Cobb (10 page)

Arising fun-and-games climate was gradually replacing America's puritan tradition of hard, long hours of work by the time Cobb entered pro baseball. It was becoming more and more acceptable for some at least of the 86 million American citizens to relax at ballparks and horse-racing tracks; to enjoy prizefights, archery, and rifle shooting; and to race bicycles, play golf and tennis, and row boats for money and trophies. One of the early evangelists of variable athletic competition, as practiced by the ancient Greeks, was Grantland Rice. A 1900 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt University, Rice became a popular sports columnist for the
Atlanta Journal,
on his way to national fame.

Late one afternoon, while the
Journal
's presses rolled on the day's edition, Rice sat playing dime-ante poker in a back room at the paper. He was interrupted by a messenger with a telegram from Anniston, Alabama. Rice wasn't sure where Anniston was located, nor did he recognize the wire's sender, who identified himself as “James Jackson, news-tipster.” The communique read: “Tyrus Raymond Cobb, the dashing young star from Royston, has just started playing ball with Anniston. He is a terrific hitter and faster than a deer. At the age of 17 he is undoubtedly a phenom.”

Rice, laughing, returned to his poker. Tearing up the telegram, he later took time to inform the unknown tipster through Western Union, “After this the mails are good enough for Cobb.”

Anniston, a mill town in Alabama's northeast iron-ore region, fielded a team in something called the Tennessee-Alabama-Southeast League, composed of semipros and small-college horsehiders. An organization that was so far down the competitive ladder held no interest for metropolitan Atlanta sport-page readers. As for the highly recommended Cobb, no file existed on him in Rice's growing collection of biographies of southern U.S. professional ballplayers.

But then there followed to the
Journal
a steady flow of applause: “Keep your eye on Ty Cobb … he is one of the finest hitters I've seen.” “Watch Cobb of Anniston, he is sure to be a sensation.” “Have you seen Ty Cobb play ball yet? He is the fastest mover in the game.” “Cobb had three hits yesterday, made two great catches.” “A sure big leaguer in the making.” Rice could count on a dozen or so such letters, postcards, and wires arriving monthly, sent by “interested fans” and “faithful readers” who signed themselves as Jackson, Brown, Kelly, Jones, Smith, and Stewart, among other interested parties.

Routinely discarding such mail, Grant Rice did not suspect perpetration of a fraud, mainly because the bulletins were signed in multi-form longhand styles, from slanting, scrawled, Spencerian, and Palmer methods to roundhand and wide-looped. Pencils and inks also varied. Finally, in self-defense, Rice wrote a “blind” column about someone he had never seen, hailing the arrival of a “new wonder boy named Cobb” who was “the darling of the fans” and a “hot number” with a ball club across the border from Georgia. Rice hoped that the acknowledgment would end the plague of Cobb plugs. No such luck; drumbeating notices continued to arrive from points in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.

Not until 1951, at a General Electric Company banquet honoring the sixty-five-year-old Cobb, did the seventy-one-year-old Granny Rice learn that he had been flimflammed by penman Ty, who was the secret author of the notices. Cobb now confessed that he had acted as his own press agent, and he alone had pumped out the praise. He also admitted to having played only twenty-two games at Anniston, with far from the spectacular results he had described via the post. In other words, he had lied like hell.

In the 1950s, Rice was the acknowledged dean of American sport commentators. Learning he had been suckered by a mere babe of seventeen surprised and irritated him. “That was a damned sneaky thing to do, Cobb,” snapped Rice. “What made you do it to me?”

“I was in a hurry, Granny,” answered Cobb.

Rice forgave him, and the two men resumed a long-standing friendship.

The desperate rush to be noticed came after Cobb had reported to Augusta on schedule, played in two games, and on April 24 had been handed his release. Abruptly Cobb found himself an unemployed free agent. Five days after his release he was in the outfield of the Anniston Steelers, a club he had never heard of until then, and one at the professional game's lowest possible level. It was from there that he began his letter barrage to the press.

From early April, when he had first reached the Augusta Tourists' training camp, very little had gone right. He had checked into a cheap hotel— “a bedbug joint” in his words to me—and hurried out to Warren Park, the Tourists' four-thousand-capacity home field. To him, the bandbox park seemed huge. He had come supplied with letters of introduction to a few Augusta businessmen from his Royston boosters, who had not however included the name of the Tourists' manager, Con Strouthers. The brusque manager barely glanced at the rookie, telling him, “Get suited up, go shag some flies.” Some thirty-five candidates were competing for sixteen to eighteen jobs. Utilityman Cobb's first assignment was to run down and return foul balls sprayed off the bats of other prospects. While batting practice went on he did outfield wind sprints and knee bends.

Otherwise, Ty merely stood around in his gaudy Royston uniform, trying to strike some rhythm with the tough-looking Tourists. “In that monkey-suit,” said first baseman Harry Bussey, “you should join the fire-department volunteers.” Ty moved himself to the infield during six-man defensive drills and worsened his situation by preempting grounders hit to others and yelling it up—“Woweeee!”—when he made a good stop. He would gladly have shed his red outfit, but a set of Tourist flannels was not offered.

Approaching the plate for some swings, he was jostled aside.

“Get the hell away,” growled Mike McMillan, a large outfielder, glaring at him.

Cobb bristled, as usual, when challenged. “It's my ups,” he pointed out.

“Beat it,” repeated McMillan, shouldering him into the backstop netting that served as a batting cage.

Cobb came back with fists raised, and suddenly he was surrounded by players who knocked off his cap and scuffed his new shoes. The boss, Strouthers, looked on unconcernedly. Cobb's gripe that he was tired of sitting around was wasted. “You make your own place here,” explained Strouthers.

While half a dozen preseason contests were being played, the novice pro did not leave the dugout, a flimsy lean-to that leaked when it rained. During pregame practice, uninvited to take part, he moved to center field and sat on the grass watching, waiting for something to happen. “I couldn't figure it out at first, then I got mad,” Cobb related years afterward. “It was humiliating to be taken for a pissant. I wondered why Augusta had bothered to call me up in the first place.” The fact was that Ty had originally approached Augusta; the roughing-up he took was standard maliciousness in a day when young contenders for veterans' jobs found their suits cut to shreds, their shoes nailed to the floor. Cobb's welcome was to have his pants and shirt “juiced”—sprayed with tobacco leavings.

Strouthers—who had never risen above the bottom minor leagues as a player—made no move to use Cobb in his lineup when the Detroit Tigers, touring the region in exhibitions, played the Tourists at Warren Park. Cobb stayed anchored to the bench. That did not stop him from closely watching Detroit's rangy center fielder, a left-hander like himself—Wahoo Sam Crawford. The Tigers, who had finished a bad fifth in the American League in 1903 with 65 wins and 71 losses, tore into the Tourists as if it were midseason in the majors. Cobb saw Crawford, a .332 batting star in the previous season, leisurely trot to first base after drawing a base on balls, then suddenly switch into high gear and race for second. The Tourists were caught napping. While they scrambled to nail Crawford at second, where he threw up a broad cloud of dust, a Tiger runner who had seconds earlier wandered down the line from third base sped home to score by inches. Cobb stored away that delayed, closely timed play for future use.

He noted, too, that while at bat Crawford seemed to be sneaking peeks at the mitt of the Augusta catcher. Was he stealing the catcher's
finger signs to the pitcher? It looked that way to Cobb, although he had never seen this trick. In the outfield, on a wallop heading for the fence, Crawford drifted under the ball, leaped at the exact right moment, and picked the chance off the boards, making the play look easy.

After the Tourists were beaten, Cobb hesitantly walked up to the future Hall of Famer Crawford to say, “That was a great catch, Mr. Crawford. What's the best way to judge long fly balls?” Crawford didn't mind talking about his specialty. While giving the rawboned boy his first big-league coaching, he also offered the first friendly words that Cobb had heard recently. Wahoo (from Wahoo, Nebraska) was a town barber in the off-season and had a wheat-belt twang, and Cobb's speech was filled with “cain't” for “can't,” “ah” for “I,” and “yuh” for “you.” Still, they understood each other. Crawford said, “You go [on flies] by the sound of the bat. A sound like a gun going off means the ball's hit hard … you start back in a big hurry. Use the crossover step, left or right, on the getaway. Run on the balls of your feet … Look over your shoulder to tell where the ball's headed, so's you run under it … Don't do any backpedaling, that gets you nowhere.” He went on, “Use both hands whenever you can … If you get a real good jump on a ball hit to your front, be moving forward on the catch so as to make a stronger throw.” Liking Cobb's concentrated interest, the loquacious Wahoo passed on other tips: “Make up your mind in advance to what base you'll throw … Throw on one hop to the bag, not on the fly … Before a road game bounce a ball off the fence in different places, testing for force and direction of the rebound.”

Cobb wanted to hear more. “Hell, I can't gab all day,” said Wahoo. “Break in a backup glove or two in case your number-one leather is ripped.” Cobb didn't admit that he could barely afford one old glove.

Cobb was encouraged to show Wahoo his own particular glove. As an experiment, he had cut the leather out of the palm to expose raw flesh, so that any catch essentially was a bare-handeder. Crawford grinned, saying, “I did that as a kid—to keep balls from sliding off the leather. No more, though.”

“It works for me,” said Cobb.

“Then keep it until you can't stand the blood it'll draw,” said Wahoo. And then he admonished, “Don't drink on game days.”

Trying not to stammer—one of the holdover curses of his boyhood
—Cobb thanked Crawford before going off to contemplate what he had learned. Some of it was basic. But at least half of what he had heard was new to him. He would always remember Crawford's kindness.

On opening day of the Tourists' regular Sally League season, Con Strouthers was short of a middle fielder. First baseman Harry Bussey, a salary holdout, was ineligible to play, meaning that center fielder McMillan moved to first base. Who would replace McMillan? On the lineup card Strouthers wrote: “Cobb, cf,” listing him seventh in the batting order.

This was a reluctant decision, Cobb had reason to believe. Strouthers wanted to see his tryout ended and have the noisy rookie gone down the road, enabling Augusta to sign a replacement. Coming to bat, Cobb received no instructions beyond, “Don't swing at anything in the dirt.” He took the field steamed up beyond normal.

In the season's opener, the opponent was a strong Columbia, South Carolina, team, featuring a fastballing pitcher, George Engel. It was a damp, grayish day with fifteen hundred or so fans on hand when Ty Cobb bowed in as a professional baseball player. Using his Roystonized grip—left fist gripping his stick six to seven inches above his right—he grounded out on his first time up. Next time he dug Engel's pitch up and over third base into the left-field corner, against the fence. As Columbia's fielder chased a ricocheting ball, Cobb hustled around the bases. The throw-in to the plate was close, but a head-first slide beat the relay by an arm's length for an inside-the-park home run. That drew cheers—but not in Augusta's dugout. It was quiet there. In the sixth inning, doubling up the middle, Cobb met the same indifference. Columbia won, 8–7, and Augusta fans went home for dinner, talking about the slender, big-eared newcomer with speed and a sting in his light bat.

A husband and wife from Cornelia, Georgia, near Royston, who were visiting Augusta, made the gesture of inviting Ty to join them for dinner on the night of his home run. Otherwise, he would have dined alone.

Strouthers said nothing hopeful. He griped that Cobb broke too many bats in practice. Bats of willow, ash, or spruce cost seventy-five cents apiece. “I only broke two,” said Cobb. “You don't let me do much swinging.” Two, said Strouthers, were too many.

Momentarily Cobb thought of mailing a news clipping of his break-in game to his father. The
Augusta Chronicle,
Georgia's oldest newspaper—“we never missed a single daily edition during the War Between the States,” the
Chronicle
could boast—didn't miss Cobb's feat, either. In a side note to the main game report it mentioned that “Outfielder T. Cobb was auspicious in his first local showing … Four-base and two-base pry-ups are a better act than anyone could expect from a beginner.”

On second thought, Cobb didn't send the news item home. Nothing was settled. He might strike out four straight times in his next start. He had been cold-shouldered and “hey-rube'd.”

In a second game with Columbia, Cobb told me, he doubled, fielded well, and stole a base. This may be inaccurate—Fred Lieb in his authoritative 1946 book,
The Detroit Tigers,
reported him as going hitless. Faded old box scores do not settle the matter. His stolen base, however, was Cobb's first in organized ball.