Cobb (50 page)

As to my sharpening my spikes in a barbershop, no, Bugs, I did not. There is no equipment for such an operation in a barbershop. It calls for a file—not that I am well-acquainted with the filing process. The story of my spikes-sharpening springs from a prank hatched by members of our club, Detroit.

As you know, Bugs, baseball is not a pink-tea party. I have been handed more injuries in the heat of play than I have caused.

Now that I have unbosomed myself, with every good wish for your health and happiness, I am

Ty Cobb.

In other volunteered correspondence to critics he insisted that the false barbershop story began with Tiger rookies on the bench, rasping
away at spikes with files while the New York Yankees passed by before a game. Cobb tried to explain, “It was only horseplay by a bunch of bench-riders … It wouldn't have been a story for Baer and other writers if they didn't put me in it.

“I have been roughed up more in print on this than on anything.”

Bobby “Kentucky Rifle” Veach, who played the outfield in company with the Peach from 1912 to 1923, dissented. “Maybe Ty didn't hone his spikes,” Veach testified later, “but he used to yell at me in the field that he was going to get so-and-so the next inning. Then he'd give the works to someone like Cy Morgan [Red Sox], Home Run Baker [Yankees], and Harry Bemis [Cleveland]. He'd draw blood. Liked to go for shins and kneecaps.” Veach died in Detroit in 1945, maintaining that such incidents—some of them exaggerated—were mainly true. Was Veach prejudiced? “Some,” he conceded. “I hated Cobb's guts from 1912 on for what he did to us.”

A practical reason for Veach's stand was that for much of the 1920s, an epidemic of dirty base-running had existed across the American League. As Veach explained it, a symbiotic relationship exists between opposing forces—whatever takes place with one component is bound to set off a mirror reaction in the other. “Clubs got even,” said Veach. “Our base runners paid for Cobb's doings.” A steady .300 hitter, Veach in one season got into only 114 games, partly due—he claimed—to injuries received in retaliation for his teammate's slashing. Cobb cut twenty-odd men that Veach knew about.

Cobb's suggestion that he should be seen in a more enlightened way mostly resulted in scoffing. The record was plain to see. “I'm afraid,” once said Grantland Rice, pro-Cobb among the press, “that he'd too often hurt someone for any forgiveness later.” (Rice, however, did not print this at the time.)

In January of 1920, returned from managing San Francisco in the Coast League, the Peach vacationed for a few weeks. He had switched to a thicker, heavier bat of forty-two ounces (up from thirty-seven), theorizing that at age thirty-three his swing was no longer extra quick and that he needed more contact surface. Against popular thinking on this, he felt he could still get around in time and that, on in-tight, strike-zone pitches, the added wood he could get on to the ball would produce a share of clubbed slow infield rollers—“hand hits”—that he could beat out. Further, a thicker bat helped on bunts. He was one of
the first bunters who slightly withdrew his bat to “smother” a fastball and so turn a rocket into a precisely placed twenty-foot dribbler. He weighed his new sticks each week to make sure that friction and chips off them had not altered their heft.

ONCE AGAIN
, for the fifth springtime, in 1920 he avoided the Tigers, who trained in Macon, Georgia. It poured rain in Macon. Writer-catcher Eddie Ainsmith's poem encouraged him to work out in damp but not soggy Augusta, on the Warren Field where he had broken in as a pro and where semipros were available to pitch to him. Ainsmith's ode went:

Away down South in the land of cotton
Where the sky is high
And the grounds are rotten,
Stay away! Stay away!
Stay away! Stay away!

Frank Navin was angry that T.C. had stayed dry while the rest of the club barnstormed through terrible weather. Needing to speak with him about a contemplated change in Detroit team management, Navin tracked him down to an Augusta golf course, where he was trying to break 80. Cobb kept Navin waiting, then recommended that the owner take up golf for his big belly.

Finding it difficult to beat 195 pounds on the scales, Cobb showed many of the symptoms of a man lulled by his own accomplishments and—he admitted this later—coasting for the first time. Rising at 7:00
A.M.
had been his habit from farm-boy days. Lately his clock had been set for nine-thirty or ten. Golf had become something of a harmful habit. He had found a game difficult for him, and went at it for thirty-six holes per day. Members of the Augusta Country Club were warned to stand clear when partnering with him—he threw clubs upon missing a putt. He remained away from his job, not bothering to join the Tigers until April 10, only four days before opening day in Chicago, where he had four hits in two game-losing Tiger efforts. After that he went into as prolonged a slump as he had ever known.

“I beat myself,” he later put it. “Too much horsing around, too much anticipating. I'd averaged almost the same in the past three
years—.383, .382, .384. My legs were in better shape. So I was grooved and saw no reason why it wouldn't go on the same.”

Sharing his slump, the Tigers lost their first thirteen games. Few worse starts were on record. Defensively they were a joke. Cobb's inspiration was gone. He developed a hitch in his swing—the heavier bat hurt, not helped—and well into the season he was struggling to reach .200. He injured a knee and, reinjuring it, was sidelined for weeks. There was the strange sight of the mighty Tyrus taking extra batting practice in the twilight after games. Hughie Jennings had largely a stand-pat lineup carried over from 1919, one with infield leaks, and had but one pitcher, Howard Ehmke, able to win as many as 15 games in the season. Catcher Oscar Stanage batted .231, new infielder Babe Pinelli .229. Lefty Dutch Leonard lost 17 games, Hooks Dauss lost 21. Only the Philadelphia Athletics of the long-suffering Connie Mack were a worse aggregation.

The American League was tougher than ever, with Cleveland, Chicago, and New York the class. Pennant-bound Cleveland had Jim Bagby en route to a 31–12 pitching year; New York had Ruth batting .370 and compiling a fearsome 54 home runs (10 against Detroit), and effective throwing from Carl Mays and Bob Shawkey. Detroit had Cobb, averaging .265 all spring long, a horrible sight. At length, in June, Cobb found his stroke, reaching .300, then .334 toward the end. His recovery came far too late, and for the first time since 1916 he lost his league's batting championship. That trophy fell to compact, 170-pound, left-handed George Sisler of St. Louis.

Sisler had been scouted in college by Cobb, but Navin irrationally had failed to sign him. In 1920 he finished with a stunning 257 base hits—the most blows struck to date in the modern majors—for a .407 average. Nobody except Shoeless Joe Jackson, who in 1911 averaged .408 to Cobb's .420, had hit .400 or more since Cobb's 1912 mark of .410. Leg-sore Tyrus had appeared in but 112 games in 1920. Shoeless Joe at Chicago rubbed it in with a .382 mark, and 58 more runs driven in than Cobb.

There was a bit of consolation for T.C. one July day against the Yankees. He made a racing-in catch of a screaming line drive by Wally Pipp and with Ruth carelessly wandering off second base, continued on to tag him out. He applied a vicious blow to Ruth. “Oh, did that hurt the poor boy?” asked Cobb. “Maybe you should take up pattycake.”

Casey Stengel, long afterward, said, “I was playin' for Pittsburgh that year, but I saw Ty a few times. He was goin' through hell. He's really burnin'. He tells me that maybe he'll hang them up. But I knew better. Losing was about to make him as good as ever.”

Sparing the sympathy, much of the press was of the opinion that his loss of speed—in bat velocity, running the bases, and particularly in chasing fly balls—was so evident that it foreshadowed his end as the Peerless One. Harry Salsinger of the Detroit press was more circumspect, but did comment that Cobb's tremendous drop in steals, from a league-leading 68 and 55 a few seasons back to 14 in 1920, pointed to his doing more pinch-hitting than playing regularly in the future. Further, a seventh-place Detroit finish was seen as the last chance for Hughie Jennings as the club's manager. Jennings now had finishing marks over a decade of second, sixth (twice), fourth, second, third, fourth, seventh, fourth, and seventh.

In September during a series in Boston, weeks before Cobb came in only tenth-best in the American League batting race, Jennings held a private meeting with Cobb. They met in a Boston bar; Jennings's hands were shaky. As Cobb later described it:

“Ty, I can't go on. I'm not thinking straight,” admitted Jennings.

“Stop drinking so much,” replied Cobb bluntly. “I can smell your breath from six feet.”

Jennings would not confess that he had become an alcoholic. “I never drink before games. It's just that I'm worn out, tired all the time. Navin is always on my back.”

“How about yesterday's game?” demanded Cobb. “You were out of it, not thinking.”

In the ninth inning, the Tigers had trailed the Red Sox by three runs, Detroit had runners on first and second and no outs, with hard-hitting Bobby Veach at bat. Jennings flashed the bunt sign. The Tigers protested. They appealed to Cobb to stop Jennings from such a bone-head play. So Cobb had run out to the coaching box. He had dropped to one knee, pretending to be tying his shoelace. Jennings stared back blankly when reminded by him that there were no outs and that Veach hammered Boston pitching. When he failed to react, Cobb removed the bunt sign. Swinging away, Veach poled a home run, tying the score. The Tigers went on to win.

“Go on the wagon, Hughie,” urged Cobb. “Go to a health farm this winter. And take 1921 out.”

Jennings, a college man, the National League's champion fielder in his heyday, at age fifty-one was in bad shape. For the 1921 season he would be a coach with the New York Giants; after a nervous breakdown a few years later, he would retire. The once-boisterous “Eeee-yahhhh Man” who blew whistles, honked horns, and capered on the coaching line, would die young, in 1928, at age fifty-eight—looking like seventy-five.

WHILE COBB'S
statistics dived sharply—he had failed to stand first in his circuit in any of the thirteen statistical categories, even as Ruth led in runs scored, home runs, and runs batted in—organized ball was headed in the 1920s Jazz and Nonsense Age to a boomtime in which overall annual attendance would reach 9.5 million and then 10 million. Across the leagues, fan turnout would rise 50 percent over the draw of 1919. Some owners boasted that they could fill a 100,000-seat arena if they had the seats. The Yankees, to name one case, even while failing to win the 1920 pennant, doubled their 1919 figure with 1,287,422 paid attendance. Now that more than 8 million automobiles were on U.S. roads, fans could come a far distance to attend a game.

The World Series was first broadcast in 1921—the Giants edging the Yankees—and within four years the Chicago Cubs' owner, William Wrigley, made the revolutionary move of allowing his games to be aired on the radio. Ladies' Day, with admission free, was introduced, to much acclaim. Parasols, cloches, and bobbed hair were seen scattered throughout ballparks.

Equipment changes were overdue. A glove with a pocket replaced the old flat “pancake” glove, thinner-handled bats became the vogue, the pitchers were allowed to use a resin bag—coarse powder—to obtain a better grip on the ball.

More than that, the spitball was outlawed in 1920. An advisory council of the National Commission, in the process of abolishing spitters and freak pitches in general, ruled, however, that those who heavily relied on wetting the ball could finish their careers using saliva, but saliva only. Pitcher Bill Doak of St. Louis had argued that an outright ban would deprive at least seventeen veterans of their earning power.
But once these men had retired, the ancient, controversial pitch would be out—at least legally.

ON AUGUST
16 of the 1920 season, the Tigers were in Boston for a Red Sox series. Cobb, in his hotel bed with bandaged legs, received a phone call from United Press. A reporter asked, “Did you hear what happened in the Yankee-Cleveland game today in New York?”

“No, I didn't,” replied Cobb.

“Ray Chapman was hit on the head by Carl Mays and he may not survive.”

“That's bad,” said Cobb.

Continued United Press, “There's a lot of feeling over this … The Washington club has stated that it won't play the Yankees again while Mays is pitching. They claim he throws at hitters deliberately. Cleveland says it'll boycott, too. I'd like to ask you—what about Detroit?”

Careful about how he answered, Cobb said, “Well, I'm only a member of the Detroit team. I don't set policy. Anyway, I'm here in Boston and didn't see it.”

Obviously out for a headline-making quotation, the United Press man pushed him to say more. Cobb grew irritated. “Look here!” he snapped. “Under no circumstances will I comment on it … Even if I'd been there I doubt that I would have commented.” With that he hung up on the caller. So he remembered it years later.

His phone began ringing again, and within the hour Cobb knew that in the fifth inning of a Cleveland-Yankee game at the Polo Grounds, the Yankees' submarine specialist, Carl Mays, had badly beaned Cleveland's shortstop, Ray Chapman. The ball had caromed off Chapman's left temple with an audible
crack
and bounced back toward Mays, who fielded it and threw to first for the out. Later Mays was to submit that he thought the ball had hit Chapman's bat, which had caused the deflection. The
Washington Evening Star
's report went: “Chapman collapsed … was lifted to his feet by players … staggered and crumpled … was carried to an ambulance … An operation was hurriedly decided upon shortly after midnight, when a portion of Chapman's fractured skull was removed by surgeons.