Cobb (40 page)

Griffith, a deacon of the American League, left Detroit hastily. Assistant butcher Harding decided not to take legal action. He told Bethune Station police that he was amazed by the berserk attack, but since it was Ty Cobb he would settle for an apology to himself and to Carpenter, repair of shop damages, and payment of his doctor's bill. Detroit team attorneys were alleged around town to have quieted the
victim by paying him something like one thousand dollars, as they had done to resolve other eruptions by their client. It was a cheap settlement; Cobb's 1909 Cleveland knifing of a detective had cost Detroit ten times that much.

Carpenter wasn't placated, however. He resented the claim that his fish were “rotten” and didn't let it pass. Less than a week later he filed a disturbing-the-peace charge, and again his assailant was jailed. It was said that policemen drew straws to determine which of them would have the “honor” of making the arrest after a game at Navin Field. No handcuffs were used in this instance. Cobb spent another night in a smelly hoosegow, appeared in magistrate's court next day, and at the advice of his attorney, James O. Murfin, pleaded guilty. If he hadn't done so, observed the Detroit press, he faced a probable jail term of six months for using a deadly weapon.

Cobb stood silent before the bench with his right hand bandaged. He did no talking other than to identify himself. “He regrets this incident to the bottom of his heart,” stated Murfin. “He regrets it exceedingly on account of management of the Detroit team and his teammates. He feels that as they are struggling he should be in the game … He believes that he made a mistake and has promised to control his temper in the future. He has had his lesson.”

Discussing
Carpenter v. Cobb
in his old age, Cobb remarked, “I had some good contacts at magistrate's court.” He was fined a paltry fifty dollars, with the warning that if he caused more such trouble he would be heavily penalized. As the judge may or may not have known, this was his fifth known assault on a black person, three of them coming inside Detroit jurisdiction.

In the fish fight Cobb fractured the thumb of his throwing hand. For fifty-two days, through June, July, and until August 7, he was sidelined. Up until then the Tigers had a chance to take the pennant, or come close. Frank Navin was enraged; without his number-one man the club turned stale, lost seven straight at one stretch, and finished far out of first place. There would be no World Series money, no pay raises for 1915. Hard words were passed when pitcher Hooks Dauss and an aging Sam Crawford flatly let Cobb know they realized what he was doing after his thumb healed—that is, hitting to boost his own average, not for the team's general welfare. When a sacrifice fly or bunt was needed, instead of providing it he would place-hit a ball just over the
infield. Many of these “nibbly” punched hits were worth little in a free-scoring game, failing to produce runs. But without him the Tigers were sluggish, lacked belligerency, and were not a contender.

What would he do next? According to several players, Navin had come genuinely to wonder whether Cobb's repeated bizarre rages meant that he was not mentally sound. What else could explain it? Cobb's reply was the usual: “Trade me.”

It was maddening to be caught in a situation in which one man was so essential to finishing even in third or fourth place that he could not be dealt away. Hughie Jennings thought he was managing a winner—“then in one hour in a butcher shop Cobb ruined us.” It wasn't funny, but a Detroit quip went, “Lucky it wasn't a porterhouse steak—he'd have killed somebody.” The convicted Cobb's rationalization of his broken thumb was, “Everybody gets hurt sometime. It's up to the others to take up the slack. And nobody around here did that.”

His own performance stood up well. With a hand still tender, he was held to about a .340 average before getting hot in the final months of 1914. In August he trailed the persistent Joe Jackson of Cleveland by 18 to 21 points. With one of his most superlative stretch of runs yet he moved ahead of Shoeless Joe and Eddie Collins of Philadelphia. His concluding .368 mark was enough to capture one more championship trophy—easily. Collins finished at .344, and in a tie, Speaker and Jackson hit .338. Joseph Jefferson Jackson had complained in the past, and now the South Carolina country boy moaned to writer Harry Salsinger, “Ah wonder what it takes around here to win somethin'? Ah did .408 in 1911 and Cobb did .420. Ah did .395 the next year and he did .410. Now he's did it again. Ahhh-hell!”

Intimations by American Leaguers that Cobb was a looming case for the psychopathic ward faded for the time being. No one yet had battered pitchers so hard over a sustained period, none had shown such base-path craftsmanship. Signs seen in him earlier that year by the
Sporting News
of a “decay from glory” went unmentioned—no doubt much to the regret of the trade sheet—at the October finish. “He's weird, all right,” said Rebel Oakes, manager of the Federal League's Pittsburgh club. “He's a nutter, but, by god, there's nobody nearly so competitive. When he's at bat you can hear Cobb gritting his teeth.”

General opinion was that Cobb was headed for a fall. But George Tweedy Stallings, highly respected New York and Boston Braves manager, college-bred Georgian, and Cobb's companion on game-hunting expeditions, was protective and optimistic; “Kings don't take orders. If Ty wasn't so fiery and out to beat you, he wouldn't be half as great a player.”

Detroit's front office, along with Mrs. Cobb, expected him to return to Augusta that fall, and was startled when he turned up in Shelby, Ohio, playing with a nondescript team of minor-leaguers. The reason: he was paid $150 per game. It was precisely like Cobb to go after every loose nickel, no matter where located.

The “straw hat affair” demonstrated just how much Silas Marner there was in him. A custom had developed in Detroit on Labor Day for the more rabid fans to scale their straw hats onto the field when the Tigers were going well. Cobb ordered the grounds crew to collect and store the skimmers for him. In his book
The Detroit Tigers
, author Joe Falls told of how Cobb shipped hundreds of hats home to his Georgia farm at season's end, where they were worn on the heads of his field-hands and donkeys as protection from the sun. “Each day after the players left,” wrote Falls with a grin, “Ty also would pick up pieces of soap left in the showers. These, too, would go back to Augusta with him—soap for the hired hands.”

Concerning the tipping of waiters and cab drivers, a practice then catching on, he was just as thrifty. Upon one cabby's asking for a tip, Cobb snapped, “Sure, don't bet on the Tigers today.”

“Mister Ty”—the salutation he came to prefer—had as his long-term aim to become the highest-paid player in history—and to take off from there. For the 1915 season, despite his transgressions, he negotiated a salary raise from roughly fourteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars, plus certain bonuses. That made him number one in the game for pay, ahead of Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and other golden names, and he set out to buy land and expand his sideline interests. At the Pontchartrain Hotel bar he had come to know such auto men as John and Horace Dodge, Ransom E. Olds, J. W. Packard, and David Dunbar Buick. From 1905 to 1914 Cobb had lacked investment capital. Now he was better prepared when Charlie Hastings, manager of Hupmobile, proposed, “Everybody down south knows you. I can arrange for you to take over an agency for us in
Atlanta or Augusta. You'll have to put up fifty dollars for each car we deliver, which will be twenty-five hundred dollars initially. Then you'll need another twenty-five hundred for stock in the company.”

At first Cobb thought it was too big a deal to handle, but finally he signed on with Hupmobile, and in his first two years sold some 125 “Hups” under an ad banner strung near Augusta's Broad Street: “
TY COBB DRIVES ONE, THE GEORGIA PEACH SAYS SO SHOULD YOU.
” His profit averaged 30–35 percent, money that he plowed into additional cotton-market shares. It was a thrill for some pecan farmer to have Ty Cobb motor into his place, accept a cup of homemade corn liquor, and sell him a car. Sometimes he would make sales on the sidewalk in Macon, Decatur, Kenesaw, or Savannah, with his autograph as a nice bonus.

On his native ground he held a wide edge—“and the edge in this world means everything,” he said—over other auto salesmen, even those offering Henry Ford's product, by combining sales technique with his national image. When less than halfway through his major-league career, he was close to equaling his player's salary in ancillary income. Prior to the Hupmobile dealership, Cobb had received all the free bats he wanted from Hillerich and Bradsby Company of Louisville, in return for his endorsement etched in the wood of Louisville Sluggers. When a customer wavered about buying a Hup, he would mention, “Of course, partner, a bat with my name on it goes with the purchase.” Kids and fathers hung around the Cobb Agency to stare at the strapping prince of ballplayers. Salesman Cobb gave the kids lessons on how to grip a bat with hands six or so inches apart.

In what he saw as a peacemaking move by Detroit's front office, Cobb was invited to join Navin, Bill Yawkey, and Hughie Jennings in buying [“a minor partnership on my part”] the International League franchise at Providence, Rhode Island. Meanwhile, he was able to increase his shares in the Lavonia, Georgia, bank where he was already a director. By his growing affluence he had also been able to retain sixty-odd acres of the one-time hundred-acre Royston family farm, in danger of loss by foreclosure after his father's death ten years earlier. At the time, Cobb's low earnings had prevented forfeiture of some of the land. By 1915 he was able to clear all debts. More than most gains, this gave him satisfaction—in his revered father's name he had saved the homestead.

Until the second decade of the century, few books “written” by major-league stars had been published. The most notable was Christy Mathewson's popular ghostwritten
Pitching in a Pinch
of 1912. Seeing profit in a “confession,” Cobb came out in 1914 with
Busting 'Em and Other Stories
. Readers who claimed that his overblown ego—“monumental,” said most reviewers—lay behind this drive to succeed in yet one more field, found just about what they had expected. The preface of the book by ghostwriter John N. Wheeler of the North American Newspaper Alliance gushed with:

“Ty Cobb is an institution like the President of the United States.”

“He is a speed flash who makes lightning look slow.”

“He is the fastest thinker in the game … He makes players not as fast as Cobb look foolish.”

“A mechanical marvel … Cobb is the most sensational player the game has ever produced.”

“Cobb is a born reporter and would have been a star in the newspaper trade if he'd adopted the business. He is an intellectual blotter.”

And, finally, “Readers, meet Mr. Cobb—author!”

As usual with such books, Cobb's authorship, of course, actually amounted to relating anecdotes and gossip to Wheeler and, as he later conceded, “giving Wheeler a hand with the technical stuff.”

Cobb's first-person tribute to himself began modestly with mention of a seventeen-game batting slump he once had, then drifted into negativism, wherein he advised American boys not to seek a pro baseball career. It was too tough a line of work at the top. Plenty of men went broke. Stardom was largely “accidental.” You had to make money quickly or not at all. The injury rate was fierce. Under pressure Cobb was losing hair, turning gray, and growing bald at age twenty-seven. He regretted that he had never attended college to become a doctor or lawyer. As for his own son, he wasn't particularly anxious that Ty junior become a ballplayer, and certainly he'd attend a university.

Contradictorily, the most heated of fighters in the big leagues for player salary increases felt that players were earning so much that teams could not support heavy payrolls. Income couldn't keep up with outgo, the way things were going. Underpaid leaguers who read this must have wondered; was the Georgia Peach on their side, or management's? Was the vice presidency of the rebellious Base Ball Players Fraternity that he had accepted in 1912 a sham?

NOT LONG
after the book was released, the Peach took his biggest step toward security. In Atlanta he had met Robert Winship Woodruff on a golf course. Woodruff was involved in marketing a flavorful drink invented by a southern pharmacist, and felt the concoction would sell well nationally and internationally. He was expanding widely from the South and wanted home-boy Cobb to buy ten thousand dollars worth of shares. The home boy said he'd think about it. The drink was called Coca-Cola.

In the 1920s, Coca-Cola stock would make him wealthy beyond his dreams—better than a millionaire before he was thirty-five. By then he was commanding the greatest income of any athlete in the world with the possible exception of Spanish bullfighter Juan Belmonte.

“I was a phrenologist back then,” Cobb told me in retirement, “and I still am … The shape and contours of a man's skull tell you plenty about his intelligence and general character … Barney Johnson was an ideal example.”

“Barney”—Walter Johnson—in a prime lasting for a dozen years, was as great a right-handed pitcher as ever lived. Tousle-haired, with a noble brow, pleasant facial features, and warm blue eyes, he revealed himself to Cobb upon first sight as too decent for his own good; that is, history's fastest pitcher (416 lifetime wins, 3,508 strikeouts, 110 shutouts) would not turn loose his fastball with malice aforethought. Phrenology said so to Cobb. (In point of fact, phrenology was based not on appearance but on the bumps on a man's skull.)