is the best all-around hitter who ever lived,” reiterated Tris Speaker. “He can bunt, chop-hit, deliver long drives, or put balls out of sight.”
COBB HAD not been immune to boos from a minority of fans at Navin Field since the Tigers’ third-place ranking in 1924. Even after his awesome 1925 outburst at St. Louis, he drew a sprinkling of jeers in June and July, a reminder that Detroit had yet to win a pennant. Conditioned for a fight, he got into more trouble when a customer dressed in tiger stripes ran onto the grass and spit at him. Cobb kicked the fan in the pants. Park guards pulled him away.
At Cleveland in July his leg was wrenched and he was carried off the field when second baseman Joe Klugman fell atop him while avoiding a sliding Peach’s high spikes. In mid-July, in a leg bandage, he came near to repeating his forty-five-minute fistfight with Billy Evans of 1921, which had bloodied that umpire. Against the Indians, Cobb badgered umpire Clarence “Pants” Rowland over a third-strike call. Bumping Rowland around the home-plate area, he almost knocked him down. Ejected, Cobb was handed a five-day league suspension. In Washington he drew the anger of the Nationals’ president, Clark Griffith, for his overt stalling tactics. Old Fox Griffith, a prominent league executive who prided himself on being a leader since the 1890s in reducing rowdyism at parks, was fed up with Cobb’s constant, obnoxious turning of games into brawls, and with his extensive delays while playing to the stands. The Old Fox issued a long list of complaints. In return, Cobb called the Nationals’ president a liar. He publicly charged Griffith with encouraging the East Coast press to slander him and force him out of the league. The Georgian further took the opportunity to repeat his stand against team owners for their monopolistic grip on the industry.
Walter “Big Train” Johnson, of the Nationals, a peacemaker in controversies, asked Cobb why he caused so many disturbances when he came into Washington. The national capital incited the worst in him. He gave Johnson two reasons: “Griffith is one of the main men behind the reserve clause.” And, “People like him have blocked me from leaving Detroit.”
IT WAS in September 1925, with the Tigers in fourth place, that a man who would have much to do with Cobb’s remaining baseball career was heard from in north-central California. Hubert Benjamin “Dutch” Leonard, a temperamental, in-and-out left-handed pitcher, had walked out on the Tigers after a dispute. Leonard was also a well-to-do farmer, owner of Fresno, California, citrus, melon, and vegetable acreage, who could afford independence when he quit the team. He accused his manager of overworking him to the point that his arm would be ruined. Although he did such things as keeping the thirty-three-year-old Leonard in a Boston game to take a 12–4 beating, Cobb disagreed. In a confrontation, Cobb called him “another of my goddamn cowards and Bolsheviks.” Leonard then refused to pitch at all. He was placed on waivers, no team claimed him, and Cobb arranged his sale to Vernon, California, of the Pacific Coast League. Out there, rumor circulated that an enraged Leonard was claiming that he “had something” on his former boss and might make it public, to Cobb’s great detriment. What Leonard had to reveal that could hurt the Peach was not specified. It remained vague—supposedly it had something to do with gambling. Nothing developed just then, but Cobb’s enemies were titillated and remained curious. Muddy Ruel warned his friend, “Look out for this Leonard guy.”
IN AUGUST and September, the Tigers pepped up enough to win ten straight and finished in fourth place, sixteen games behind a champion Washington club for which Johnson, Stan Coveleski, and Dutch Reuther won 58 games, and down the track from second-place Philadelphia and third-place St. Louis. In a closing-out doubleheader at St. Louis, Cobb staged another offensive show. He went 6 for 10, stole two bases and even pitched one shutout inning, just for the fun of what was left of another dull season. His .378 average was up with the circuit’s leaders—this was his sixteenth campaign at .350 or better—but fatigue was evident, in that Cobb played in just 121 games.
At the ensuing World Series between Washington and Pittsburgh, when the Pirates became the first participant in history to come back from a 3–1 game deficit and win, he encountered a depressed George Herman Ruth in the press box. Ruth did not bristle, nor did Cobb. Neither felt well. They were photographed shaking hands unsmilingly.
“Had a hell of an off year, Cobb,” said Ruth. “Got sick, couldn’t hit my hat.” (The reference was to his notorious “bellyache heard around the world” of the past April, rumored to have been caused by a venereal disease, but more likely to have been an intestinal abscess, for which he was operated upon. Whatever the dismal truth, Babe had batted a low .290, with 25 home runs, by far his worst production as a Yankee.)
“You’re no kid anymore,” said Cobb. “Got to take care of yourself.”
“They pinch-hit for me a couple of times,” said Ruth.
Cobb shrugged. “That’s happened to me.” (It had not—not yet—but for some reason Cobb felt empathetic toward Babe.)
“I’ll take the hot tubs, get in shape. See you next season,” ended Ruth.
“Next season,” said Cobb. “I’ll be there.”
ON THE morning of March 2, 1926, two weeks before spring camp opened in Augusta, Cobb was wheeled into surgery at the Wilmer Clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Dr. William H. Wilmer had finally prevailed upon him to have his vision trouble pinpointed and treated. Wilmer, a fellow Georgian, was known as one of the country’s foremost doctors of ophthalmology. Operations would be performed on both eyes. After tests, Wilmer explained, “This would be serious if you had let it go much longer. As it is, you should make a full recovery.”
“How soon is that?” asked a jittery Cobb.
“Within a month, probably. But you’ll need to wear smoked glasses for a while,” replied Wilmer. “And do no batting for the time being.”
Cobb’s ailment was caused by a filmy substance, termed pterygium, brought on by an accumulation of fine dust particles over the eyes, which had formed through more than 2,700 games. The surgical procedure would be to slit the growth, bury its terminals with tiny sutures, and allow the “cloud” to grow away from the pupils.
When he awakened from the anesthetic, Cobb discovered his head swathed in a full mask. He was left blind for four days and ordered to make no abrupt movement of his head. It was tormenting. The immobility was the second-hardest part of it. Cobb: “I lay there waiting for the decision … tried to think of something other than the coming season … and failed. I diagrammed plays in my head … that didn’t work, either. All I could think of was that one word—blind.”
When the bandages were removed, everything
looked blurry to him; as he began panicking, his vision slowly cleared. Wilmer declared the surgery to be a complete success. Wilmer then left on other business, assigning a nurse to medicate his patient. Foolishly, Cobb got out of bed and insisted on leaving the clinic. His nurse protested, “You can’t do that! Your eyes need to be treated for several days.”
“Lady, I’ve got a ball club in training!” snapped Cobb. “I’m leaving. Get me my clothes.”
Nurses were hunting for Wilmer when Cobb felt “a small twinge at the back of my eyes.” It worsened. Within minutes, he was in agony. The pain was head-splitting, intolerable. He ran down a hall to the head nurse’s station, screaming that his head was on fire: “Get me that medicine fast!”
Rushed to first aid and medicated, he was relieved of the worst of it. “From then on, I was the most cooperative customer Johns Hopkins ever had,” he said to me in his sixtieth year.
He arrived, shakily, in Augusta on March 13, two weeks late. An unsympathetic Navin asked why the operation couldn’t have been performed over the past winter, and not left the Tigers temporarily without leadership. “Because I make my own schedule!” returned Cobb. And that was that.
His recovery was slow. Wilmer had warned him not to take batting practice for at least one month. Any accidental beaning or abrupt swiveling of the eyes was to be avoided. Wearing smoked glasses, the patient began hitting line drives within two days of his arrival. Photographers crowded around, eager to record his ability to hit in the same way—or not. He took a dozen or so swings and quit. He gave no explanation, but that night he left camp, was driven to his Augusta residence by Charlie Cobb, and stayed in bed for several days. Any exposure to bright light or even smoke from a cigarette or cigar caused a sharp stinging of his eyes. Wilmer, meanwhile, had wired him: “STOP AT ONCE. USE PRESCRIBED TREATMENT.”
Years later, in Nevada, Cobb wrote to me of this time: “How I dreaded the first fastball I’d have to face on a sunny day when regular play began.” What he should have dreaded even more was Dutch Leonard, a man with information that seemingly revived 1920 and the perfidious Black Sox of Chicago.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“REPREHENSIBLE—BUT NOT CRIMINAL”
For someone as calculating, opportunistic, and well known as Cobb, it figured that he would form advantageous friendships with sports-minded politicians. During the short but marred Harding administration he had developed a strong, profitable White House connection. Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty-ninth president of the nation, had been a first baseman–outfielder with the Marion (Ohio) Base Ball Club. Later he owned the Marion minor-league franchise. Harding loved the sights and sounds of a ballpark. He treated Cobb as the most honored of guests. In March of 1921, Harding had invited the “Great Agitator” to attend his inauguration; thereafter, when the Tigers were scheduled in Washington, Cobb became a poker-playing insider at the White House. “I saw as much as ten thousand dollars on the table in one stud game,” he recorded in his retirement. “Harding was popular enough, but he was surrounded by crooks. I sat back in card games, and went easy on the drinking … His pals hit the bourbon hard, so I had a good payday for myself about a dozen times a year.”
By 1926, Harding was long dead, but T.C.’s continued clubbiness with national political leaders would now stand him in good stead. Events began to build around him, off and on the field, that cast Cobb in such a bad light that he was to need all of the support he could get in top Washington circles. Without these defenders his career might end in the most shocking form of disgrace known to a ballplayer.
THE YEAR 1926 was another case of Tiger failure: one more sixth-place finish, during which the manager, nearing forty but still carrying a Maxim gun to the plate, showed signs that after twenty-one years he and Detroit were about to part company. His suitability as a manager was widely questioned. That feeling mounted with the formation of statewide “Fire Cobb!” factions. Michiganders with less than perfect memories even threw overripe peaches at him.
An example of what fans saw as his worst flaw came at Yankee Stadium in September. His pitcher-switching act that day exposed him as possibly unfit to deal with circumstances under pressure. It came when his pitcher, Lil Stoner, breezing for a Tiger victory behind a four-run lead, walked two men in a row. Showing signs of panic, Cobb jerked him. In came Augustus “Lefty” Johns in relief. Johns was about to win the game for Stoner in the ninth inning when he gave up one hit. Cobb rushed in from right field, jerked the ball from Johns’s hand, and benched him, too. Johns objected to joining Stoner in the showers and he and Cobb exchanged words. The next hurler, Wilbur Cooper, an old-timer of fading ability, gave up more hits, and within minutes an almost sure win for Detroit became a defeat.
With few exceptions, those who worked under Cobb’s direction felt smothered—he expected them to think as fast and imaginatively as he did, hit for an impossible average, and approach the game with his fire. None of the Tigers came close to his requirements for mental agility and obsessiveness; some—Heilmann, Manush, Gehringer—were greatly gifted, but were not in their leader’s class. He rode his players so hard that some spoke of living in a nine-inning hell. “We thought that Cobb would crack up any day,” said intelligent infielder Fred Haney. “One day he would be riding high and working well with his lineup, next day he’d go around with the whites of his eyes flared and be the meanest guy you ever saw. He had spells, fits. Unimportant things made him blow. Some of the boys thought it was a case of brain fever.”
IN EARLY November, Frank Navin loosed a thunderbolt—Cobb would not be retained as manager or player in 1927. Navin blamed him for “demoralization” of the Tigers, a situation showing no sign of improvement. Cobb had handed in his resignation on November 3, briefly stating that he was “bone-tired” and had planned to resign back in August. But his main reason for leaving, he let out, was Navin, who demonstrably did not understand how to build a winning team through trading, scouting, using the waivers process, stealing other teams’ stars, and bringing along talent through patient development in the minors.
Then, while Cobb and Navin were placing the blame on each other, Tris Speaker, thirty-eight, the highly admired Cleveland manager, also resigned, to enter the trucking business. This came on November 29.
The public’s reaction to the departure within weeks of two of the biggest box-office names in the game was surprise, then suspicion. Was something going on that had not been disclosed? Why, for instance, had Cobb dropped from view, unavailable to the press at a climactic moment? How was it that Speaker had quit just weeks after leading the Indians to a second-place finish, only three games behind the Yankees? Texas Tris, now at a peak of popularity in Ohio, was being paid close to forty thousand dollars.
A few days before Christmas, a stunning explanation came from Commissioner Kenesaw Landis. He verified as true the rumor that Cobb and Speaker had been permitted by him to resign in the face of accusations made against them of fixing and betting on a game played between Detroit and Cleveland seven years earlier, back on September 25, 1919.
THE STRONGEST evidence against the pair of a gambling conspiracy consisted of two letters in Landis’s possession. One had been written by Cobb in 1919 to Hubert “Dutch” Leonard, who had pitched for Detroit during the time he alleged the fix was on; the other letter was written in 1919 by Smoky Joe Wood, a Cleveland outfielder, which also was sent to Leonard.
For a reformer as dogged and as much a headline-hound as Landis, the correspondence was pure gold. It was widely reported, and not denied, that American League owners had paid Leonard between $15,000 and $25,000 to buy his letters and perhaps to suppress them. By 1926, Leonard was a well-to-do fruit farmer in central California. His motive for disclosing the letters was identified as revenge on Cobb for cutting him from the Detroit roster in 1925 and effectively ending his big-league career. As for Speaker, he had let Leonard slide down to the minors by not picking him up on waivers after Cobb’s rejection. It would have cost Speaker’s club only
$7,500 to take him on waivers, cheap for a pitcher who had posted some good seasons.
Long before Landis took over the investigation in late 1926, when American League president Ban Johnson began to look into the matter, Cobb denied everything. Now he demanded that Leonard be brought from California to Chicago to meet him face to face. Leonard, refusing, was widely quoted as saying, “They got guys in Chicago who bump people off for a price.” Yet Leonard, earlier in 1926, had come east and tried to sell his incriminating letters to a newspaper.
What had happened, claimed Leonard, was this: before the 1919 Detroit-Cleveland game in question, he, Speaker, Cobb, and Wood had met under the stands, and a conspiracy was hatched. Leonard quoted Speaker as saying that, since his Indians had clinched second place in the closing-out season and Detroit was in a battle with the Yankees for third place and a piece of World Series money, why not make sure the Tigers collected it? “Don’t worry about a thing,” said Speaker, according to Leonard.
To take advantage of a sure thing, Cobb offered to put up $2,000 of a pot collected then and there by the four men. Leonard would gamble $1,500 and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each—$5,500 in all. Cobb, added Leonard, provided a Detroit groundskeeper named Fred West to lay the wagers with chosen bookies.
When Landis placed Leonard’s documentation on record on December 21, 1926, he touched off the most lurid sport scandal since the 1920 Black Sox affair and the excommunication of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, and friends. “I am going to expose that bastard Cobb,” Leonard had promised Pacific Coast baseball men. “I’ll ruin him.”
Newspapers gave a heavy play to the course of events: