Cobb (27 page)

“Kling!” he bawled to Cubs' catcher John “Noisy” Kling, “I'm going on the next one!” Kling's arm was accurate—in game number five of the 1907 Series he had cut down Cobb trying to steal third. He waved the ball in warning.

“Speedy Tyrus went into second base as he'd boldly promised so hard,” wrote Grantland Rice in the Nashville
Tennessean,
“that he knocked the bag from its moorings and was safe as he sent baseman Joe Tinker flying.” Acting as if irritated by a defective base bag, Cobb kicked it a few times. His real purpose, soon revealed, was to move the bag a few inches closer to third base. With that, he again shouted to Kling and pitcher Ed Reulbach loudly enough for people in the close seats to hear: “I'm going on the next one!”

Kling was unnerved. His throw to Harry Steinfeldt at third base
was too late to catch Cobb, whose fall-away slide gave Steinfeldt only a toe to tag. He had called his shots twice and made good on both. With George Mullin pitching well, Detroit won, 8–3.

Was not announcing his intentions in advance a foolish act? Would it not make Kling all the more alert and determined? “No,” said Cobb at age seventy-three, with a clear memory of the plays. “I knew Kling's mind, how he'd be shook up by it and would have to collect himself before throwing. All I needed was inches.”

After that, however, the Cubs closed it out, winning a five-game Series with no trouble. Three-Finger Brown and Orvie Overall threw consecutive 3–0 shutouts. In the two closing games Cobb made no hits, striking out, grounding out, or flying out five times. He also misfielded Chance's fly ball. “Series-jinxed” was the term applied to him by some writers. Yet his overall Series batting average of .368 could not be dismissed—only two Cubs had bettered it. No Tiger had come close to him.

Like so many modern standout players who have refused press interviews after a defeat, Cobb left Bennett Park in haste.

THE 1908
season represented a turning point of Cobb's life. Finally, after three years of indecision, he reached the conclusion that he belonged permanently in the game. Cobb wrote in his diary, “I now made up my mind that the gang couldn't keep me down … Anytime a man can last more than 400 games and put his team into two Series, his path is chosen for him.” Charlie Cobb may not have agreed with that decision. Just seventeen years old, she disliked living for months far away from her Georgia family. She faced the fact, however, that her husband gave her no say in the matter.

Poor attendance at the last two Series games—turnouts of 12,900 and 6,200—held each Tiger to loser's shares of $871 apiece from the box-office division. Cobb was diligent in rooting out every other odd dime. He picked up $1,200 in postseason exhibitions and a $250 purse for entering an around-the-bases sprinting contest.

How fast was he really? At Chicago he beat some of the top runners by going from home base to first in 3.5 seconds and touring four bases in 13.5 seconds, doing it in cut-down uniform pants and baseball shoes. If alive today, given starting blocks, technique training, and
the springy shoes of Carl Lewis, he might well be an Olympic Games prospect.

That winter, always restless, he spread himself across the South and East. In Louisiana he played against semipros for cash guarantees. Bush ballparks doubled their attendance by his presence. He drove a Thomas Flyer in the New York to North Carolina Good Roads Tour, a promotional event of the auto industry. Between 1900 and 1918, U.S. motor-vehicle production rose from 4,000 units to 187,000, and driver registration from 8,000 to 469,000. Cobb, who was fortunate to have arrived at the outset of automania, owed much of his future financial affluence to endorsing cars, tires, batteries, owning dealerships, and buying early General Motors stock.

Coach Dan McGugin of Vanderbilt University invited him to attend football practice. Cobb watched the boys bang heads for a while and asked if he could try running the ball. McGugin was hesitant. After taking part in a few “dummy” plays (no tackling), Cobb insisted on donning pads and helmet and engaging in a real scrimmage. McGugin was astonished when he cut off-tackle and ran eighty-five yards for a touch-down the first time he handled the ball. “That convinced me,” McGugin told a reporter, “that here is the greatest athlete in the country.”

A FEW
weeks of quiet living at home was enough, after which Cobb needed action. He seemed to require the sounds and sight of a crowd roaring. A New Orleans fight promoter signed him to referee a card of club matches. Before the first fight ended, the audience was howling protests; instead of stopping a bout in which one pug was being battered around the ring, bleeding and nearly unconscious, Cobb let it keep going. With the crowd out of hand, policemen forcibly evicted Cobb from the ring, and the promoter had him removed from the building. After that, the one-night-stand referee left for Georgia to hunt quail and to give Charlie some of his time.

DURING THE
off-season the couple lived at The Oaks, the home of Charlie's father, Roswell Lombard. A wing of Lombard's large house was provided for them, along with a household maid. Cobb couldn't afford his own place as yet. He got along well with a father-in-law who was prominent in his own right.

DOMESTIC PEACE
and quiet may have been Cobb's lot that winter, but in seven American League cities there were those who wanted him drummed from the game, either through a long-term suspension or permanent barring. From 1908 until the World War I years and beyond, his lawless ways, coupled with his ability to beat teams single-handedly, whether by accepted means or otherwise, would embroil Cobb in almost endless run-ins with opponents, fans, the press, policemen, law courts, his owner, and the American League office. Byron Bancroft Johnson, American League president and advocate of less rowdyism on field and the sanitizing of baseball so that women would be attracted to games, was quoted as saying, “Every time I look up I hear about Mr. Cobb making trouble. He seems unable to conform to the accepted rules of baseball or society.”

In Philadelphia, Boston, and Cleveland, fans were more direct. They threatened bodily harm, and some of the threats to shoot down Cobb appeared less like the ordinary recriminations aimed at a controversial figure than genuine warnings of deadly intent.

High on the list of those who wanted him ruled off the diamond was Cornelius McGillicuddy Mack, the “Tall Tactician” and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics. Mack was dignified, soft-spoken, and conservative. He would rule the A's for fifty years. After Cobb spiked Home Run Baker in a celebrated incident in late August, Mack called Cobb, his
bête noire,
such names as “back-alley artist,” “a no-good ruffian,” and “a malefactor no league can afford.”

“I wouldn't let Cobb play for me if he did it for nothing,” Mack stated.

Conflicting accounts of one Baker-Cobb incident back in August had been widely published. John Franklin Baker, a five-foot, eleven-inch, 170-pound former butcher from Trappe, Maryland, was on his way to fame as the deadball era's leading power hitter. In 1911–13 he would knock 33 balls out of parks and be nicknamed Home Run Baker; the beetle-browed ex–meat man was a symbol of power at the plate.

It had not been proved, either way, that their collision had been a case of Cobb deliberately going for Baker's body on a steal, or the third baseman's awkwardness in trying for a tag. Cobb had drawn a walk, stolen second, and soon after tried to take third. Baker, taking a strong throw from A's catcher Paddy Livingston, had his man out by two feet.
At full momentum Cobb faked a hookslide to his left while whipping his right leg across to the bag. Baker, stabbing at the runner bare-handed, went down in pain. Blood ran down his hand and forearm. The runner was safe; Baker was cut an undetermined amount. The A's quickly bandaged him and he stayed in the game.

It was an impossible play to call. Harry Salsinger of the
Detroit News
saw it this way: “Cobb was blocked … and came in spikes flying high and glittering in the sunlight. A photograph taken of the play proved nothing. It could have been an accident.”

Baker replied, “It was on purpose. After I put the ball on his left leg and had him out, he did a scissors-like motion of his right leg. One-eighth of an inch deeper and he'd have ended my career. I wouldn't have been able to throw.” Baker added that while he lay on his back, injured, Cobb invited him to settle the matter with fists back of the stands. A crazy thing to do, thought Baker.

Cobb denied intent, and pointed out that Baker needed only a small sticking plaster on the cut. He maintained, “Mack's big favorite is Eddie Collins, who slides into base the way I do—he's hurt more men than I have.” Mack called that a lie.

A majority of American League teams took the side of Baker and Mack; they believed that Cobb intended to rule the base paths, come what may.

Another incentive for Mack's reaction was that after slicing Baker, Cobb had gone on a batting binge such as comes to few men, averaging .640 in one stretch as the Tigers swept sixteen of twenty games. His presence in the lineup meant a probable pennant for Detroit.

Mack's enrollment in the Cobb-haters had begun in 1909 at spring training at San Antonio, Texas. A third straight pennant was in prospect for the Tigers. They badly beat New York, 16–5, in their home opener on May 11 before a crowd of about twelve thousand, with their ace running the bases with abandon and doubling twice. In another New York match Cobb singled three times and tripled while accounting for five runs. A half-century later he told
San Francisco Examiner
sports columnist Prescott Sullivan, “In those two games, I arrived as a big-leaguer.”

For twenty-four years Cobb's life was one of unrelieved, preternatural conflict, a bannerline writer's joy. In the summer of 1909 the Georgian set some kind of record by becoming the only famous baseball
player to be jumped and mugged by a group in his own home city on his way to a game. In Detroit, he was attacked by several men, who knifed him and set off a brawl in which Cobb finally drove off a mob and later claimed to have killed one of the attackers with a pistol butt.

The matter, however, soon took second place to another ugly development. Early in September, Cobb made spectacular news. It happened when the Tigers were in Cleveland against the Naps. Years later Cobb gave his version of what supposedly happened. “With the idea of entering show business one day as an actor, I dined with George M. Cohan, thirty-one-year-old songwriter-actor who had composed such hits as ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy' and ‘Give My Regards to Broadway,' and Vaughn Glaser, a playwright. Our dining and drinking ended about one-thirty
A.M.
” At that time Cobb was driven to the Tigers' hotel, the Euclid. He was not drunk, Cobb was to testify in court. He
was
angered by the night elevator operator, a black man, who allegedly said, “We got no elevators after midnight … you can walk up to your room.”

“Get going up,” ordered Cobb, waving a fist. They arose, but to the wrong floor. Cobb berated the lift man, slapped him, and they returned to the lobby. There the guest was approached in an “insolent” way by the hotel's black night watchman–house detective, one George Stansfield. He reproached Cobb for being so noisy at a late hour. A shouting match followed between them. As they say in box scores, error by Cobb, assist to Stansfield. Stansfield pulled his nightstick, and upon moving in on Cobb found himself in a fight for his life. They struggled. Both fell down, and while on the floor the husky Stansfield struck Cobb several times with his truncheon. At that Cobb produced a pocketknife and began cutting Stansfield—in the ear, shoulder, and hands. Stansfield didn't quit, as evidence showed. He hit Cobb a few more solid blows to the body and head with the stick, then pulled a gun. As Stansfield went down again, Cobb kicked the gun across the lobby and kept up the knife slashing. People from lower-floor rooms came down to witness him kicking Stansfield in the head.

Homicide wasn't far away when a desk clerk and janitors jumped in to pin a flailing Cobb to the floor. Bleeding, he staggered to his room to bandage head wounds. Many years later, Cobb showed me old skull scars, saying, “I didn't want to draw the Tigers into it. But I got in touch with Georgie Cohan at his hotel and had him notify Navin in
Detroit.” Such was how Cobb remembered it, in any event. (In point of fact, it is dubious whether Cohan was involved.)

With a police investigation pending, Cobb appeared at League Park the following afternoon, bandaged from ear to chin. Teammates, not knowing the score, watched in amazement as Cobb played all eighteen innings of a doubleheader. In the first game he had three hits off Cy Falkenberg. Hughie Jennings urged him to sit out the second match. He played and made a pair of good outfield catches. By now his bandages were stained red. Of all sights of Ty Cobb on a ballfield, this one may have been the most bizarre.

Navin already was in receipt of some dozen “Black Hand” death-threat letters mailed from Philadelphia as a result of the Baker episode. The unsigned notes asserted that when the Tigers reached that city for crucial meetings beginning September 15, a ballpark sniper, or several, would gun down Cobb in reprisal for the spiking of Baker. In addition, junk and threats had been thrown at him in the Boston park, and he had thumbed his nose at Beantown crowds. One of these exchanges had come during a ten-inning Detroit victory in which the Peach tripled, twice singled, poled a home run, and roughly upended shortstop Charles “Heinie” Wagner on a steal attempt. (“That sort of shitty treatment of me at Boston mostly came from Harvard students,” brooded Cobb with unconscious humor in later life. “It's why I sent my son to Yale when he grew up.”)

Navin needed to deal with the Cleveland situation, and quickly. From a hospital bed, watchman Stansfield had sworn out an arrest warrant charging aggravated criminal assault with intent to kill. To lose Cobb's bat and his hustle to drawn-out court procedures or a prison sentence in all probability would end Detroit's championship hopes. The second-place Athletics were pressing close.