Cobb (41 page)

Hanging over the plate, inviting a beanball, Cobb got away with usurping “pitcher's space” for long years. Especially with someone he liked, Johnson was forbearant, afraid of seriously injuring the batter. When the Tigers and Washington Nationals played each other, T.C. hosted Johnson at dinners at the Detroit Athletic Club and with theater tickets. A rare photograph exists showing Tyrus with one arm thrown around Johnson in a proprietary manner. The two grew friendly enough that in 1914 Cobb helped dissuade Johnson from
jumping to the upstart, doomed Federal League when the big man already had six thousands dollars of the Feds' advance money on the table and his mind about made up to defect. T.C. refused to jump; Johnson followed.

In all, Cobb faced the Big Train 245 times for a .335 bat average. “If I hadn't been able to read him, it would have been about .290,” he willingly admitted.

COBB WAS
less successful in sizing up an opponent by his appearance in 1914–15 when, given some of his first looks at a hefty left-handed rookie pitcher with the Red Sox, he was not impressed. “He's over-weight and balloon-headed,” judged Cobb. “Just another fresh kid from Double A” was how he initially saw nineteen-year-old George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Ruth, who was blocky-headed, had been pitching fairly well since the Red Sox brought him up from the Providence Grays of the International League that spring. Wasting no time, he'd beaten the Yankees with a five-hitter, while incidentally hitting a home run. The new boy-man with the brush haircut would hit four homers in this break-in season. He would also, and primarily, win 18 games with controlled fastballs and sweeping curves.

In late August the Tigers were locked in a close pennant race with Boston and the Chicago White Sox. A decisive four-game series began for Detroit at Boston's Fenway Park, at which time Cobb and Ruth came to know each other. Carl Mays, who would deck a man with a grin, was on the hill for Boston. Novice bench-jockey Ruth yelled to Mays when Cobb came to bat, “Knock him on his ass!” Many of the twenty thousand local fanatics liked the suggestion and yelled it. Mays knocked his man down twice running. Dodging a third beanball, Cobb threw his bat at Mays and charged him. Umpires broke it up. “Duster” Mays followed up by hitting his target on the wrist and hand. Again going for Mays, this time carrying his bat, T.C. was stopped by Jennings, the umpires, and some of the Tiger bench. Cobb stood on first base after walking to call Mays a “dirty scum yellow dog.” And: “Step outside and meet me.”

Riot impended. Beer and pop bottles flew from the stands, one of them grazing Cobb's shoulder. Behind sharp pitching by Hooks Dauss, Detroit won, 6–1, and when Cobb made the final out with a fly-ball
catch, hundreds of Beantowners leaped over railings to get at him. Special park guards and a police squad armed with batons partially restored order, helped by a few Tigers who circled their teammate with whirling bats. During this melee Cobb walked, not ran, to the clubhouse. Young Ruth was seen to rush onto the field—the first hint of the repeated confrontations he and T.C. would enter into off and on for the next thirteen seasons—but by then Cobb was behind locked doors.

Along with most American Leaguers, Cobb had not the slightest idea that in Ruth he was observing a player who would develop into much more than a pitcher. His “hard one” smoked; from 1915 through 1918 the Babe would win an impressive 78 games against 40 losses for Boston, with a pair of 20-wins-plus seasons, earned-run averages of 1.75 and 2.02, and 450 strikeouts included. He was a born thrower. Further, the rookie from an industrial school for orphans and waifs in Baltimore was just learning his trade.

Home runs? “His hitting never crossed my mind then,” admitted Cobb in time. From 1914 through 1917 Ruth hit but nine homers, quite good but not significant in a day emphasizing science over power for a public schooled in the “old Army game” of place-hitting, bunting, singling behind runners, the steal and delayed steal, the hit-and-run, and the infield-bounding “Baltimore chop.” The very long ball was nothing more than an occasional feature.

In the 1916 World Series the Babe would pitch a wonderful fourteen-inning, 2–1 victory over Brooklyn, without blasting a ball out of the park or even hitting safely. He would hit no homers while appearing in three World Series as a Red Soxer. “He did some pinch-hitting,” reflected Cobb, “and he was below average. Ruth fooled me. I didn't think he had the hand speed to do what came later.”

THROUGHOUT THE
1915 campaign, when he first became vaguely aware of Ruth, the Tigers' prima donna was playing at such a tempo that there was talk of the U.S. mint striking a coin for him. “Make it a hundred-dollar gold piece, that's fitting,” suggested Hughie Jennings. All that he did was lead the league's batters for the ninth consecutive time with a .369 mark—his average for the past five seasons was almost .390—and as customary leave everyone in the dust. The next best was Eddie Collins, with .332. In the National League the leader, Larry
Doyle of the Giants, at .320, was far behind. In his tenth anniversary season as a big-leaguer, nearing age thirty, Cobb grouped his second-highest-yet number of runs (144) to lead the league in scoring, along with making the most hits (208) while raising the most hell yet on the bases. Still as fast as ever, he beat all of his past steal statistics. Since 1907 he had stolen per season 49 (led league), 39, 76 (led league), 65, 83 (led league), 61, 52, and 35 bases.

In the winter of 1915 he had resolved to achieve a number not to be beaten during his career. With that in mind he had gone to a leatherworker in Atlanta to have weights installed in his shoes, his latest innovation. All winter he walked the fields hunting game birds—“maybe five hundred miles,” he guessed—while wearing ten-ounce impediments. In spring-camp games, without informing anyone but Jennings about the leg-toughening weights, he seemed to be slowing up. Writers fussed about his “decline.” Upon removing the lead, he stole four bases in one day against the Athletics, then three each against St. Louis and Cleveland. Six times in 1915 he stole home base. When on third he would say to the baseman, “Want to bet, bo?” Nobody did.

Cobb ended the season with an all-time high of 96 steals. Close to fifty years would pass before anyone would top that, and then Maury Wills of the Los Angeles Dodgers, with 104 in 1962, would do it in nine more games than were played in 1915, on far smoother base paths, and with improved shoes and camera techniques to aid him. “I've always regretted I didn't go for a hundred or more steals,” T.C. said to me in 1960. “But in that month I was saving my sore legs … in case we went into the World Series.”

That the Tigers did not do, and in a most unusual and frustrating way. Never in American League history had a club won 100 games on the season and missed the championship. Largely due to the Peach, the Tigers won 100 and lost 54, but even so were nosed out by Boston, with Ruth a growing factor on the mound, at 101–50. New York and Philadelphia critics, always glad to knock Cobb, attributed Detroit's failure to his eighteen-game hitting slump in August. He retorted that the loss was due to a two-inch piece of foreign material that cooperative umpires had allowed Red Sox pitchers to use on their baseballs all season. At Boston he had tripled off Ernie Shore, then suddenly an already blackened ball was having convulsions. “Because,” he fumed,
“Shore got some emery board, taped it inside his glove and roughed the ball into dipping a good six inches.” That day Cobb had gone to the Red Sox dugout to let loose at manager Bill Carrigan: “I'll punch in your head if you don't stop loading up!” he threatened.

“Now, Ty,” broke in umpire George Hildebrand, who, gossip had it, was a friend of Carrigan, “don't start something or you'll be gone.”

“Go ahead and sock me!” cried Carrigan.

“You want me out of here, you bastard,” came back Cobb. “You won't get me. But I'll see you out in the alley after this is over.”

Carrigan didn't keep the date, which was intelligent of him.

Around the Motor City there was talk, murmurs really, that T.C. and not Jennings should be field-managing the Tigers. Cobb discouraged it. For one reason, he liked the peppery Jennings. For another, the Irishman with the red hair and sideline whistle was building a 1916 team seemingly equipped to bring home a championship for the first time since 1909. With Cobb acting as his counselor, Jennings had recently added southpaw pitcher Harry “Giant Killer” Coveleski, who had just won 22 games for the Tigers and in 1916 would win 21. A crackerjack new second baseman, Ralph “Pep” Young, a former prep-school star, became an asset. Jennings traded third baseman George Moriarty, one of the team's persistent Cobb-haters, and acquired Oscar Vitt, an acrobat at third base. In the outfield was strong-armed Bobby Veach, a .300-plus hitter who would contribute 143 triples and doubles in a coming three-season stretch. Hulking in the wings stood a two-hundred-pounder from the Pacific Coast League who was personally scouted by Cobb. “A slow outfielder, but he hits a ton and a half,” reported T.C., thereby coining a fresh baseball expression. Harry “Slug” Heilmann had the fast hands that Cobb felt rookie Babe Ruth of Boston lacked; after hitting .282 in his baptismal Detroit year of 1916, Slug moved up to .320, .394, and finally .403, and one day into the Hall of Fame.

How Detroit landed one of the greatest batsmen of all time was a story Cobb enjoyed telling: “Frank Navin, as usual, was sitting on his fat butt when this boy came along,” he snorted. “Fielder Jones [former manager of the “Hitless Wonders” White Sox of Chicago] called me from the coast to tout Heilmann. The price on the kid was only two thousand dollars. Navin hemmed and hawed. In the off-season I went to San Francisco and tested him long and hard. He hit the cover off
everything we threw at him. His father was the problem—he couldn't believe his Harry would be paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus for just knocking a ball around. I told the old man I was making twenty thousand a year—and his boy was a natural. Finally I convinced him that we didn't want Harry to join a bank-robbery gang back east.”

But with all their rebuilding the Tigers came in third in 1916, and simultaneously a thunderbolt hit—Ty Cobb impossibly lost the league batting crown. You had to go back before the U.S. financial panic and depression of 1907 to call up a time when he had finished out of first place at the plate. With nine back-to-back titles, Cobb was the only man to take over so implacably one department of any sport. The closest behind Cobb in “king of clubs” ranking stood Hans Wagner, with four straight championships, and Nap Lajoie, with two.

Cobb gave no answer to the question,
Is he losing his grip
? nor did he concede he was slipping. Since opening day he had known trouble. Two bouts of intestinal flu had hurt. Umpires, tired of his grandstanding complaints on calls, were said by him to have formed a covert coalition against him. The story went that he and Charlie Cobb had quarreled. It was gossiped that his wife wanted a fur coat to wear at such places as Detroit's Whitney Opera House (Ignace Paderewski had performed there) and he had refused to buy the garment. On the diamond, losing all control in Chicago, he had thrown his bat into the stands after being called out sliding, almost injuring people who were slow to scatter. Ban Johnson's office suspended him for three days for that, even as he was raising his average close to .360. He trotted out an old line for the press: “There are two kinds of umpires—idiots and big-league idiots.”

The Cleveland Indians had paid a record fifty thousand dollars to the Boston Red Sox for Tris Speaker in the spring of 1916, and Speaker's efforts to unseat the Peach finally paid off. Cobb, in September, at times limping, broke out with three base hits (and three steals) against Washington, but it was too late. One of the closer duels yet staged for preeminence ended:

To be stripped of the batting championship was a blow. Cobb was reckless enough that winter to promise his Georgia connections that it would not happen again.

HE WAS
vainglorious. Carlyle's definition of self-esteem as embracing “the sixth insatiable sense” fitted him as well as the custom-tailored clothing he wore. The transcendent figure of a game drawing 16.5 million fans in 1916 and expected to surpass 20 million in 1917—unless President Wilson and the Congress were foolish enough to plunge the nation into a foreign war—the Georgian dressed the part. His suits were of the best tweed and twill, his boots were costly. He wore colorful bow ties. He wasn't seen at such fashionable restaurants as New York's Delmonico's in the cloth caps worn by many ballplayers; for him it was a fine felt hat. Cobb combed his thinning hair to make it seem more abundant, and spoke of the Tigers as “my ball club.” He adopted pipe smoking and wore a diamond stickpin when visiting at the White House. He was rather steadily a guest there in prewar years.

He was dudish on the golf course, where he employed both a caddy and a forecaddy, a mark of affluence. On extended hunting trips to Dover Hall, a twenty-five-hundred acre game preserve in which he had a financial interest, Cobb brought along two gun-bearers. Widely published humorist Irvin S. Cobb (no relation), asked for an introduction and was much pleased when it was granted. Cobb missed a business date one day because he was “with MacArthur,” meaning Colonel Douglas MacArthur, a one-time West Point shortshop and a fast-rising officer soon to lead the Army's Forty-second Division into combat in France.