Cobb (60 page)

THE YEAR
1926 was another case of Tiger failure: one more sixth-place finish, during which the manager, nearing forty but still carrying a Maxim gun to the plate, showed signs that after twenty-one years he and Detroit were about to part company. His suitability as a manager was widely questioned. That feeling mounted with the formation of statewide “Fire Cobb!” factions. Michiganders with less than perfect memories even threw overripe peaches at him.

An example of what fans saw as his worst flaw came at Yankee Stadium in September. His pitcher-switching act that day exposed him as possibly unfit to deal with circumstances under pressure. It came when his pitcher, Lil Stoner, breezing for a Tiger victory behind a four-run lead, walked two men in a row. Showing signs of panic, Cobb jerked him. In came Augustus “Lefty” Johns in relief. Johns was about to win the game for Stoner in the ninth inning when he gave up one hit. Cobb rushed in from right field, jerked the ball from Johns's hand, and benched him, too. Johns objected to joining Stoner in the showers and he and Cobb exchanged words. The next hurler, Wilbur Cooper, an old-timer of fading ability, gave up more hits, and within minutes an almost sure win for Detroit became a defeat.

With few exceptions, those who worked under Cobb's direction felt smothered—he expected them to think as fast and imaginatively as he did, hit for an impossible average, and approach the game with his fire. None of the Tigers came close to his requirements for mental agility and obsessiveness; some—Heilmann, Manush, Gehringer—were greatly gifted, but were not in their leader's class. He rode his players so hard that some spoke of living in a nine-inning hell. “We thought that Cobb would crack up any day,” said intelligent infielder Fred Haney. “One day he would be riding high and working well with his lineup, next day he'd go around with the whites of his eyes flared and be the meanest guy you ever saw. He had spells, fits. Unimportant things made him blow. Some of the boys thought it was a case of brain fever.”

IN EARLY
November, Frank Navin loosed a thunderbolt—Cobb would not be retained as manager or player in 1927. Navin blamed him for
“demoralization” of the Tigers, a situation showing no sign of improvement. Cobb had handed in his resignation on November 3, briefly stating that he was “bone-tired” and had planned to resign back in August. But his main reason for leaving, he let out, was Navin, who demonstrably did not understand how to build a winning team through trading, scouting, using the waivers process, stealing other teams' stars, and bringing along talent through patient development in the minors.

Then, while Cobb and Navin were placing the blame on each other, Tris Speaker, thirty-eight, the highly admired Cleveland manager, also resigned, to enter the trucking business. This came on November 29.

The public's reaction to the departure within weeks of two of the biggest box-office names in the game was surprise, then suspicion. Was something going on that had not been disclosed? Why, for instance, had Cobb dropped from view, unavailable to the press at a climactic moment? How was it that Speaker had quit just weeks after leading the Indians to a second-place finish, only three games behind the Yankees? Texas Tris, now at a peak of popularity in Ohio, was being paid close to forty thousand dollars.

A few days before Christmas, a stunning explanation came from Commissioner Kenesaw Landis. He verified as true the rumor that Cobb and Speaker had been permitted by him to resign in the face of accusations made against them of fixing and betting on a game played between Detroit and Cleveland seven years earlier, back on September 25, 1919.

THE STRONGEST
evidence against the pair of a gambling conspiracy consisted of two letters in Landis's possession. One had been written by Cobb in 1919 to Hubert “Dutch” Leonard, who had pitched for Detroit during the time he alleged the fix was on; the other letter was written in 1919 by Smoky Joe Wood, a Cleveland outfielder, which also was sent to Leonard.

For a reformer as dogged and as much a headline-hound as Landis, the correspondence was pure gold. It was widely reported, and not denied, that American League owners had paid Leonard between $15,000 and $25,000 to buy his letters and perhaps to suppress them. By 1926, Leonard was a well-to-do fruit farmer in central California. His motive for disclosing the letters was identified as revenge on Cobb
for cutting him from the Detroit roster in 1925 and effectively ending his big-league career. As for Speaker, he had let Leonard slide down to the minors by not picking him up on waivers after Cobb's rejection. It would have cost Speaker's club only $7,500 to take him on waivers, cheap for a pitcher who had posted some good seasons.

Long before Landis took over the investigation in late 1926, when American League president Ban Johnson began to look into the matter, Cobb denied everything. Now he demanded that Leonard be brought from California to Chicago to meet him face to face. Leonard, refusing, was widely quoted as saying, “They got guys in Chicago who bump people off for a price.” Yet Leonard, earlier in 1926, had come east and tried to sell his incriminating letters to a newspaper.

What had happened, claimed Leonard, was this: before the 1919 Detroit-Cleveland game in question, he, Speaker, Cobb, and Wood had met under the stands, and a conspiracy was hatched. Leonard quoted Speaker as saying that, since his Indians had clinched second place in the closing-out season and Detroit was in a battle with the Yankees for third place and a piece of World Series money, why not make sure the Tigers collected it? “Don't worry about a thing,” said Speaker, according to Leonard.

To take advantage of a sure thing, Cobb offered to put up $2,000 of a pot collected then and there by the four men. Leonard would gamble $1,500 and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each—$5,500 in all. Cobb, added Leonard, provided a Detroit groundskeeper named Fred West to lay the wagers with chosen bookies.

When Landis placed Leonard's documentation on record on December 21, 1926, he touched off the most lurid sport scandal since the 1920 Black Sox affair and the excommunication of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, and friends. “I am going to expose that bastard Cobb,” Leonard had promised Pacific Coast baseball men. “I'll ruin him.”

Newspapers gave a heavy play to the course of events:

CHICAGO
, Dec. 22—[Associated Press]—The attention of the base ball world centered today on a seven-year-old game, that between the Detroit and Cleveland American League teams on Sept. 25, 1919, around which charges of fixing, involving two of the greatest players known to the game, have been made.

The long smouldering bombshell, the subject of many recent rumors, broke yesterday and sent fragments into many places, but today those accused came back quickly with denials of wrongdoing.

Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, idols of thousands of base ball fans, and holders of many base ball records, declared they were innocent of assertions that they were involved in a conspiracy to “throw” the ball game and to benefit by betting on the outcome of the contest.

DETROIT NEWS
, Dec. 24—Fred O. West, Navin Field employee of the Detroit Tigers, mentioned in testimony before Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Commissioner of Base Ball, as the man who placed the alleged bets for Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Joe Wood and Hubert (Dutch) Leonard on Sept. 25, 1919, made the following statement to The Detroit News today:

“I took a sealed envelope from one place to another on the date mentioned. The following day I called at the second place, got another sealed envelope and delivered that.”

West refused to mention the name of the player who handed him the sealed envelope, although admitting it was one of the four involved in the scandal. He refused to say where he took the envelope that he picked up on the following day.

“I can't say what was in the envelope,” said West. “It was sealed and I'm not in the habit of opening sealed envelopes.

“I was called to Chicago by Commissioner Landis. I saw him Monday. I told him what I have just told you. It's all I have to say.”

Hughie Jennings, the manager under whom Cobb broke in at Detroit in 1905, and usually pro-Cobb in Cobb-versus-establishment clashes thereafter, worsened the crisis for the Peach—now facing possible expulsion from baseball—by speaking of how easy it would be to fix a game and issuing a “no comment” on the questioned game, played when Jennings was Detroit's manager. His “no comment” sounded like he was avoiding the issue:

CHICAGO
, Dec. 26—[United Press]—Hughie Jennings issued a statement yesterday on the base ball plot averred by Commissioner Landis. He said, “I have no knowledge of the matter whatever. My slate has been clean base ball for 35 years. This is the first inkling I have had of this case. Whatever I have done in base ball has been of such a nature that I would be ready any time to go before anyone and place my case before them. I do not feel that I should comment on the case. These things are all very well to bring out if you have the goods and can prove them.

“Judge Landis has probably been investigating for some time and would not make any such statement unless he had proof to back it up. As for the complicity of the game of base ball it would be an easy matter for players so inclined to throw a game without the manager having any knowledge of it. It would be a very easy matter to cover up. But if I had any inkling of the thing during my time as manager of Detroit, or since, I certainly would not have covered the matter up but would have given the facts no matter what the cost.”

One of the offshoots of the alleged plot was the disclosure of the longtime covert practice of teams playing “good fellowship” games in late season. Basic to this scheme was the bribe. If Team A, fighting to collect second- or third-place money, needed help, Team B, finishing out of the money, would provide it by trying extra hard against Team A's chief rivals. Team B's
quid pro quo
was the gift of a suit of clothes or cash from A for each of its regulars.

Cobb candidly told me in 1960 that he had shared in such secret subsidizing on occasion, when the Tigers “broke our backs” to help out a team after Detroit was eliminated from the World Series race. “Once I got a dozen shirts from the Boston Red Sox,” he said offhandedly. “It was just a thing we all did.”

But this time there could be no cover-up:

DETROIT NEWS
, Dec. 27—“I am not surprised,” said “Bernie” Boland, former Tiger hurler, who pitched the “good fellowship” game of Sept. 25, 1919. Boland is a paving contractor, living at 11833 Wisconsin Avenue.

“I hope everything comes out about it. I was a pick and shovel pitcher, working like a miner, taking the games as they came. Dutch Leonard was a star, wasn't he? But he picked the soft spots. If he had to pitch against Walter Johnson he was sick or something. He never showed up in the spring and I and others had to pitch these small town games where they lay the diamond out the night before. I got tired of it and then when I tried to get in shape too quickly I hurt my arm. They ran me out of the American League.

“There are a lot of these friendship games at the tail end of the season, when they give the boys hits to fatten their batting averages and help them get good salaries. I do not remember this particular game, but you can bet I had nothing to do with the matter. This is all news to me. The only player I ever gave a hit to was ‘Stuffy' McInnis. He used to plead so hard so he could make a .300 average. In that newspaper report of the game in question they say I gave Speaker three triples. That is not so. I never gave Speaker anything in my life.

“The way I figure it, about one in every 300 games is crooked, and those at the tail end of the season.

“This is bad for baseball, for practically all of the players are honest, but I am glad some of them are getting justice at last. It's mighty hard to keep going when the boys quit behind you.”

One corrupt game in every three hundred? Club owners blanched at that news. They had covered up the rewards systems, allowing it to pervade a game believed by millions of Americans to be on the square. Now the outcome was a shameful disclosure. Landis called players of past and present to his Chicago office to be grilled. Swede Risberg, one of the exiled Black Sox of six years earlier, swore to God that a whole series of games between Detroit and the Chicago White Sox—two straight doubleheaders of September 2 and 3, 1917—had been “greased” to aid Chicago in its struggle for first place. Risberg said Detroit helped Chicago win all four crucial games and the pennant. According to him, each White Sox player put up forty-five dollars toward purses of one hundred dollars as a bribe for Detroit pitchers and others.

But Cobb testified that he had no part of the 1917 dirty work and Risberg verified that. Landis cleared Cobb of any wrongdoing in 1917.

Landis possessed an embarrassment of riches. He paraded forty witnesses at a January 5, 1927, board of inquiry session, and everyone wished he had not done so. Disillusionment grew as players confessed to fixed games arranged by the idolized New York Giants of John McGraw, whose infielders had a habit of sidling up to opponents and whispering, “You wanna kick one today?” A few years earlier, Landis had warned, “If I catch any crook, the rest of his life will be a hot period!” At the moment, in early 1927, with a new scandal arising, Landis became more moderate, telling the press, “Team pools or incentive money offered others is an act of high impropriety, reprehensible and censurable, but it is not criminal.”

The infamous letter written by Cobb to Leonard, offered retroactively as evidence, read:

Augusta, Ga., Oct. 23, '19

Dear Dutch:

Well, old boy, guess you are out in old California by this time and enjoying life.

I arrived home and found Mrs. Cobb only fair, but the baby girl was fine, and at this time Mrs. Cobb is very well, but I have been very busy getting acquainted with my family and have not tried to do any correspondence, hence my delay.