Cobb (17 page)

While his father was alive, Cobb had not needed to worry about money. Suddenly, it was a concern. On the trip north he considered his assets and came up short. Years after that, relying on memory, he estimated, “I had about two hundred dollars in an Augusta bank and seventy-five dollars cash in my pocket and that was it until I saw something from Detroit. It was so late in the season when I went up that I couldn't expect much from the club.”

He did not understand banking procedure, such as interest and
transfers of credit. When his seventy-five dollars ran out, he was not sure what would happen; “I didn't know what the hell was going on.”

At the time, the game of baseball was reshaping itself. In 1901 the foul-strike rule had been adopted by the National League, whereby the first and second foul balls off the bat counted as strikes. The American League followed suit two years later. For a batter such as pesky Cobb, who could repeatedly foul off deliveries until he drew a pitch he liked, that was bad news.

A far more momentous shake-up had also occurred. Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson, of Cincinnati, saw no reason why the National League should maintain a stranglehold on big-league franchises. Johnson geared up and went to war with the National League monopoly by changing the name of his strong minor Western League to the American League and claiming parity with the existing cartel. Johnson and his partners controlled franchise bases in Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, and Baltimore, and for the 1901 season enticed away from the Nationals such headliners as Nap Lajoie, Clark Griffith, Fielder Jones, Jimmy Collins, John McGraw, Cy Young, Jesse Burkett, Rube Waddell, Jack Chesbro, and Wee Willie Keeler. Soon enough the Nationals tired of a costly trade struggle, and in 1903 signed a peace treaty according equal status to Johnson's group. By this act, bifurcated baseball and the modern World Series were born. In that first Series, in 1903, the American League's Boston Pilgrims (soon to be called Red Sox) rubbed it in with a victory over the Honus Wagner–led Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League.

For Cobb, who knew little of such inside maneuvering, the timing of that event was fortunate. He reached the game's top level only two years after the baseball war ended, amidst a beginning boom time. Combined attendance at major-league games soon would jump from a reported 3.6 million in 1900 to 5.8 million in 1905, and to more than 7.2 million by 1910.

Detroit prospered doubly. The city could boast not only of a money-making team, but of jobs being made available from another birth—that of a foul-smelling contraption on wheels. In 1903–04, James W. Packard helped found the Packard Motor Company in Detroit, and David D. Buick and Henry Ford tooled up to do business. The Motor City, as the river center soon would be called, was at a pioneer stage when Cobb arrived there on the night of August 29, 1905.

HE WALKED
the streets, a stranger in America's thirteenth-largest metropolis, wholly on his own in a place he had never expected to see. Having effectively cut all ties with Augusta's team management through a series of clashes, he had nowhere to go in baseball if his hastily arranged tryout with the Tigers failed. In betting terms it was perhaps 100–1 that he would not last long here. Cobb would not be out of his teens for another sixteen months.

The events of recent weeks left him feeling rootless. Reconstructing the situation of that late summer, he told me, “I wasn't so much scared as nervous and anxious. Nothing was familiar. I didn't know anyone between the train depot and the boondocks. Hell, I didn't even know where the Tigers' ballpark was located.” He had never seen a big-league park or an official game between two big-league teams.

In the past nineteen days, Cobb had buried a beloved one, feuded with Augusta players and executives, led the Sally League in batting, been astonished to learn that a major organization wanted his services, and been bounced around on a lengthy railroad trip to where he now stood: on busy, downtown Woodward Avenue, looking for a cab to land him at a hotel. He arrived in town at 11:00
P.M.
, but the place still hummed with bike traffic, market vendors, and theater-goers. Trolleys clanged, cab whistles shrilled, ice wagons clattered past.

En route to the city of 400,000, the one-time frontier fur-trading post of Antoine Cadillac and then home of Calvinist settlers, Cobb had stopped off at Royston. His mother remained bedridden, almost incommunicado after her unbelievable, possibly criminal shooting of Professor Cobb. It had been Ty's task to dispose of his father's personal belongings. In conversations with me fifty-five years later, he never mentioned how he reacted to this, other than to allude to it as the most painful thing he had ever imagined and that he closed it off inside himself.

For his invasion of the North he carried only his dish-shaped Spalding glove, three well-boned hickory and ash bats, and one clothing bag, along with the fifty-dollar gold watch presented to Ty in his final Augusta appearance. No representative of the Tiger club was at the Detroit train depot to greet him.

Directing a horse-cabby to drive him to an inexpensive hotel near the Tigers' home field, he was asked, “Bennett Park or Burns Park?” Cobb did not know that the Tigers, because of a civic no-Sunday-ball prohibition, performed weekdays at Bennett and on the Sabbath at
Burns, in neighboring Springswell Township. He settled for a room near Bennett in a wooden-sided inn called Ryan's—“$8 Weekly Bed & Board, Cash Only.” As Cobb recalled, Ryan, the proprietor and a Tiger fan, said, “I saw your picture in the paper … about how you're joining the team.” This came as a surprise. Nobody had informed him that three days earlier the
Detroit Free Press
had printed his photo, a blurred image taken earlier in Augusta, showing rookie Ty in street suit and polka-dot bow tie. A notice had also appeared under the byline of the
Free Press
's baseball correspondent, Joe Jackson. Hotelman Ryan had kept a copy of the one-column piece by Jackson, and Ty read his first big-city write-up.

Jackson's column rated him as reportedly having exceptional speed out of the batter's box, but was lukewarm about his chances to stick with the Tigers once their personnel emergency ended. Forty-one games remained on their schedule, not enough dates for a new hand to make much of an impression. It was by forfeit—injuries to two Tigers—that the raw “nubbin” had gained a trial. He was one more in a line of recruits brought up by teams in a late-season pinch. Almost none of them lasted.

Manager Bill Armour's collection of inconsistent hitters—with only one man, reliable outfielder Sam Crawford, averaging close to .300—would end the season in considerably less than glorious fashion:

Dick Cooley, of, .247
Bill Coughlin, 3b, .252
Sam Crawford, of, .297
Lew Drill, c, .261
Pinky Lindsay, lb, .267
Bobby Lowe, of-inf, .193
Matty McIntyre, of, .263
Charlie O'Leary, ss, .213
Germany Schaefer, 2b, .244

No Tiger other than Wahoo Crawford (.433) owned a slugging average above .333. Pitching almost alone had carried the club to third place, behind the Philadelphia Athletics and Chicago White Sox, who were locked in a photo finish for the pennant. One freshly incubated outfielder would have as much impact on Detroit's hope of improving
its record as a marshmallow hurled against the Majestic Building, a fourteen-story Detroit skyscraper.

As he read on, Cobb saw that columnist Joe Jackson wrote off his .326 average, tops in the Sally League, as meaningless. What he had accomplished in the Georgia backwater had no application to major-league baseball. Jackson foresaw a .275 batting mark as about the best that could be expected from Cobb—which would be “satisfactory.”

In so saying, the
Free Press
's forecaster was putting a newcomer on the spot. A .275 average was no easy attainment. In the 1905 season, pitching utterly dominated the American League. In the entire circuit, ridiculously, only four first-string players finished the campaign at .300 or above, and the pennant-winning Philadelphia Athletics showed an embarrassing team batting average of .255. During a year of wholesale slump by veterans, Ty would be expected to hit against well-seasoned pitchers he had never seen in person, among them New York's Jack Chesbro, a spectacular recent 41-game winner, sinkerballing Addie Joss of Cleveland, and the curious strikeout specialist, Rube Waddell of Philadelphia. All in all, it wasn't too much of an exaggeration to compare the matchup to sending a new, unranked prizefighter up against the ruling heavyweight champion, Jim Jeffries.

Due to report the next day, August 30, Ty needed sleep. He picked the wrong place. The legend began here that he was so much of a rube that he mistakenly checked into a whorehouse on his first night in the city. Actually Ryan's Bed and Board had no loose ladies, but it did contain a burlesque joint on the first floor. Rooming above it, he got little rest while the din went on.

Early the next day, in rumpled street clothes and a straw boater, carrying his equipment, he caught another horse-cab to Bennett Park, where the Tigers were scheduled that afternoon against the New York Highlanders. Bennett, at Trumbull and Michigan avenues, was on the edge of Corktown, an enclave of hard-boozing, hard-rooting Irish-American fans. Once Bennett had been a hay-and-grain market; now it was boxed in by a high wooden fence to block gate-crashers and held eighty-five hundred at capacity, with adjoining “wildcat” bleachers for three hundred at fifteen cents per seat. Inside the park, prices ranged from one dollar for boxes to fifty cents in the grandstand. Bennett Park did not have a real dugout; even the game's foremost stars sat on rough benches. There was no smaller-seating park in the American League.

Partly because of that, Detroit had been threatened with loss of its franchise by autocratic American League president Ban Johnson. Civic leaders struck back at Johnson, saying that he belonged in Detroit's Eden Musee, a museum featuring a chamber of horrors. Fans of a city growing toward 500,000 in the nascent age of the automobile prized their ball team highly, win or lose. The Tigers, also called the “Bengals,” “Striped Cats,” and “Felines,” had been around since 1887.

Cobb, ill at ease, met manager Bill Armour in his office. Armour seemed to be a man in pain, what with a spotty-hitting lineup also known on defense for turning singles into stand-up doubles. At thirty-seven, Armour wore a bushy mustache and disguised his small stature by wearing a padded vest and suit coat. “Little Bill” was in his first season as field chief, and already being criticized. Cobb noticed his nervous habit of twisting his hands. Armour said, “Glad to see you. We've got some disabled men. I'm starting you today in center field. You should get together with Jimmy Barrett on our signals.” Barrett, a good slap-hitter, was the injured outfielder to be replaced by Cobb that afternoon. It came without warning. Cobb: “I hadn't expected to start a game for a while … it was a jolt. I didn't know New York's pitchers except that they were fast.”

Before the action began, a presence appeared. He was Frank J. Navin, former pro gambler and insurance salesman who had won the confidence of the Tigers' millionaire playboy owner, William H. “Good Times” Yawkey, and had taken over the running of the team. Secretary Navin, big, chubby, and poker-faced, was said to bet as high as a thousand dollars on a horse race; when in his cups he bet more. Not bothering to shake hands, Navin looked over the Georgia import—a lean, muscular type of five feet, ten inches and 160 pounds, with fair to reddish hair neatly combed back over a side part and with steady eyes.

At first meeting, Ty felt intimidated by the man. Navin was cold of manner. He barely nodded, and made no response when Cobb stated that he appreciated the chance that the Tigers were giving him. The youthful Cobb had a feeling that Navin would be a tough boss to get along with. He was not too inexperienced to see that if he played a few bad games in a row, Navin would have him headed home in no time—bats, glove, the Augusta fans' gold watch, and all.

Upon leaving Augusta, he had hoped to be paid from $400 to $500 by Detroit in his role as final-month replacement—if he cracked the
lineup. Navin handed him a contract worth $1,500 over the full season, breaking down to $250 for the one month's work at hand. Lacking recourse, he signed. He was outfitted with a uniform that did not fit particularly well: gray-white flannels (laundry service was slow with the Tigers) with an Old English
D
across the shirt, black stockings, and white-and-black cap. A pair of steel-cleated shoes was found to fit his size-ten feet.

Injured Jimmy Barrett coached him on the Tigers' hit-and-run, take-or-swing, steal-or-stay signals, Cobb remembered, adding, “We've got a way of swiping New York's signs. See that advertisement on the center-field fence? Well, I'll be sitting next to it in the stands with a spyglass strong enough to pick up warts on their catcher's hands. I can read his signals to Jack Chesbro—he's pitching for them today—on almost every throw. That's where the fence sign—‘
The Detroit News,
Best Newspaper in the West'—comes in.”

Barrett went on. “When you're batting, keep your eyes on the letter
B
in the sign. You'll notice the slots in it open and close. If the slot's open in the upper half of the
B,
it means I've read their signals from the catcher. It's a fastball coming. If the bottom slot closes you can expect a curve or some kind of drop. One of our boys is working the slots after I give him the word.”

“I'm not used to this,” Cobb protested. “Can't I get up there and hit my regular way?” It was not the cheating that bothered him; he was feeling a severe case of nerves, and adding another element could hurt his concentration.

Barrett shrugged. “Your decision, kid, you're the hitter. But against Chesbro you can use the extra help.” Barrett's reference was to Jack Chesbro's spitball, a pitch disguised as a straight fastball, which when well wetted dived to ankle height. Since 1900, Happy Jack Chesbro had pitched his way to what by season's end would be 126 wins against but 56 losses. In 1904 he had piled up a record of 41 victories to 12 losses. This was who the unlucky Cobb would face in his first major-league game.