Cobb (39 page)

Cobb snapped, “What do twenty-dollar-a-week sportswriters know?” he struck back. “All around the circuit the writers hit me up, wanting an interview. When I give them some of my time, they knife me.”

“Oh, yes?” replied Ed Bang in the
Cleveland News
. “Who was it
that pulled a knife and cut a hotel detective of this city in the middle of the night?”

His running combat with the press did not take the Peach's mind off another possible objective. At several points during the 1913–15 seasons his batting averages had stood at a blazing .487 and .483. He even had an idea, as outlandish as it sounded, that .500 might be attained in a season. Back in 1887, when a base on balls counted as a base hit and four strikes constituted an out, Tip O'Neill of the pioneer American Association had reached .492 overall, and Pete Browning of the same league had swung at .471. True, the game was different then, not really comparable to today's. Cobb thought about it. What—he conjectured—if he went uninjured for six months, caught league pitchers in an off year, did not draw many bases on balls, and put together one of his phenomenal hitting bursts, such as his 40-game streak of 1911?

No one during his playing years had surpassed Cobb's 248 base hits in 591 plate appearances of 1911, good for that .420 showing. And he had done this while benched for a while with bronchitis. Yes, 300 hits and a .500 mark were possible. So he believed.

Before he could shoot for the moon on batting average, Cobb went on a moose-hunting expedition in southern Canada following the 1914 season. He slipped, fell down an embankment, and appeared to have fractured a leg. He was littered out of the woods to a hospital, where it was found to be only a torn ligament. He wrote to an Augusta friend, “Will be home and running in two weeks.”

He recovered rapidly, but within months came a scare of far greater concern—his eyesight. He had feared the loss of some clarity back in 1909–10. Once more, pitches that had been clear to him now, on occasion, became slightly blurred. Cloudy vision would appear, disappear, and recur. Before it had been an inflammation; now it was diagnosed at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as a case of pterygium, or “proud flesh,” which very slowly was intruding on the cornea of Cobb's right eye. The ailment was caused, it was believed, by the accumulation of dust and other particles while he was playing more than thirteen hundred games in windy outfields. Soon, the medical warning went, surgery would be needed. For now, fearing the outcome, Cobb postponed it.

When the 1915 season started, nobody could tell he needed an operation from his daily hammering of fastballs, spitters, curves, and
change-ups. One day at Philadelphia he drove six bullet balls through or over the infield in six trips. Facing the imperturbable Walter “Big Train” Johnson at Navin Field before a record Detroit turnout of 24,500, Cobb coolly informed catcher Ed Ainsmith, “I'm laying down the next one and a hundred dollars says I'll beat out you two birds.” Ainsworth signaled Johnson to throw even harder than he usually fired a ball. Both were helpless when a pitch bunted deep, not as a sacrifice but for a base hit, rolled to Johnson's right side. Lunging for a hopper just beyond his grasp, the Big Train fell down.

Word passed around the league that some managers were levying fifty-dollar fines on any battery allowing Cobb to steal home on them. In St. Louis he doubled, and while prancing and feinting at second base worked on pitcher Grover Cleveland Lowdermilk. “You couldn't get me out in a month!” he taunted. The next batter, Sam Crawford, tapped back to the mound. Lowdermilk was upset enough to fumble the chance and, seeing Cobb streaking to third, stumbled and in his haste to throw did a forward flip. He sprawled on the ground, cursing himself, as Cobb passed third and sped home for another uncanny score.

On the bases he continued to pay for his daring in bruises and blood. In press boxes the rumor circulated that anyone who disabled Cobb would get bonus money. Evidence of this accumulated. Cleveland's first-basing Wheeler “Doc” Johnston caught up with him in a rundown and instead of making a clean tag, slammed a knee into Cobb's lumbar region. It caused spasms. Cobb was out for four games. Heavily taped, he said, “I didn't see anyone coming off our bench to fight for me when they broke my ribs.” That had happened at Boston when Rube Foster's intentional duster cracked two ribs, sidelining him for nearly three weeks.

Buck Weaver of the White Sox, six years away from involvement in the “Black Sox” who fixed the 1919 World Series for gamblers' money, stuck a spike into Cobb's knee; not properly cleaned, the wound became infected. Once more he was on the bench. When a sufficient scab formed, he tried his luck playing second base. All out of position, making errors, he returned to a doctor's care.

When not in the lineup, Cobb in 1914–15 saw himself as tenth man on the ball club. He sat off by himself on a reserved chair, as sensitive to the game's pulse as a hawk to shifting wing. He watched for
tendencies—did an opponent play the center fielder shallow so as to quickly trap hits down the middle, leaving an area open to line drives? Did the catcher show any telltales in signing for pitches? Did a pitcher pound his glove or hitch up his pants before loosing a fastball? No one minded his silent search for clues, but the Tigers resented his habit of piping to one of them when batting, “Go getcha self a swing!” He was as critical as he was analytical.

Returning to duty, but still notably short of having good legs under him, Tyrus within days touched off another riot. Against the Athletics he seemingly spiked catcher Jack Lapp with intent on a play at the plate. As Lapp lay on the ground, groaning, Cobb spat upon him. Something like twenty fans climbed over railings to try to lay hands on the villain, and cops beat them back. Outside Shibe Park afterward, several dozen Philadelphians gathered to rush the departing Cobb with fists and sticks. Luckily a trolley car came along and he jumped aboard. Down the track rattled the trolley with a small mob in pursuit. Cobb punched and kicked off all he could, but a few climbed onto the car's roof to tear loose the electrical rod. While the conductor struggled to replace the rod, Cobb was glad he'd changed into civilian clothes at Shibe. Ducking away into a sidewalk crowd, he disappeared. “The only cure for Philadelphia is to blow it up,” he snarled on a train leaving town.

IN AUGUSTA
the situation at home was troubled. Charlotte “Charlie” Cobb, twenty-three, was often ill. Four times during Cobb's annual duels with Joe Jackson and Tris Speaker in defense of his batting championship, she became sick enough to require his breaking off and hurrying home. Three of their five children were born between 1910 and 1916; twice their mother suffered postpartum complications. Cobb always dropped what he was doing and responded to the call, but not always with good grace. “He didn't come home for long—he acted like it was an imposition,” said Shirley Cobb Beckwith, his daughter, in a conversation with this author in 1960.

At such times
Baseball Magazine
's F. C. Lane was one of the very few journalists allowed to visit the spacious Augusta home into which the Cobbs had moved in November of 1913. When missing times at bat to stay at his wife's bedside, Lane's host appeared to be nervous and distracted. Lane found Mrs. Cobb, while sickly, to be “a woman of
uncommon judgment and good sense.” Their three young children, Ty junior, Shirley, and Herschel, were neatly dressed, respectful.

“It is well that Mrs. Cobb is of this character,” wrote Lane, “what with Ty's quick, nervous disposition and scrappy, hotheaded temperament.” The reporter added that while Cobb consulted medical specialists about his wife's health, he also spent much time majestically taking bows on Augusta streets, “mitting” admirers. On a side trip to Florida he even took aeroplane flying lessons. Manager Hughie Jennings, hearing of the flying, was said to have hit several roofs.

One more tidbit from Lane concerned five-year-old Ty Junior's backing off from a schoolyard fight with an older kid. His father's instructions were: “This boy insulted you and if you don't go out and lick him, then I will lick you.” Lane wrote, “Little Ty lived up to the reputation of his dad in a strenuous manner and since then there has been no doubt whatever of his wish to insist upon his rights.”

At home at 2425 William Street, in what a curious Lane called an antebellum southern semimansion with a broad veranda encircling it and shrouded by trees, Cobb spoke of why he was constantly on the warpath up north: “I get into a lot of trouble and have made many enemies. But my philosophy is brief. I think life is too short to be diplomatic. A man's friends shouldn't mind what he does or says—and those who are not his friends, well, the hell with them. They don't count.”

That was enough for Lane—the man intended to go on playing outside the rules, challenging baseball to stop him.

Upon his return from one of these forced sojourns in Georgia, you could bet on it that Cobb would rebound in a batting streak. In July of 1913, to cite one instance, he resumed play after a week's absence to find that Shoeless Joe Jackson was slugging at the .412 mark. He trailed Jackson by 11 points. In Cleveland, where Cobb-bashing was akin to a civic duty after a series of brawls with fans and hotel personnel and two near escapes from criminal prosecution, he had one of his all-time best offensive days with two triples and a double—in all, six hits in seven plate appearances. “Six-hitters” were so rare, just as they are nowadays, that Bill Yawkey came down from his owner's box to extend compliments. Cobb shook his hand, but, said witnesses, not warmly. “Money, not compliments, talked with Ty,” said author Fred Lieb. “Hey! Hey! The Peach gets ten hits in nine tries!” cried newsboys selling
papers outside Dolph's Saloon in central Detroit. People would believe anything about him by now.

Final figures for that 1913 season were .390 for Cobb, .373 for Jackson, who faded before the champion's late comeback, and .363 for Tris Speaker of Boston. In the National League, Jake Daubert's .350 for Brooklyn led. Whatever the complaints, for the seventh consecutive campaign the Georgian had stood foremost.

Some statisticians sought to debunk the result. Because of lost time he had played in only 122 games to Jackson's 148 and Speaker's 141. Cobb retorted that total games and multiplicity of at-bats had nothing to do with it, that he had averaged .390 with a sixth-place team, and that pitching staffs were loaded with 20-game-and-up winners—six of them leaguewide—along with numerous moundsmen with low earned-run averages. Despite injuries he had hit the toughest of them well. As to slumping to 52 base steals in 1913, well below the 75 posted by Clyde “Deerfoot” Milan in Washington, he dismissed that as due to the knee infection, jammed back, turned ankle, and trips back to Augusta. Then, too, he was developing property he owned in Georgia; that had been distracting.

He had become a cigarette addict, complained Cobb, which was bad for his wind. By 1914 the tobacco industry was selling an estimated 2 million pounds of its products in the U.S. In exchange for tobacco stock assigned to Cobb he posed for cigarette testimonials—“and now it's so that I'm smoking a warehouseful a month.”

IN 1914
, during another late onrush to win an eighth straight batting crown, Cobb gave the national public renewed reason to question his sanity. In still another moment of madness he turned murderous. In this outbreak he twice landed in a Detroit jail and then in criminal court over the ridiculous matter of a twenty-cent piece of fish—perch, as it happened.

His rampage began on a June evening after he had invited Clark Griffith to dinner at his rented Woodland Avenue home. Griffith, manager of the Washington Senators, abetted by Senator Hoke Smith, who by now was an advisor to Cobb, continued to make overtures to Navin to acquire the Tigers' main man by cash or barter. Griffith was coming to dinner to talk it over. Before the meal could be served, a shocked Griffith witnessed his host under arrest and facing a jail term on an
evening that confirmed the growing belief in sport circles that he was wrongheaded—twisted by some sort of unpredictable dementia.

Before dinner, Charlie Cobb, having joined her husband in Detroit, complained that a butcher down the street had acted insultingly to her when she returned some fish she felt was spoiled, her cook concurring. Cobb, excusing himself to Griffith, phoned the butcher and called him a series of names. Then he pocketed a revolver he always kept handy and took off for Carpenter's Meat Market. An account of what happened later was summarized in Doc Greene's “Press Box” column in the Detroit
News
:

“The Georgia Peach entered a meat market at 1526 Hamilton Street operated by one William Carpenter. He waved a loaded .32 revolver and declared ‘somebody has insulted my wife!' The hassle turned out to be over a purchase of 20 cents worth of perch.

“A meat worker, Howard Harding, who was Carpenter's wife's brother, tried to protect the proprietor and finally the pair went outside. Cobb handed his revolver to one bystander, his hat to another, and proceeded to brutally beat up the youngster.”

Doc Green's column didn't detail the whole wretched affair. After a police paddy wagon arrived to handcuff and remove a screaming Cobb to jail, court testimony would establish that he had forced the butcher to phone Mrs. Cobb and apologize and meanwhile smashed glassed-in meat displays and wrecked some furniture. Harding, who was black, had brandished a meat cleaver in defense of the shop. Furthermore, before Cobb and Harding moved outside to the street, Cobb had fought indoors with Harding, hitting him over the head at least three times with the gun's butt. Harding was bleeding even before they went outside.

He hadn't fired a shot—which was all that saved the Georgian from a prison sentence. On a possible assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge, he spent the night in a cell. The cell was “flea-ridden,” he complained, unfit for a dog.