Cobb (38 page)

So vindicated, Cobb was happy to rub baseball's nose in trade unionism and freemen's rights for a long time to come. Thirty-eight years after his Detroit contract battle, he was invited as a “retired authority” to testify before a House subcommittee studying monopoly power, chaired by Emmanuel Celler of New York. As of 1951 Congress continued its off-and-on probes into whether or not the major leagues should be allowed to continue as exempt from antitrust law. The Library of Congress supplies this excerpt from 1951:

CHAIRMAN:
“Would you care to say what happened as a result of your 1913 holdout? Did you go back to Detroit and play and did they give you want you wanted?”

COBB:
“Yes, sir. Naturally I had this exhibition trip [with the Georgian All-Stars] and made a little out of it. And we finally came to terms.”

CHAIRMAN:
“Do you remember what action, if any, the Georgia Federation of Labor took after Mr. Navin's release of the ultimatum ‘you will play with Detroit or you never will play in Organized Baseball'?”

COBB:
“Yes, sir. Senator Hoke Smith from Georgia … and others of Congress … asked to see my contract. And then they gave
out the press statement here in Washington about investigation of the contract, see. And then Mr. Navin and I got together
pretty quick.” [Audience laughter.]

Even with the distraction of earning big money from five directions—seven if you counted the Duplex Razor ads and plugs for Nuxated Iron Pills [“Nuxated Calms My Stomach”] he endorsed at one thousand dollars each—Cobb had a typical series of seasons from 1913 through 1915. Five hundred and two hits came cracking off his black and tan Louisville Sluggers during this period, as he gained his seventh, eighth, and ninth consecutive batting crowns with averages of .390, .368, and .369. That put him one up on Honus Wagner's eight titles at Pittsburgh. Wagner would amass no more before his retirement at age forty-three. Cobb, at age twenty-eight in 1915, was far from finished—in fact, he was only getting warmed up for a sweep of the statistics.

In the same three-year span his base-running became still more nerve-shattering. He was compared to a phantom, a whirlwind, and a loose cannon. “I've given it a lot of thought,” remarked Branch Rickey, then managing the St. Louis Browns, “and have concluded that the only way to slow him is to do what infielders keep trying—grab his belt as he goes past. And that's illegal.” Rickey endlessly raved about a particular play, one that he found unbelievable for its combination of improvisation, speed, gambling, swiveling eyeballs, and Cobb's right foot. Against St. Louis Cobb took extreme twenty-foot leads off first base on pitcher Carl Weilman. Weilman had a relatively slow pickoff move. Five times Cobb beat his throws with dives back to the bag. Then, stealing second when it was 100–1 that he'd try it, he kept sprinting when a throw to the middle base was slightly fumbled. “The throw to third to Jimmy Austin to retire him had Cobb beaten by a good yard.” Rickey's bushy eyebrows climbed as he spoke. “In a split second as the ball headed into Austin's glove, Cobb amazingly kicked it into our dugout. He did it in such a flash that the umpire refused to call it interference, which it openly was. The umpire had never seen a man literally kick a ball out of his way, like you'd swat a gnat, let alone go on to score the winning run. He said it had to be accidental. Oh, I was raving mad and screamed at the umpire.”

What did Cobb say? Rickey: “Of course he was full of innocence.
The kicking was just luck. I was happy that he didn't spike Austin in the process.”

In the 1913–15 span, often on battered legs, the Peach stole 183 bases. His 96 steals of 1915 established a record that would last for fifty-nine years.

NO MATTER
what city he was in, Cobb was always in a hurry. In one such instance he came within inches of death. On a Philadelphia evening he hurried from the Franklin Hotel, caught a taxi, and instructed the driver to step on it. From a side street came a bell-clanging trolley car, out of control.

Sitting in the front seat with the cabdriver, Cobb yelled, “Turn! Turn!” The cabbie froze and continued ahead at thirty miles an hour into the trolley's path. Moments before a collision, Cobb grabbed the wheel and spun the cab sideways, but it was too late to avoid the smash-up, which ripped off the taxi's rear wheels and sent Cobb sailing out the door. With the hurtling trolley about to hit him, he rolled away, barely safe. Bruised, his pants torn, he continued to his meeting.

Detroit was caught up in a speed-oriented era, drawn by anything traveling fast. Nothing in Cobb's Tiger contract prohibited him from becoming a begoggled, neck-risking auto race driver. “Whenever I could get away from the ballpark,” he wrote, “I enjoyed slamming a big Pope-Toledo, Mercedes, White Streak, or Thomas Flyer around tracks. I'd hit it up on the bricks at 100 m.p.h. in those firespitters.” At the Indianapolis Speedway he was timed in forty-five seconds flat for the “flying kilometer,” a near record. At a state fair in 1916 he acted as head starter for a five-mile race. After the field of drivers was off, Cobb turned to his “mechanician,” a big-league umpire named Brick Owens, and cried, “C'mon, Brick, let's catch them!” Owens was shocked and lost his breakfast when the fence-clipping ride was ended—with a win. Cobb chuckled, “I got even with all umpires that day.”

At Savannah, Georgia's, sixteen-mile speedway, he was zooming along, he claimed, at 105 miles an hour with noted race driver Bill McNey at his side. As Cobb told it, McNey reached over and turned off the ignition. “You're too damned reckless for me,” said McNey, climbing out. A few days later newspapers carried the story: “
RACING STAR MCNEY KILLED IN CRASH.
” “And me with a family,” Cobb ended the story.
“I kept on driving, but that was my last race against time. Couldn't get enough life insurance.”

THERE WERE
plenty more follies and financial finagling to keep him occupied. In 1913 the Federal League, an independent circuit, declared its plan to expand to major-league status next season. Federal organizers were wealthy speculators, among them Phil de Catesby Ball (St. Louis ice merchant), James Gilmore (coal and paper), Charlie Weeghman (Chicago restaurateur), Robert Ward (bakeries), and Harry Sinclair (Sinclair Oil). They offered salaries well above those of the American League and National League, and they promised to eliminate the detested reserve clause from contracts.

Fed up with a closed shop, several dozen players were lured away from the existing majors. Among those jumping were Joe Tinker and Three-Finger Brown of Cincinnati, Hal Chase of the White Sox, George Mullin of Detroit, aging but valuable pitchers Eddie Plank and Chief Bender of the Philadelphia A's, and the Phillies' double-play tandem of Mickey “Doc” Mullin and Otto Knabe. The exodus grew, until more than eighty current and former major-leaguers kicked over the traces for better deals. Derided in the beginning, the Federal League developed into a definite challenge to the Americans and Nationals. No less a star than Walter Johnson of Washington, ace of hurlers, took six thousand dollars of Federal money, with more to come; within weeks, however, Johnson changed his mind, refunded the six thousand, and returned home.

A main Feds' objective was to sign the best of the best, starting with Cobb. In the press appeared a jingle, showing how one poet saw the trade war:

Sing a song of dollars
A pocket full of kale
See the players jumping
Hear the magnates rail.

Cobb was “interested.” Anything usable against his Detroit employers in what he saw as a nonstop salary struggle was worth considering. As early as 1913 he had met with Federal directors when they put out feelers. Again, early in 1914, he sat down to confer with Harry
Sinclair and Big Jim Gilmore, key officials of the new league. They met, secretly, at the Commodore Hotel in New York.

As Cobb told it, Sinclair, owner or lessee of vast oil-pumping acreage in the western U.S., opened with, “There's nothing we won't provide to have you join us. First we'll write you a three-year contract. Then we'll put the money either in escrow or straight into your bank, at your choice. And you tell us how much you want.”

“No, give me your offer,” replied Cobb.

“One hundred thousand dollars for each season,” shot back Sinclair, “many times more than ever has been paid a ballplayer.”

In recreating their conversation for Grantland Rice, Cobb said that he sparred for a while. One hundred thousand dollars was far more than he had expected. Sixty thousand had been his guess. (Fifteen years later, in 1930, the New York Yankees would pay Babe Ruth a record eighty thousand dollars.) Cobb told Sinclair that he doubted the Federals could arrange for suitable big-time parks in the short time available, for teams contemplated in Chicago, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Brooklyn, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, nor could teams be of the caliber to draw crowds in practical number.

“That's all being taken care of,” said Sinclair, confidently. He jolted Cobb more by adding, “If the league should fail, and it won't, I will put in writing that you'll be the highest paid oil-lease man in the history of the Sinclair Company, which as you know is worth one hundred million dollars.”

One hundred thousand, against the fourteen thousand he was getting from the Tigers—the temptation was big, he said. But, as Cobb always explained his decision, “I could see fifty thousand and then eighty thousand or more down the line for me where I was. I was sure I could beat the Detroit gang in the end. They maybe I'd buy into a [major] league franchise through a syndicate I was connected with.” That way he would never again need to work for anyone. Leaving the Commodore session he spoke with newsmen who had learned of a “mammoth” offer to announce matter-of-factly, “I have declined to move to the Federals. I made my name in the American League and there I'll stay.”

Within eighteen months he could congratulate himself on his choice. The Federal—or “outlaw”—League went under in 1915, the victim of expensive litigation and the likelihood of a world war erupting. Some $10 million in losses by both sides in the lengthy bidding
war and rivalry were quoted. Cobb could rest content that he had been offered more thousands of dollars for six months or so of work than any other athlete who had ever lived.

THERE WAS
a drawback in not defecting to the Federals. Cobb had to continue to coexist with carping, interfering Frank Navin, the man who signed Cobb's paychecks and was said to strut—not walk—down the streets of Detroit. It was bad enough for Cobb's purposes that Detroit between 1913 and 1915 finished in sixth, fourth, and second places; there was also Navin's proved and exposed practice of intercepting and reading Cobb's private mail, he said, to gain an advantage in their negotiations.

“I got wise to this,” revealed Cobb in
My Life in Baseball
, “when I noticed that Navin's home telephone number and home address appeared in pencil on the back of my business telegrams. What was it doing there? Navin was convinced that I was on the verge of jumping to the Federal League. To learn more, he had arranged to see my wires, even before Western Union delivered them to me.

“At the time I was writing syndicated stories for Bell Newspaper Syndicate, and set a trap for Navin and sat back and watched the fat man fall into it. Bell was paying me $200 per column for writing ‘ghosted' pieces on baseball events, gossip and prediction. I arranged for John N. Wheeler, head of Bell in New York, to wire me: “
DO NOTHING UNTIL YOU SEE ME ON NEXT TRIP EAST.
” When the message was delivered, sure enough, Navin's home address showed up on its reverse side.”

A furious Cobb confronted Navin with, “Invasion of certain rights of mine have been made—by you. You've been reading my mail. That's a foul trick and I want it stopped.” Otherwise, he threatened, a lawsuit spreading Navin's face over the press would follow.

With other evidence found on messages, Cobb said, Navin could not deny that he had resorted to espionage; “I had him cold.” With that, any chance of reaching some degree of accord by the two, let alone forming a friendship, ended forever.

Navin was such a “fee-simple sonofabitch” and “constipated damnfool,” wrote Cobb, that he turned down an offer from Clark Griffith, co-owner at Washington, to buy Cobb's contract for $85,000. It would have been a pleasure for the day's leading hitter to join the game's foremost pitcher, Walter Johnson, along with such other Washington
standouts as Clyde Milan and Chick Gandil; Johnson and he, Cobb felt, could have won the pennant as a combination.

Now and then Cobb was paid extra to scout promising college and minor-league players. On a visit to the University of Michigan he was impressed by a stocky, twenty-year-old first baseman who could also pitch. He judged the boy to be an all but certain major-leaguer and sent Navin a memo recommending a quick signing. Navin assigned another scout, got back an unfavorable report, and forgot about George Sisler. The St. Louis Browns signed him. He proceeded to hit .371, .407, .420, and the like, finishing with one of the most spectacular career averages in history, a .340, and a place in the Hall of Fame. In the eyes of his original discoverer, to pass up Sisler was no less than team sabotage.

Somehow—to Cobb's disgust—Navin escaped serious blame for Detroit's failure to add a fourth pennant after the straight championships of 1907, 1908, and 1909. Bill Yawkey's designated boss of the Tigers was coasting on his past reputation and, according to Detroit historians Norman Beasley and George W. Stark in their civic biography,
Made in Detroit
, remained popular—“a fine fellow without malice and without an enemy.”

Cobb's own expanding reputation was a matter of geography. In Detroit, fans left hams, turkeys, and candies on the porch of a home he rented. In the eastern U.S., from Chicago to Boston, he was detested to the point that at times he wasn't allowed to sleep at night. “Foreign” fans banged tin pans outside his hotel, shouted anti-South slogans (“Isn't Georgia the place you march through?” “Robert E. Lee was a bastard”). They threw junk until fields were littered and time-out had to be called. The
Sporting News
, often a Cobb supporter, was displeased by his steady lone-wolf prowling on the bases, at the sacrifice of coordinated teamwork. Greed “motivated him.” Cobb's act in Washington, D.C., of arousing Congress toward antitrust action was not forgotten. “What does Cobb care?” asked the
Sporting News
. “Cobb is for Cobb. He's done more than any individual to give baseball's enemies a chance to attack.” Clairvoyantly, the paper saw that “his most glorious days are behind him.”