Cobb

by Al Stump

  Ormsby committed the further indiscretion in a game at Philadelphia of calling a ball driven by Cobb out of Shibe and onto Twentieth Street not a home run—as everyone else saw it—but a foul ball. A homer would have beaten the Red Sox. Cobb shoved and struck Ormsby, setting off a bottle-hurling riot that needed a squad of twenty police to put down. Ormsby had a split lip and a fat eye. Ban Johnson, not yet permanently retired as American League president, suspended “constant offender” Cobb without a stated time limit—that is, indefinitely. Johnson did not get around to lifting the penalty formally before he left office, giving Cobb, at the ages of sixty and seventy, the pleasure of boasting, “I’m still under suspension—the longest blacklisting in big-league history.” After a while everybody ignored the suspension.

  Then Ruth and the Yankees came into Philadelphia. Babe strutted to the plate. He waved a handkerchief to the Athletics’ fielders, a signal to move back. He swung three times with full power and struck out. Cobb came to bat. He took out a handkerchief and also waved the boys back. Then he bunted, beat it out, and stole second and third. Ruth and the Yankees cussed him each step of the way.

  PERCEPTIVE FANS of the 1990s, if they are history-minded and informed enough, see surviving traces of Cobb on 1994 base paths. In the early century he had created or improved upon such stratagems as the drag bunt, squeeze play, safety squeeze, suicide or running squeeze, and his specialty, the now-you-don’t-see-him-now-you-do delayed steal. The last-named stunt looked next to impossible on paper, but now and then he made it work. In 1927 Cleveland’s second baseman and shortstop were playing well away from the base, with Cobb the runner at first. He did not break for second as the pitcher released the ball. Instead he waited until the ball had just reached the hitter and then he made his break. Since Cobb had not started with the pitch, the two infielders were sure that no play was on and relaxed mentally and physically. Cobb was now well on his way to second base. Cleveland catcher Luke Sewell raised his arm to throw, but nobody was covering the base. Sewell had to wait to throw until the shortstop arrived in a rush, and the timing of the toss was so difficult that the ball shot past him into center field. Center outfielder Bill Jacobson’s hasty return throw was wild. Cobb scored a run on what had been accomplished by the world’s slowest steal. He had never seen this play timed correctly before first using it himself in 1905. “So maybe I invented it,” he speculated.

  Surprisingly, he felt so frisky during the season’s second half that he moved into demanding center field, and batted cleanup in the order. In a four-game White Sox series, he stole four bases. After a barren offensive spell—no hits in twenty attempts—he rebounded in September with seventeen base hits in twenty-five at-bats. But his best work could not stir the Athletics to catch the 1927 Yankees, the best-balanced group ever seen in any league, winners of 110 of 154 games to the runner-up A’s 91–63 mark. The Yanks’ Ruth, Gehrig, Bob Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri amassed 133 home runs, 200 doubles and triples, and batted in 544 runs. Ruth’s fabulous 60 homers for the year had the baseball world agog. Gehrig’s challenging presence was an important factor. At age twenty-four Columbia Lou had been 3 home runs ahead of Ruth on August 10, with 35. Ruth met his challenge with 25 homers to 9 by Gehrig the rest of the way. Gehrig finished with 47 homers. In his appraisal of the two, Cobb rated Gehrig as the more durable and slightly more valuable batter-fielder. Until a large belly and age slowed Ruth in the early 1930s, very few persons would have agreed with that analysis.

  It pained Cobb to have missed what he assumed was his last chance to appear in a World Series. He had made no plans to continue into 1928. His weak collective average of .262 in seventeen games of the three World Series of his young “learning” days, 1907, 1908, and 1909, had been galling. He had assumed that somewhere along the line of his remaining career with Detroit the Tigers would capture another title or two, at which time he would—a favorite expression—“set the record aright.” It had not happened. Additionally, he had missed out on the twenty-thousand-dollar bonus guaranteed by Mack if the A’s won the pennant. Or so it seemed.

  Mack had backed himself into a difficult spot regarding the twenty grand. In a quarter-century of formalized big-league baseball, no man had ever recorded 4,000 career base hits. Honus Wagner had piled up 3,430 during a twenty-one year span; Tris Speaker, still active, would finish at 3,515 over twenty-two years. Cobb, on July 19 of the summer of 1927, stood at 3,999. On that date he slapped a double off Sam Gibson of Detroit to reach a unique 4,000-hit milestone. He stood at that peak alone. “Unbelievable,” said the Detroit News. Connie Mack was to live to the age of ninety-four and in 1956, the year in which he died, the 4,191 mark of Cobb still stood. It would continue to stand long after Mack’s passing.

  Mack believed that he was looking at the best player he had ever seen—as fast as Eddie Collins, as physical as Wagner had been, as a psychologist matched by none. He had just turned in a marvelous season. He remained one of the most feared of base runners. His 22 stolen bases were topped by only two American Leaguers, Bob Meusel and George Sisler of St. Louis. His .357 batting was a hair above Ruth’s .356, and fifth in the American League, behind only Simmons, Heilmann, Gehrig, and Fatty Fothergill of Detroit. (“Sure, he’s a prick, but God Almighty, how that old man can still hit and run,” Ruth commented.)

  One day that summer there had been a rundown play at home plate. Who raced all the way in from right field to cover it but Cobb?

  Few in 1927 drove in or scored Cobb’s 197 cumulative runs, which figure also led his team’s statistics. Beyond that, in a new environment he got along fairly well with teammates. His characteristic choler was tempered while he was employed by the sedate and big-paying Connie Mack. “Here it is September,” joked one of the A’s, “and Old Hellfire hasn’t slugged a pitcher with his bat or gone to jail yet.” He had clashed with Mack only once. Mack ordered a pinch hitter for him and he yelled, “No one hits for Cobb!” Then he singled.

  Pennant or no pennant, the proper thing to do, Mack felt, was to pay the twenty-thousand-dollar bonus. Wrote Mack in his autobiographical My 66 Years in the Big Leagues, “I gave him the extra amount. I never regretted doing this.”

  TO THE battered but still breathing and belligerent Base Ball Players Fraternity, formed eight years earlier largely for the purpose of breaking the reserve clause peonage system, the approximate $100,000 grossed by the Peach was a cause for rejoicing. In a book he published Cobb wrote, “Slavery was ending. From now on ownership had to pay for what it got. The day when contracts were dictated by front offices and not negotiated was going.” He could easily afford to increase his cotton-growing acreage in northern Georgia and in Alabama, continuing to use itinerant blacks as crop harvesters. “I make as much off my cotton as two World Series shares,” he wrote to friend Bob Clancy late that year. In that case he was making around twelve thousand dollars from this source per season.

  But cheap labor had become a critical issue in his own profession. Together, he, Ruth, Speaker, and Rogers Hornsby were taking down close to $260,000 per season. The wide pay gap between a top drawing card and an average member of the labor force could not be maintained much longer. Paying off in comparative peanuts had to end, now that two-league attendance had jumped 52 percent over what it had been in the previous decade. In large part the American ballplayer was undergoing metamorphosis from rural hayslinger, uneducated factory worker, and town handyman to a Halls of Ivy product. As 1927 was ending, 107 men representing seventy-nine colleges and universities held one-third of the regular positions on major rosters. Better educated and advised campus-bred athletes might alter the odds around negotiating tables. So, anyway, went speculation.

  Yale University had approached Cobb months earlier to coach Old Eli’s baseball team, Cobb said in later years, and he left Philadelphia before the season ended to discuss the offer. Yale had some kids who could swing a bat. But how could he be interested, when Yale didn’t pay its players a thin dime and a fine prospect could wind up by g
raduating on you? Slush funds for big-college sports were forming around the country in an era of building huge stadia, but the Ivy League, to which Yale belonged, was pledged to the concept of amateurism.

  After Yale, Cobb detoured to Chicago to watch a longtime friend, Jack Dempsey, attempt to recapture his world heavyweight boxing title from Gene Tunney, who had beaten him in 1926. The fight on September 22 grossed a world record $2,658,660. The Peach, introduced from ringside, drew mixed boos and cheers. Afterward, he always remembered, the bloodied, defeated Dempsey laughed about it in his dressing room. “What’s funny?” asked Cobb. “You could have licked him if you’d used your brains.” He came away disgusted.

  In October, he spent the best part of a month on the ten-thousand-foot Wyoming plateau, a repeat visit. His compulsion to kill big game remained as strong as ever. By now he had a trophy room filled with preserved heads of the largest North American specimens. He maintained a photo library of what he had shot to the end of his days. A Pacific blue marlin he caught weighed a near-record 1,266 pounds. Garland Buckeye, pitcher by trade, remarked that he had shot seventeen varieties of wildlife, including some rarities; Cobb reckoned that he had killed more than that, from bear to wolverine to Canadian moose and elk. He planned a safari to Africa soon. In Wyoming, he and Buckeye strayed upon private land. Cowboys across a canyon fired rifle shots into the air—a keep-out warning. Buckeye left immediately. Cobb, according to Buckeye, fired an equal number of shots upward. Then he left.

  Mack and the press were kept guessing about any plans he had for another “final” tour in 1928. One day he would intimate that he might return, the next day he would be considering a round-the-world cruise. Meeting with him at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, Mack confessed that he was unable to come close to matching the record sum he had lavished on Cobb the year before. The recipient countered that he did not expect that much, but might settle for, say, two-thirds. The Great Holdout Artist was—at the end—a reasonable man. Mack agreed to that figure. Their deal provided that Cobb would make every effort to play a minimum of one hundred games.

  “My arm and wind were still pretty good,” he diagnosed himself years afterward to me. “My legs were bad—rheumatic knees, old muscle tears.” He did not show at the Athletics’ springtime camp in Florida, but, as in previous years, worked out only a few miles from his Augusta home on a field being used by the New York Giants. John “Muggsy” McGraw remained manager of the Giants. He and Cobb had not spoken to each other in years, nor did they speak now. “Fucking McGraw,” remembered the Peach. “McGraw and his pals met King George V and the Earl of Chesterfield at a game in London. The next day the earl’s ruby tie pin was missing. McGraw and other bums once were arrested in Arkansas for crooked bookmaking.”

  Frank O’Doul of San Francisco, the jolly Giants outfielder known as “The Man in the Green Suit,” was a guest at Cobb’s home that spring. O’Doul’s view was, “Ty was a cold fish … had no sense of humor. About once a year he got off a funny line, like the one about the umpires being blinder than a potato with a thousand eyes. As for his returning to play for one more year, the reason for that move was obvious. Baseball was in his bones—he couldn’t stand to watch other guys doing something he had damn near invented.” O’Doul didn’t need to cite a second motive. Like almost all veteran pros, Cobb was mercenary. O’Doul: “He couldn’t leave five dollars on the table.”

  Charlie Cobb underwent further serious surgery before the season opened. Her husband stayed only briefly at her bedside. He was due to open the season in right field at Shibe Park, and the job came first. Long afterward, his eldest daughter, Shirley Cobb Beckwith, spoke of her father’s priorities: “What else could we expect? He always put himself ahead of the family. What it came down to was that he needed the crowd’s adulation.”

  THE ATHLETICS, in no way resembling the Philadelphia clubs that had finished in last place seven times straight after the 1915 season, got off to a promising start in 1928, challenging the Yankees for the lead. Their senior member was hot at bat in April and May, although not so hot at fielding. He had two hits and two runs scored against the Yankees, but fifty-six thousand New Yorkers booed him for losing a fly ball in the sun and for getting put out while trying to stretch a base hit. He had a double and single against Detroit, a home run against Cleveland, a bases-loaded triple in a defeat of Washington. But his fielding, like that of his forty-one-year-old teammate, Tris Speaker, acquired by Mack from Washington that year, was wanting. Tyrus and Tristram were—sad to see—slow afoot. No longer could Cobb race in one hundred feet for a shoestring catch; Speaker, who by his swiftness had played the shallowest of center fields, was now forced to set up much deeper. Fly balls dropped between them often enough that the New York American cartooned it as “The Philly Phollies.”

  Cobb drove himself unsparingly to reach a .330 batting mark by late May. At one juncture he was sidelined with a “bad boiler”—stomach trouble, vomiting. He played hurt as the Athletics streaked to twenty-one wins in twenty-five games and trailed the Yankees by only three and a half matches. Speaker was benched with ruptured blood vessels. His stomach calming, Cobb gave crowds estimated as the largest in the game’s history—up to eighty-five thousand—something to remember him by. On June 15 at Cleveland, in the eighth inning, he demonstrated how much ability he had left. “A little Cobb telepathy,” he called it.

  It began when he hit a grounder to first base, a twisting ball that baseman Lou Fonseca bobbled. Meanwhile he raced to second base. On a following groundout by Max Bishop, he advanced to third. A roar went up—“There he goes!”—when he caught pitcher George Grant off guard. Before catcher Luke Sewell could handle Grant’s snap throw and apply the tag, Cobb was in there safely.

  It was the thirty-fifth steal of home base of his career—and the last. Since that June day no one has tied or beaten that number, or even come close. Casey Stengel considered the feat to be the most demanding, dangerous single act in any sport, and informed people that of all of Cobb’s records surviving into the 1960s (and the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) this one was the hardest earned and at least the third-most important. Casey: “Ya got to remember that he went for the plate like a freight train. Ooooooo, he was scary!”

  Setbacks came. On July 18, Sam Gibson of Detroit hit Cobb’s right wrist with a pitch that laid him up. Days later he twisted a knee ligament; on July 27, Sarge Connally’s pitch knocked him out of a White Sox game—a fastball to his breastbone. Accumulated injuries forced him to miss much of the fun of a late-season Athletic-Yankee fight for the pennant. “I’m not much to look at,” he told Baseball Magazine. “I’m black and blue from my ankles to my hips.”

  On September 7, Mack’s men tied the Yanks for first place and one day later took over the league lead by a half-game margin. By now Cobb had been replaced in right field by twenty-five-year-old Mule Haas, who was born in Detroit. Cobb overheard Haas joking about how he had watched the Georgia Peach playing in the Detroit outfield when he was a baby in arms. Not many years earlier Cobb might have punched Haas for that. Now, to keep the peace for Mack in a championship race, he let it pass. But a bigger incentive was that if the Mackmen won the pennant, Cobb would get another crack at the World Series.

  According to Cobb’s very good memory, he was headed down a passage to his dugout at Yankee Stadium during a September series with the Yanks when he encountered Ruth. On a hot day Babe was wearing his summertime home remedy, a wet cabbage leaf atop his hair and under his cap.

  “Does that help?” asked Cobb.

  “Cools me off, you bet,” replied Ruth. “Stops heat prosecution [sic].”

  There was an awkward pause. By habit the two men had been jockeying each other with foul language during this series.

  “Too bad about Shocker,” said Cobb, speaking of former Yankee pitcher Urban Shocker. A fine control pitcher who had won 37 games to 17 losses in his last two seasons, Shocker was from Detroit and had known Cobb there. Days earlier, on September 9, Shocker had died
of possible heart failure.

  “Yeah, Shock was a good guy,” agreed Ruth.

  “He got me on the slow stuff,” said Cobb.

  “Uh-huh,” said Ruth.

  They parted on that note, and never again spoke to each other during a game. There would be no opportunity for them to exchange incivilities again. Cobb’s final appearance in the American League came before forty thousand on September 11, at “The House That Ruth Built” in the Bronx. Thirty-three-year-old Babe struck a home run so high and so far that you needed a telescope to follow it. His blow won the game, 5–3. Cobb, coming off the bench in the ninth inning as a pinch hitter for infielder Jimmy Dykes, lifted a blooper back of third base off Hank Johnson. Shortstop Mark Koenig caught it for the out. Cobb ran as fast as he could to first base on the play … and a career dating from the turn of the century ended. An era dating from ragtime, umpires with waxed mustaches, and cars you started with a crank passed into history.

  He wore the uniform a bit longer. Connie Mack needed the money, so the schedule was interrupted for an exhibition game on September 13 against the Albany, New York, club of the Eastern League. Cobb played and had a pair of singles. Next day came an exhibition affair at Toronto. A small crowd of about twenty-five hundred Canadians witnesses his last appearances at bat in a big-league uniform. Once more he hit two singles. He was truly finished—3,033 games, 11,429 at-bats, 4,191 hits, and 2,244 runs on the official record. Lifetime batting average: .367, to this day the highest ever registered.

  In his final season Cobb played in 95 games and batted .323. Only nine other American Leaguers averaged better than that. Only two regular members of the National League champion St. Louis Cardinals of 1928 did as well as forty-two-year-old Cobb. The Yankees clinched the pennant on September 28, two days before the season ended, then walloped the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight World Series games. By then Cobb was retired and looking for something with which to occupy himself for the rest of his days.