by Al Stump
A NUMBER of seasoned baseball beat reporters doubted that anyone still able to hit well over .300 had reached the end of the line, and they were skeptical about his retirement plans almost to the end. At a press conference he called in Cleveland on September 17, Cobb reaffirmed his departure, while thanking those supporters who had stood behind him during his worst times. “Not that there were very damn many,” he said later, privately. Someone remarked that the man who stood first in so many playing categories had been last in making friends.
Once more he expressed regret at having seen so little of his children while they were growing up—the eldest, Tyrus Cobb, Jr., was eighteen, preparing to enter Princeton University—and noted that this would be corrected. The boy had caddied some golf games for him.
His retirement notices were worthy of an abdicating high government official or crime lord. “Say farewell to the most admired, envied and hated of ballplayers”—New York Evening Post. “There never has been a player who brought such intelligence, audacity and ferocity to the game”—New York Evening World. “Pitchers walk Ruth to dispose of trouble … if they dare give Cobb a base on balls, their troubles are just beginning … He has been every bit as dangerous on offense as Ruth”—Literary Digest. “Hell in spikes”—Police Gazette.
Ty Cobb set marks that, approaching the year 2000, no major-leaguer has equaled. “He put them so high that a cannon couldn’t shoot them down,” said Casey Stengel. As of 1994, more than sixty-five years had passed since Cobb’s retirement. No ballplayer in Cobb’s time, and none to this day, could come close to matching his .367 lifetime batting average, the most eminent single statistic in sports. Ted Williams, probably the best of modern hitters, finished at .344, 23 percentage points behind the .367 (he might have reached .360 but for two war-service interruptions).
Joe DiMaggio says simply, “Ty was too much for everybody.” DiMaggio stands in awe of the doctored baseballs faced by Cobb—illegal today—and the low-visibility parks of his day, compared to the ideal lighting conditions after World War II. Despite that major handicap, Cobb ranks first of all-time with 2,244 runs scored, well ahead of Ruth. Cobb’s feat of leading his league in batting average twelve times is no less than staggering. Ruth did it once, DiMaggio twice, Williams six times, Hornsby seven and Wagner eight times. In the category of hitting .300 or more per season, the Georgian still stands far in front of everyone, with twenty-three seasons.
He accumulated 5,863 total bases and rang up 3,052 singles, both still existing records. His 5 home runs in two consecutive games tie him with others. His career 892 stolen bases stood for decades. Young baseball-card collectors can tell you which hero stole home base the most times—“Ty Cobb, thirty-five!” In his career he had set 123 records.
ALL ALONG Cobb had professed that relief from pressure and finding time for a normal family life were his goals. That autumn his children hoped to enjoy their father’s company, perhaps to travel with him from their home on William Street in Augusta to places they had never seen. Sticking to his promise, Cobb sailed for Japan in October aboard the SS President Jefferson with his wife and three young Cobbs—Herschel, Beverly, and James Howell. The trouble was that almost everywhere they traveled, Cobb had been booked by promoters to hold baseball clinics for the Nipponese. The hosts were eager to learn the game. And time-consuming clinics made the tours less a matter of shared fun and sightseeing than a method for selling Father’s name. He was paid one thousand dollars each for staging fifteen instructional sessions from Tokyo to Nagoya and Kobe. In Kobe, someone stole his uniform from his hotel room, added proof of his popularity in the Orient.
Upon the family’s return to Georgia, he was not to be seen at home for a time while his prize bird dogs were competing in field trials in two states. And after that the jaunting paterfamilias scheduled a European hunting tour extending from Scotland to Germany to Spain. Cobb’s children would not be coming along.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
PAYBACK TIME
Back home in April of 1929, with time on his hands, Cobb took off in another direction—Europe and the British Isles. He had not been abroad since he was Captain Cobb of the Gas and Flame Division of Chemical Warfare in World War I. He was in good spirits when he and Charlie sailed aboard the SS Roosevelt for London.
Charlie was eager to tour the palaces and cathedrals of the Continent. Cobb wanted to test himself against the fast-flying grouse of Scotland and to hunt by foot the fierce boars of Germany. It turned into a lengthy tour of half a dozen countries and so much scenery that he complained to the Ty Cobb Fan Society of Augusta-Atlanta upon their return that he had been dragged from the halls of Versailles, King Ludwig’s castles, the Colosseum and Vatican to the canals of Venice to the Tower of London and the Swiss Alps. They even made a side trip to the Pyramids in Egypt.
Between inspecting holy reliquiae and the art of the Louvre, he hunted grouse at Keith, Scotland, by invitation of Sir Isaac Sharpe, one of the world’s top trainers of retrieving dogs. In My Life in Baseball, he wrote, “Keith was the big league of game birds, a pilgrimage place for the finest of shotgun artists. The challenge of trying my luck there in 80,000 acres of moor and heather had been gnawing at me since I was a young man.” The Scots wondered if the American could hit one of their rocketing grouse. He knocked down two on his first shot, and had a full bag for the day. Down in north Georgia, where he had hunted quail since he was knee high to a hedgehog, they had fast birds, too. In Germany he had one shot at a boar—and missed.
BEFORE GOING abroad, and afterward, he put out feelers to American and National league teams, expressing his interest in acquiring a majority stockholder position and top executive post with one of them. He had come to feel that he could not just walk away from something that had been his life since 1905. At midlife, he needed to practice what he knew best. His name still could sell tickets. His ability to handle money in large amounts was well established. But the dual brotherhood was unresponsive. Both leagues could use a readymade multimillionaire in their ranks—if he abided by the rules. But applicant Cobb had made a shambles of competition in its normal meaning; he had played as if in some kind of primal heat, and as a manager had not led his players so much as intimidated them. No offers were forthcoming above the AA level.
Through 1929 he persisted in trying to buy his way back into the Big Show. A possible opportunity developed at Redlands Park, Cincinnati. Ticket sales there were down, leadership was weak. The city that had introduced professional baseball to America in 1869 had not won a pennant since 1919. Longtime club president Gary Hermann had retired and the new boss, Sid Weil, a used-automobile dealer, had a limited knowledge of team promotion. Weil enjoyed suiting up with his players and chasing fly balls with them.
However, according to Cobb’s files, opened by him to this researcher in the early 1960s, their negotiations never became serious. Cobb offered $325,000 for the franchise, including seven of the players currently under contract, the ballpark and furnishings, clubhouse equipment, ticket boxes, flags, and ground equipment. Weil was shocked. His price was $500,000 and he wasn’t budging. Weil asked about the rest of his players—why was it that Cobb wanted only seven of twenty-eight?
“Because the others aren’t major-leaguers,” Cobb said he told him. “Some are stiffs.”
“Stiffs!” exclaimed Weil. “They are veterans.”
“Veterans of the Spanish-American War,” said Cobb coldly. The deal fell through when he refused to budge above the $325,000 or buy any “stiff.”
Detroit, one of the American League’s steadiest money-makers before and after Cobb’s years there, was another possibility. Frank Navin, now co-owner of the Tigers in partnership with auto-chassis maker Walter O. Briggs, would lose much of his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash, and entertained bids for the club. However, co-owner Briggs remained angered by the Cobb-Speaker-Leonard fix scandal of a few years earlier. He suspected that Cobb had been guilty of conniving in the fix of a ball game while in Detroit u
niform. A prominent citizen and churchman, Briggs privately spoke of Cobb as “Houdini” for working his way out of expulsion from the game. Taking that attitude, Briggs refused an offer of $2 million for the Tigers from a syndicate headed by Cobb and Atlanta businessmen, and he stepped in to block Navin from making a deal. Navin declined in health, dying of a heart attack in 1935.
Cobb continued his futile search for a baseball home. Repeated refusals by teams of any takeover by “the Georgia crowd” led by Cobb indicated to the public that he was persona non grata in both leagues in the role of owner, co-owner, or front-office executive. The assumption was entirely correct. Press critics proclaimed this the price of making enemies from New York at the top to Boston at the bottom of the leagues. How many bottles and seats had been thrown at a raving Cobb, or in his defense, during park riots? He would almost certainly be as difficult to live with as a policymaking owner as he had been as an outlaw with the bat and his filed spikes.
Another Cobb-led bid to buy a franchise, an offer for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, was rejected in 1930. As it worked out, not only that turndown, but equally those before it, proved a disguised blessing. In the ruinous national depression of the 1930s, with its unemployment, breadlines, and bank failures, organized baseball at every level took a beating. Total major-league attendance in the 1920s had been 92,652,885; in the 1930s depression decade it slumped to 81,013,329. Even the Yankees were badly down, from a 10.5 million draw in the 1920s to 9.1 million in the hard times. Clubs cut ticket prices, but with jobless men out begging for food, how many could afford even a ticket costing seventy-five cents? It would have been the worst of timing for Cobb to have invested a few million in sport.
Along with many speculators playing a bull market during the Roaring Twenties, Cobb had more than doubled his wealth in the period from 1920 to 1930. When the market slumped, aside from American Can, which fell from 182 to 86 in the crash, Cobb’s major holdings stood up well. “He was smart and damned lucky,” said Elmer Griffin, a Wall Street broker. “He continued buying Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Anaconda Copper, and the Depression didn’t hurt him heavily in the long run.” In a crash that ruined more Americans than all previous money collapses combined, Cobb emerged in good shape.
Yet not even his kind of available cash and bank credit could buy him a seat on the inner councils of baseball. “There were crooked lawyers and Tammany Hall ginks and bootleg whiskey smugglers who held important jobs in the game, but Cobb couldn’t get in,” he said later about himself in those years. “Even using my own money and not a bank’s, I couldn’t buy in.”
VISITING CALIFORNIA in the spring of 1930 to scout talent for Connie Mack and to play golf, Cobb discovered the quiet little rich man’s town of Atherton, twenty-three miles south of San Francisco. He had expected never to live anywhere but Georgia. Yet it had been so blazing hot there in the past summer that, in those pre-air-conditioning times, the Cobbs had kept electric fans running for two straight months, and had still sweltered. At Atherton, with cool weather year-round, he found an elegant Spanish Mission–period home priced at $110,000 in an idyllic setting—three oak-shaded acres, with a swimming pool and guest quarters. There were fifteen rooms in the main house, and space for stables to house Cobb’s polo ponies. Lately, he had resumed playing polo after a long lapse. He was a first-rate horseman and scored well, but was regarded as undisciplined and too rough. Every few chukkers he would cause a collision and a rider or two would be spilled. Cobb never seemed to get hurt, only his opponents. The San Francisco Chronicle noted, “Tommy Hitchcock, the famous 10-goal poloist, calls Ty Cobb a wild man and menace … He also regrets to say that baseball’s toughest guy has been known to whip the hide off his ponies.”
COBB’S FIVE children were growing up in a hurry, and continued to see little of their widely invested father. Cobb admitted that he was gone from home most of the time. Ty Cobb, Jr., at eighteen, stood almost as tall as his father’s six foot one. The redheaded eldest son had been raised by his mother and private-school teachers. “I blame her for the way the kid behaved,” Cobb flared in conversation with his close friend, Elmer Griffin. The girl-chasing Ty junior had been in one scrape after another while enrolled at Richmond Academy in Augusta, then at Princeton University. He drew traffic tickets for speeding, dated fast girls, and missed classes. Showing no baseball ability, Ty junior wound up as a member of the Princeton varsity tennis team. The senior Cobb, thinking tennis to be a pitty-pat sport for the white-flannels set, winced. “Here’s a boy who has grown up privileged to visit big-league clubhouses and training camps,” he told Griffin. “But he would rather watch Bill Tilden than see his father win games.” (Tilden, U.S. tennis king in the 1920s, was a known homosexual.) Paternal bitterness ran deep.
In the late spring of 1929, receiving word that Ty junior had flunked out of Princeton, Cobb had caught at train to the New Jersey campus and called at his son’s lodging house. He carried a black satchel. He removed from the satchel a blacksnake whip “and then I went to work on that boy pretty hard,” he told this writer. “I put him on the floor and kept it up … tears and some blood were shed … but Tyrus never again … never … failed in his grades.”
Cobb never thought of the act as repulsive. When he mentioned the horsewhipping to the few people of his inner circle he did so with an air of satisfaction. He said, “You can look at it two ways. Teaching Ty a lesson hurt both of us. On the other hand, it did some good … he grew up in a hell of a hurry. In the end he made something of himself.”
That was true—for a while. Since Princeton no longer wanted him as an undergraduate, Ty junior entered Yale University. He improved academically and became captain of Yale’s tennis team, a star singles player. However, in 1930 he was arrested for drunkenness on two occasions and failed to graduate with a degree. Cobb provided lawyers to handle the police charges, then informed the twenty-year-old that there would be no further communication between them. Cobb senior was finished with Cobb junior. This was not just a threat. An unbending father meant it, to the extent that they remained alienated until near Junior’s death at the age of forty-two, in 1952, of a malignant brain tumor. It was all very sad, Griffin reported. “Ty paid for the young man’s sickness and death,” said Griffin. “But that was all.”
On April 10, 1931, his plan to move his family across the continent to the wine-and-roses country of Atherton was blocked when Charlie Cobb filed a divorce suit in Augusta. It appeared that a troubled marriage had ended. She deposed that her husband had treated her cruelly, had done so repeatedly, and she could take no more.
Under Georgia law, Charlie would become a very wealthy woman of thirty-nine if a divorce was granted. Cobb, who was playing golf on the California circuit when her charges were announced, expressed shock at his wife’s action and predicted that there would be no divorce once he returned to Georgia and they reconciled their problem. Asked if their differences over how Ty junior had been raised was a factor, Cobb had no comment.
He must have been persuasive, for before the month was out, Charlie withdrew her suit. Comment was withheld by both sides. The move to California was on again, and after delays, by May of 1932, the Cobbs were in residence at their fine new establishment. He named it “Cobb’s Hall.”
While Charlie and the young children were attempting to adjust to new neighbors and the California way of life, Cobb was off and running again to distant parts. He added to his big-game hunting territory the Alaskan island of Kodiak, where he shot a bear, and the Snake River country of Idaho, for salmon fishing. Cobb was back on the golf circuit that summer.
If ever a sport had been created for which he was wholly unsuited, it was golf. He had fooled around with the game earlier. Now, in the 1930s, he entered into it seriously. Hitting a small ball into a small hole is so frustrating that it drives normally calm men into blowing their fuses. As might be expected, the fiery Georgian, in pursuit of par or better, was in a class by himself for temper explosions.
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What with his perfected bat swing and ability to concentrate, he should have been a natural at golf and won senior tournaments. However, consistently and inexplicably he lost to ordinary 80-shooters. He played in the mid-80s and low 90s. Although he consulted the best teachers—Bobby Jones, the number-one amateur in the world, was one—and used the most expensive handmade clubs, he was beaten at Pebble Beach, California, in 1930, 8 and 7, by the women’s champion, Babe Didrikson. With a roar, Cobb threw his driver to an adjoining fairway, almost beaning people playing there.
Within a few years’ time he had become unwanted at some of the nation’s most prestigious country clubs. It was not more Cobb apocrypha but fact that he was forced to resign from three clubs for offensive behavior. As of the late 1930s, he had been a member of eight clubs, from Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, to San Francisco’s Olympic Club.
He needed to win at a surrogate game, but could not. His most humiliating moment came in 1939 at the Olympic Club, when in the club championship event he was paired with a twelve-year-old boy, Bob Rosburg, a local prodigy. “I wiped him out, beat him badly,” said Rosburg in 1992, when, as a noted professional, he was asked to comment. “Cobb didn’t say a word at the horselaughs he drew. He cleaned out his locker and never returned to Olympic.”
Ballyhooed matches with Babe Ruth were another matter. In June 1941, Fred Corcoran, the Professional Golfers’ Association manager, challenged Cobb to meet Babe over fifty-four holes in a charity series that would draw galleries of thousands. Cobb at first declined. He saw it as a sucker trap. Ruth was a six to eight handicap and hit balls three hundred yards when serious and sober. Corcoran kept the pressure on. Ty received a telegram from his former ballpark rival: “IF YOU WANT TO COME HERE AND GET YOUR BRAINS KNOCKED OUT, COME AHEAD. SIGNED, RUTH.” Rather than appear to be ducking the issue, he agreed.