Cobb

by Al Stump

  I gave him every possible break that a veteran pitcher could expect. I gave him his rest, we were down in the race, and were fighting our way up again. We had 12 games of ball in six days. I called a meeting of the pitchers and told them we had a real hard test facing us and that I might have to call on them out of turn.

  Cobb then told of asking Hooks Dauss to pitch out of turn, and said he then called on Leonard and that Leonard flatly refused to go to the mound after being ordered.

  Continuing under oath, Cobb added:

  A. I had a talk with Mr. Navin and it was decided we would get rid of Leonard. The whole team was upset over it and he had the reputation in the past of being a bolshevik on the club.

  I released him to Mr. Navin. Mr. Navin asked waivers and did all the other things. It was the only thing in my whole acquaintanceship with Leonard that I would figure would make him do such a thing as this.

  Cobb, coolly, did not admit to anything more heinous than acting as an intermediary in laying a bet. Landis took his testimony under advisement. Cobb demanded that Leonard come to Chicago from his California home to face him directly. Leonard declined. He said that he feared a physical attack from “that wild man” or that the gun Cobb was known to carry might be pulled on him.

  THE BASEBALL world now awaited Landis’s verdict. Cobb reminded fans, “I could buy myself a major-league franchise right now. Why should I bother with a few dollars gained through a damned fool bet?”

  Another point: Leonard claimed that Speaker’s Cleveland Indians had agreed to let Detroit win (which the Tigers did, 9–5); if so, would not Speaker have gone easy with the bat, and Cobb been fed some soft pitches? In actuality, Speaker tripled twice and singled, while the Peach produced just one scratch single.

  Lawyers retained by the two advised them to sue Landis and organized baseball for a sum in the six figures.

  THROUGH HIS White House connections, which dated back to the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding, Cobb arranged a meeting with Charles Evans Hughes, former U.S. Supreme Court justice and recent secretary of state. Several wealthy men in Georgia offered to meet Hughes’s fee for handling Cobb’s libel and slander suits, in which he sought $100 million in damages. Some law experts felt that Cobb’s case could be won on the strength of his unmatched playing record alone. National newspaper columnist Will Rogers was caustic, writing, “I want the world to know that I stand with Ty and Tris. I’ve known them for 15 years. If they have been selling out all these years, I would like to have seen them play when they wasn’t selling.”

  Babe Ruth had something to say. His attitude surprised some people—normally the Babe would just as soon punch Cobb’s nose as not—when he spoke from a vaudeville stage in San Francisco: “This is a lot of bull. I’ve never known squarer men than Cobb and Speaker. Cobb doesn’t like me and he’s as mean as [censored]. But he’s as clean as they come.”

  Ruth, observed New York journalist Henry L. Farrell late in December, was a beneficiary of any dirty work that had gone on. He wrote, “You hear it in the streets here, in the subways, on the trolleys, in the clubs of drinkers and from the Park Avenue aristocracy: ‘Well,’ the general comment runs, ‘Cobb is in a big jam, worse than usual, but Babe never would do that. Babe has human frailties. But never would you find him involved in anything as messy as this.’”

  In Augusta by torchlight, a large crowd, three bands, and local and state leaders gathered around Augusta’s historic Confederate Monument on Broad Street to swear allegiance to a favorite son. Landis was hung in effigy, while the favorite son was proposed as the next mayor of Augusta.

  Landis continued to delay his decision. To lose Cobb’s box-office draw would make the judge unpopular with most owners. Meanwhile, the man on trial was applying pressure where the leagues were vulnerable. Cobb hinted to newspapers that he had inside information on how certain club officials filed false ticket-sales figures to tax collectors and scalped World Series tickets. “I may say a few words on how the boys handle turnstile counts in a number of cities,” he threatened. He would “tear baseball apart.”

  “It’s amazing how 40,000 paid admissions can become 36,000,” he told the Philadelphia Daily News. “Evidently he is in a position to blow the top off a game already riddled with knavery,” U.S. senator Hoke Smith of Georgia predicted. “If they force out the grandest player of them all, he will take with him his pound of flesh.”

  During his first four years as commissioner, Landis had barred some fifteen players for life, including the eight Black Sox. Now, without explanation, he held the Cobb-Speaker-Wood case in abeyance until late January of the new year. A distinct danger existed that he would throw the book at Cobb, leaving him an even sorrier sight than the great Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned from baseball forever. Or the commissioner might do nothing—in which case the suspensions of Cobb and Speaker that American League president Ban Johnson had pronounced would remain in effect.

  ON JANUARY 26, Landis ended a month of delay. He prefaced his decision by casting doubt upon Dutch Leonard’s reliability as an absentee witness, then ruled, “This is the Cobb-Speaker case. These players have not been, nor are they now, found guilty of fixing a ball game. By no decent system of justice could such a finding be made.”

  His ruling glaringly omitted any mention of gambling on baseball games. Still, it amounted to a full acquittal for both men, and in effect constituted an admission that one man—if his name was Tyrus Raymond Cobb—could force the clearing of his name.

  There were other repercussions. Ban Johnson was ordered to take a leave of absence and, after a brief reprieve, to resign as American League president, mostly because he had hounded and prejudged Cobb. Navin, who wanted Landis’s $65,000-per-year job, was discredited. To many fans Cobb was plain guilty.

  BOTH COBB and Speaker were reinstated, but neither would play for their former clubs again. Teams came at Cobb with rich, record offers. He said in February, in private to some relatives, “I’ll play one more season, bad legs and all, to make my vindication complete.”

  John McGraw was coming off a fifth-place finish with his New York Giants. His offer was a reported $60,000 per season for two years and a private hotel room for Cobb on the road. McGraw had bad-mouthed Cobb for years; Cobb brushed off the bid. Clark Griffith of Washington promised to equal any other offer, and threw in a $10,000 bonus for signing. The Brooklyn Dodgers were heard from, too. But Connie Mack outmaneuvered everyone. According to Cobb, Mack, his long-ago hatred of the Peach having receded, came to Augusta, handed Cobb a blank check, and said, “Just fill in the amount, Ty, and sign it. Whatever you say it will be is it.”

  “Now,” Cobb related to me many years later, “Philadelphia was the place where snipers had threatened to shoot me from the bleachers and where Mack once had campaigned to have me thrown out of the league. But a blank check was unheard of, and I gave it careful consideration.” The contract he finally signed included $70,000 in salary and bonus, 10 percent of spring-training gate receipts, and $20,000 more if the Athletics won the pennant. It worked out at $85,000 for 1927. Since Babe Ruth did not enjoy a share in Yankee preseason income, that left Cobb still the highest-paid individual in the profession.

  “So,” he told me, “I broke into ball with a sixty-five-dollar-a-month contract in the lowest form of the bush league down in Alabama. My deal with Mack was worth $555.55 for each game of the Philadelphia schedule. My father—how proud he would have been if he hadn’t left for the other side.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  FINAL INNINGS

  “The honorable and honest Cobb blood … never will be subjected. It bows to no wrong nor to any man … The Cobbs have their ideals and God help anyone who strives to bend a Cobb away from such.”

  Cobb in a 1927 letter to U.S. congressman Robert H. Clancy

  So he came to historic Philadelphia to play out his string—“one final season”—his twenty-third. It was inconvenient for him to sell his home in Detroit, to lease another in the
exclusive Philly suburb of Bala-Cynwyd, and to have the bushels of mail he received rerouted. Connie Mack made the move psychologically easier by arranging for the local chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America to sponsor a welcoming banquet for Cobb at the Hotel Adelphi. The affair sold out. Seven hundred Philadelphians wanted to hear him strip some hide off those who had demeaned him and by inference harmed the Cobb clan.

  The writers heard him declare, for the first time, that his lawyers had actually dictated the terms of his reinstatement by Landis, thereby making major-league history, and he reminded the press that behind him stood a “baseball bloc” in the U.S. Senate. “I want to thank,” he said, “Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi, Senator George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania, Senator James E. Watson of Indiana, Senator James Couzens of Michigan, and Senators William J. Harris and Hoke Smith of Georgia for their actions in my behalf.” The senatorial bloc had less proof of his innocence than the prosecution had of his guilt in conspiring to gamble on a game (or games), yet to the politicos the “witch-hunting” of Landis, Johnson, and others was outrageous, a travesty of justice.

  Philadelphians, sensing this might be a pennant year for them, toasted their new man for hours at the Adelphi. Detroiters were equally effusive. In an odd act on “Cobb Day,” when the Athletics played their first series in Motor City, fans presented their former outfielder and new opponent with a Packard sedan and a fine silver service. He drove the car around the field. Then he lined a double into the roped-back right-field crowd, helping clinch a win for the Athletics.

  He had always believed that Detroit fans were cuckoo. The Packard proved it.

  SPECULATION RAN that two such seasoned strategists as Mack and the Georgian would inevitably clash. Mack’s autocratic way of shifting his outfielders about like chessmen—by semaphoring with his scorecard in or out, left or right, into the alleys—was seen as infringing on Cobb’s judgment. Skeptics could not see Cobb surrendering the critical matter of positioning, which he alone had handled through almost three thousand games. In no way would he be likely to play second fiddle. Said the local Bulletin: “Poor gentlemanly Connie Mack has caught a tiger and an angry old tiger by the tail.”

  That sensitive matter was not settled until after Cobb had been measured at the Fort Myers, Florida, training camp for the first uniform of his big-league experience that did not carry a Gothic D on the shirt. As long as he was working for Mack, he stated, he would obey all orders given him. Just let Mack flash the sign and he would respond. His own background as a manager did not apply. In a remarkable concession, he bowed to Mack—and he soon learned that the sixty-five-year-old ex-catcher knew the league’s hitters, park air currents, and the sunshine factor so well that against power pull-hitters Cobb was able to catch balls that he otherwise might not have touched.

  Mack, at about $300,000 in expense, was pennant loaded. He had burly young Jimmie Foxx—who would hit 266 home runs in seven coming seasons—at first base, Mickey Cochrane behind the plate, Al Simmons in center field, Max Bishop and Joe Boley as a keystone combination, and pitchers Lefty Grove, Rube Walberg, Howard Ehmke, Eddie Rommel, and old John Picus Quinn, who had been around since 1909 with his spitball and who would win 33 games in 1927–28 when past forty years of age. They were a blend of power and intelligence. On paper the club figured to challenge Old Fox Griffith’s dangerous Washington team and the defending champion Yankees.

  Cobb sucked in his forty-four-inch waist and began what was one of his most improbable campaigns. In April in Boston the Athletics were trailing the Red Sox 7–1, and Mack was cleaning off his bench in an effort to get some runs. That day he used eight infielders, five outfielders, three catchers, and four pitchers—twenty men in all.

  By the seventh inning, he was still behind 7–3. Cobb singled, stretched it to a double when the Red Sox outfield failed to hustle, and stole third. Bill Carrigan, managing Boston, relieved Whitey Wiltse and brought in Tony Welzer to pitch. Cobb studied the situation. In some ways, it resembled the setup in the World Series of 1909, when he stole home plate on pitcher Vic Willis of the Pirates. Welzer, like Willis, had a batting rally to put down, and he wasn’t thinking specifically of Cobb.

  However, in 1909, Detroit had a right-handed batter at the plate, his body screening the catcher’s view of third base and somewhat blocking his movement. This time a left-hander was up. It gave catcher Slick Hartley of the Red Sox all the space between the plate and the incoming runner to make the play.

  Despite the odds, Cobb opted to go. The A’s needed something flashy to happen to ignite a rally. As Welzer coiled into his delivery, the Peach took off and Welzer all but ruptured himself reaiming to throw low to Hartley. Cobb’s slide was a fall-away with just a toe there for the catcher to touch. Hartley handled the steal of home a split second too late.

  That made it 7–4. The Athletics picked up two more runs in the next inning. At the beginning of the ninth, the game was tied 8–8. With Jimmy Dykes on base, Cobb doubled him home. The A’s had the game won, 9–8, if they could stop the Bosox in their half of the ninth.

  Alertness beats sheer speed—a Cobb maxim. With one out, Boston got a man, Baby Doll Jacobson, on first base. Phil Todt, a streaky line-drive hitter, came up. Right fielder Cobb crept in perilously close behind Jimmie Foxx at first base. Todt, as if working from a script, lined a low looper over Foxx’s head. Catching it on the dead run, Cobb kept going to touch first base and double up Jacobson, ending the game. It was his last unassisted double play in a big-league game.

  IT FELT mighty good. The warhorse seemed to be able to run and catch and hit with abiding usefulness. In two four-game series with the Browns and White Sox, he hit for a .722 average. After early games, the American League superstar race looked like this:

  Cobb held no hope of adding another batting title to the twelve he already owned—not after nearly three thousand games and more than eleven thousand at-bats, and not with the coming of Heilmann, Gehrig, Sisler, Simmons, Foxx, and Manush. His goal was to finish well up in the statistics, contribute substantially to the Athletics’ offense, and teach hitting to the rookies and second-year men. And there might be a pennant for him, a long eighteen years after his last World Series appearance. He had about given up hope of that. “Tell you something never printed,” he remarked to me one day in 1960. “If Mack hadn’t put such a hell of a lot of fine players under contract, I’d have been gone in 1927. A pennant shot was the only reason I stayed on.”

  True statement or not—let us not forget the $85,000 he was collecting—Cobb avoided any serious injury and by May cartoonists no longer portrayed him as a tottering character with a white beard down to his belt and a scythe. “How can they?” asked Westbrook Pegler of United News Syndicate. “Why, that poor old guy! His vision is failing and the other day at Cleveland you could see he was slipping when all he got was five hits in five trips to bat, including a homer, triple, and double, which brought his lifetime average to only .372. The poor old guy!

  “Down in Washington a few days later, there was another occasion to jerk loose some tears for poor old Tyrus Cobb. He went to bat 11 times in a doubleheader and, to save his life, he couldn’t make more than seven hits and drive in five runs, the poor old guy! And what he did earlier in St. Louis makes it all the more evident that the ancient swatter is ready for the boneyard—merely five home runs and 25 bases toured in two games.”

  Only Mack and a few others knew what it cost him to suit up each day and face New Age fastballs. By June he was playing on a fast-dwindling reserve. He weighed 215 pounds at midseason. He cut back on drinking bourbon. As during past emergencies, after games he was driven straight to his home or hotel bed. He was served dinner in bed and answered his mail or read a book until lights out at 10:00 P.M. He remained in bed until late morning of the next day. After breakfast, a trainer would arrive to wrap medicated gauze on recent spike cuts, with tape applied over that. Only when it was time to leave for the park would he rise. Often he would turn on
a portable phonograph and relax to thirty minutes of Fritz Kreisler’s violin music.

  Describing an Athletics-Yankee game of 1927, New York writer Joe Williams commented that Cobb’s theories on batting remained as valid in the jackrabbit-ball era as they had been in deadball 1910: “History was made at Yankee Stadium yesterday. Ty Cobb went around the bases in the sixth inning. It marked the 2,087th time he had circled the bags, but more enlightening was the method he used—old-fashioned stuff scorned in the Era of Ruth. No home run figured in this.

  “He laid down a bunt, perfectly, which caught third baseman Joe Dugan totally by surprise. Cobb slid into first, beating Dugan’s hasty throw. How long since you’ve seen a first-base slide?

  “Next, Sammy Hale hit a short rap to center field, and when anyone else would have stopped at second, Cobb pumped his aged legs and went for third. Earle Combs’ throw to third had him out cold. Locating the ball with a quick glance over his shoulder, Cobb slid left, then contorted himself to the right. He had Dugan faked out from here to Hackensack. When the geyser of dust cleared, he was seen to have half-smothered the throw with his body, and while Dugan scrambled for the ball he was sitting on, Cobb was up and nonchalantly dusting himself off. Dugan? He wept.”

  It had been thought that the combination of his age and Mack’s calming influence might make him less a Torquemada of the ballpark. Instead, in an earlier exhibition match, umpire Frank Wilson canceled a game and forfeited it to Boston after exchanging shoves and slurs with old enemy Cobb. When a replacement game was arranged, Cobb refused to play and sat in the stands. He was fined one hundred dollars and suspended for a week. But that brawl did not compare to the Emmett “Red” Ormsby affair. Hard-boiled ump Ormsby, who had no use for Cobb and advertised it, had once sounded off that even Cobb’s mother must hate him. Ormsby was on sensitive ground; after Amanda Cobb’s killing of his father, her son for a time provided for Amanda, but well before her 1936 death he had sent his mother to live with others and largely eliminated her from his life.