Cobb (19 page)

His .240 average for a minor part of the season just ended would represent the only time in twenty-four big-league years that Cobb averaged under .300—a tremendous feat. No major-league batter from Honus Wagner, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Nap Lajoie, Rogers Hornsby, Tris Speaker, George Sisler, Paul Waner, Harry Heilmann, Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, Al Simmons, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron—has ever maintained over an extended career an unbroken .300-and-up record. All failed at least once to hit .300. Cobb missed hitting .300 or better only in part of one season; thereafter he did it for
twenty-three consecutive years.
His sustained excellence remains the all-time record, with the probability that no hitter will ever tie or equal it.

BASEBALL WRITERS
, puzzled by the upstart Cobb that autumn, pictured him as a question mark followed by an exclamation point. The
News
's Harry Salsinger saw him as “a ghost in advancing when he manages a hit” and “good at ducking beanballs” and “one who might develop into an offensive threat.” Paul Brusky of the
Times
went overboard with “here is an infant prodigy.” Brusky had been intrigued enough to check out Cobb's recent past, and was aware of the killing of Professor Cobb of sixty days earlier. He let his readers know that the youngster had played with a heavy burden of grief. In
Sporting Life,
Brusky admired his “wonderful ability” to resume play so soon after his father's funeral. The phrase “small miracle” was tossed around.

Other Tigers had not surpassed Cobb's .240 mark by much. As previously noted, aside from Sam Crawford's near-.300 performance—best on the club—infielders Schaefer and Pinky Lindsay and outfielders Charley Hickman, Bobby Lowe, and Matty McIntyre had batted at from .193 to .267. Armour's need for power ran right down the lineup.

Although major-league baseball attendance in general was climbing, the Tigers, despite finishing third, were at the bottom in 1905 in American League home draw, with 193,384, or an average of only 1,264 patrons per game. So poor was the showing that it was predicted that the franchise would be moved from the low-income Corktown district of Detroit to a larger eastern metropolis.

WHILE COBB
prepared for a return to a mother facing criminal proceedings in the case of her dead husband, club secretary Frank Navin remained silent on the question of whether Cobb had shown enough ability to be retained for 1906. Armour was not talking, either. Gossip had it that economy measures would be imposed next year. Cobb failed to see how, under management's existing policy, more money could be saved. On long, hot road trips, game suits went unlaundered; players washed them in sinks on trains and hung them out windows, where the uniforms were peppered by flying cinders. Bathing facilities at parks and at second-rate hotels were few and primitive; men often dried in their own sweat upon leaving a city. Lacking a trainer, players with cuts or abrasions were bandaged by teammates. Only the best pitchers and a few veterans were provided with sleeping berths on trains. Most of the Tigers, Cobb included, slept sitting up. Road meals came cold and unappetizing.

Boss Navin, however, riding up front in a private compartment, dined and slept in comfort. “Navin kept us badly housed and fed through my early years with Detroit,” Cobb attested. “That went for a lot of clubs in those days. But we were about the worst at getting pissed upon by the ownership.”

Other trouble was shaping up. Cobb was unpopular with a majority of the Tigers. Matty McIntyre and pitching mainstay Ed “Twilight” Killian set the tone by ignoring him on and off the field. The team's main men had little in common with an eighteen-year-old from a distant part of the country. Most of the members were northerners and midwesterners. Cobb's pronounced southernness—with his slurry drawl and a stiff, formal way of addressing people—was not “regular.” He did not drink or joke around. Moreover, Cobbs had fought against the Union in the Civil War.

During the first days after his arrival he was not seen as a threat to take someone's job. But once his occasional flashy play indicated that he might turn out to be more than a short-term replacement, resentment built among the established outfield corps of Charley Hickman, Matty McIntyre, Jimmy Barrett, and Duff Cooley. Only fun-loving infielder Germany Schaefer and utilityman Bobby Lowe hospitably invited him to sit with them at dinner. There was no room for him at postgame gab sessions in hotel lobbies, at floating poker games, at barbershop-quartet
singing. It was ostracism, by men who were old pros at it. The team's attitude had not yet hardened into outright hazing—that was coming—but Cobb, reviewing his 1905 experience, wrote, “It was a them-against-me setup … it wasn't about to get better.” It was not much comfort to know that rookies everywhere were treated like plague carriers, a baseball practice as old as the day when umpires wore top hats and derbies and four strikes composed an out.

At the last moment, early in October, Cobb changed his mind about leaving immediately for home. Word from Royston concerning his father's estate was troubling. Cobb had always thought that the Professor was well fixed. Now letters from his family showed that much of W. H.'s property was mortgaged, and the cost of lawyers to defend his mother in her forthcoming trial for voluntary manslaughter had mounted. The cash problem was serious.

Cobb stayed on in Detroit for a few days to pick up ninety dollars for a pair of postseason games matching the Tigers with a local all-star semipro team. While on the field, he was approached by a reporter from a Lansing, Michigan, newspaper. The man brought up the subject of Amanda Cobb and her shotgunning of W. H. “What are her chances for acquittal?” asked the reporter.

“Get away from me,” Cobb warned.

When the reporter persisted in his questioning, he was grabbed by the shirt and britches and sent staggering. It drew a reprimand from Frank Navin as the postseason ran out.

Cobb's final act of an incredible month was to try pinning down Armour on what he could expect next spring. “It's all up in the air,” said Armour, who liked Cracker Cobb for his hustle. “I haven't been offered a contract, myself. Maybe neither of us will be here next time.”

“If I come back,” pressed Cobb, “do you think I can get twelve hundred dollars for the season?”

Replied Armour, “Navin has to pay some of the boys more than twice that. He thinks you might be a comer. So don't be bashful about getting all you can.”

Uncertainty remained. Cobb would say in later years that he was not even sure at this point that he could afford to stay on as a ballplayer.

“Temperamental, humorless, egocentric, Cobb proved an inviting target for the hardboiled primitives on the team … with Detroit he had no friends, whatever … they hated his guts.”

Historian Harold Seymour, in
Baseball: The Golden Age

In December, midway through the 1905–06 off-season, Cobb reached his nineteenth birthday without receiving a Detroit contract. Weeks of silence by the front office passed. In November two events had seemed to signal his return to a minor league, and to a team not even based in the United States. Toronto of the Eastern League needed an outfielder, and the low eighteen-hundred-dollar asking price on Detroit's rookie fill-in attracted the Canadians. In addition, Frank Navin had recently signed Davy “Kangaroo” Jones, formerly a stout outfielder with the Chicago Cubs. With Jones on hand and a Toronto deal percolating, Navin delayed resigning a marginal player.

Tired of waiting, Cobb did not help his shaky situation when he violated a Navin rule concerning outside employment. Near Atlanta, the University of Georgia operated a prep-school training camp for baseball and track athletes it was recruiting, and who needed coaching. Local boy Cobb was offered $250 and travel expenses to coach the kids. Navin and Armour, as a matter of policy, refused to allow it. Cobb defied the rule, signed with Georgia, and left for camp.

Years later, reviewing the dispute, he held a thumb and finger an inch apart, saying, “I came this close to giving up playing ball for a living—for
good. I would not drop down to Toronto, which was out there in moose and snow country. Working for a university was a good deal for me … though I probably was the youngest college coach in the country.” The arrangement was an odd one: some of Cobb's pupils were as old as their teacher.

In January a contract for fifteen hundred dollars—some three hundred dollars more than he had expected—arrived from the Tigers. He signed for his first full big-league season as a backup behind outfield starters Sam Crawford, Matty McIntyre, and Davy Jones and reserves Jimmy Barrett and Sam Thompson. He was, to borrow a current expression, “low dog in the meat yard”—the lowest-paid carryover member of the twenty-four-man squad. If a favorable trade or sales proposal came along, he figured to be dealt away by Navin. “His teammates,” said the
Sporting Journal,
“wanted no part of someone who might one day take somebody's job. They banded to run him off the club with some of the hardest hazing ever seen.”

THE DETROIT
Baseball and Amusement Company opened spring training in Augusta at Warren Park with low pennant hopes. The Tigers' dump-Cobb faction wasted no time. It became busy—“in midseason form,” as Cobb described it—during batting practice. There was no room in the box for him. Big Matty McIntyre and others blocked his way; as soon as one hitter finished his ten workout swings, another crowded in ahead of next-man-up Cobb. He was dismissed with, “Go knock some flies to the yannigans [rookies].” Handed a long, thin stick known as a fungo bat, he drew the job of exercising fielders. It was insulting—fungoing was usually relegated to a coach or some retired player. Stuck with this duty, his chance to sharpen his eye against spring pitching was slipping away.

Practice games had barely started when he found his only good glove unexplainably ripped in the stitching, and a pair of his favorite bats gone from the rack. On a tip from a groundskeeper he looked behind a fence and in the weeds found the bats—both shattered at the handles. Cobb never found out for sure who did it.

Augusta's antiquated Albion Hotel was the Tigers' headquarters, an inn offering a single toilet with bathtub on each floor. Ringleaders Matty McIntyre and Ed Siever, with others, dawdled in the water while Cobb hung around a chilly hallway draped in a towel. After a hot, dirty
game, he would find himself locked out of an empty washroom. At other times the hot water supply deliberately was exhausted. In the Albion dining room a pea flicked off someone's knife would splat off Cobb's head. Or he would find a piece of rotten fruit squishing in his coat pocket. His hat was impaled on a rack. In the clubhouse his shoes were nailed to the floor.

Cobb's instinctive reaction was to punch someone. In his words, “I told that damned little Bill Armour I was about to settle this man to man if he didn't move in. Instead of coming down on the gang he went on playing poker with them. Oh, he'd make a half-assed remark now and then that things were going too far. But he let me know it was my problem—and there could be no brawling on the team.”

Cobb asked a few uninvolved Tigers what he should do. They were unhelpful. In a slugout against a half-dozen players, he stood no chance. But to let them walk on him was something he could not tolerate.

Job protection, money, and pride—strong elements—kept the feud going. Matty McIntyre, with his swiftness and good arm, soon appeared to have won a starting outfield position. At twenty-six he was a club leader. Davy Jones was all but sure to handle another outfield spot. Steadily effective Sam Crawford was a star, and entrenched as an outfield regular in his eighth major-league season. There was Jimmy Barrett, formerly a .300 hitter but now declining, and coming off an unhealed leg injury. There was Freddie Payne, a utility type. And there was Cobb. Three of the six would not see much action, possibly be traded or sold. Survival was especially important to McIntyre, who was having trouble maintaining a .260 plate average as the spring tour meandered through the South.

Someone tacked a note on Cobb's hotel door: “
LEAVE HERE WHILE YOU CAN.
” Suspects were plentiful, but he didn't bother to ask around the Albion for any witnesses. He went out and for twenty-five dollars bought a gun. “I was catching hell by the handful,” he said later. “That gun was forced on me.”

COBB'S WEAPON
was a snub-nosed Frontier Colt pistol, provided by a former teammate with his old hometown team, the Royston Reds. Ty saw the Colt as making all the difference in the event he was jumped some night by a group. He wore the gun, he told me, in a holster near his armpit. Practicing his draw, he became fast. He kept the pistol a
secret for weeks. When Bill Armour heard rumors that Cobb was armed, he moved to confiscate the weapon. Cobb denied its existence. “I stood still for a search,” he remembered, “and they didn't find a fucking thing.”

ON MARCH
30 Cobb left camp to attend his mother's trial for voluntary manslaughter. More than seven months had passed since Amanda Cobb had pulled the triggers of the shotgun that had killed Professor Cobb. During the hiatus the trial's outcome had hung as a miserable dead weight over her son. Amanda Cobb had run up medical bills while she slowly “recovered from shock.” She now needed a nurse, and had retained a battery of defense lawyers. Of the approximately $215 per month the Tigers were paying him, Ty was sending home $100 or more for family support and to apply to the debt against the Royston farm, a legacy of the late Professor.

The site of Amanda's trial was Lavonia, Georgia, where a sizable crowd gathered to look on. Already Ty Cobb was a regional celebrity—no other local product had ever reached the major leagues—and people from across the territory slapped his back and shook his hand, when all he wanted was to see the ordeal ended. The thought of a Cobb going to prison was chilling.