Cobb (64 page)

THE ATHLETICS
, in no way resembling the Philadelphia clubs that had finished in last place seven times straight after the 1915 season, got off to a promising start in 1928, challenging the Yankees for the lead. Their senior member was hot at bat in April and May, although not so hot at fielding. He had two hits and two runs scored against the Yankees, but fifty-six thousand New Yorkers booed him for losing a fly ball in the sun and for getting put out while trying to stretch a base hit. He had a double and single against Detroit, a home run against Cleveland, a bases-loaded triple in a defeat of Washington. But his fielding, like that of his forty-one-year-old teammate, Tris Speaker, acquired by Mack from Washington that year, was wanting. Tyrus and Tristram were—sad to see—slow afoot. No longer could Cobb race in one hundred feet for a shoestring catch; Speaker, who by his swiftness had played the shallowest of center fields, was now forced to set up much deeper. Fly balls dropped between them often enough that the
New York American
cartooned it as “The Philly Phollies.”

Cobb drove himself unsparingly to reach a .330 batting mark by late May. At one juncture he was sidelined with a “bad boiler”—stomach trouble, vomiting. He played hurt as the Athletics streaked to twenty-one wins in twenty-five games and trailed the Yankees by only three and a half matches. Speaker was benched with ruptured blood vessels. His stomach calming, Cobb gave crowds estimated as the largest in the game's history—up to eighty-five thousand—something
to remember him by. On June 15 at Cleveland, in the eighth inning, he demonstrated how much ability he had left. “A little Cobb telepathy,” he called it.

It began when he hit a grounder to first base, a twisting ball that baseman Lou Fonseca bobbled. Meanwhile he raced to second base. On a following groundout by Max Bishop, he advanced to third. A roar went up—“There he goes!”—when he caught pitcher George Grant off guard. Before catcher Luke Sewell could handle Grant's snap throw and apply the tag, Cobb was in there safely.

It was the thirty-fifth steal of home base of his career—and the last. Since that June day no one has tied or beaten that number, or even come close. Casey Stengel considered the feat to be the most demanding, dangerous single act in any sport, and informed people that of all of Cobb's records surviving into the 1960s (and the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) this one was the hardest earned and at least the third-most important. Casey: “Ya got to remember that he went for the plate like a freight train. Ooooooo, he was scary!”

Setbacks came. On July 18, Sam Gibson of Detroit hit Cobb's right wrist with a pitch that laid him up. Days later he twisted a knee ligament; on July 27, Sarge Connally's pitch knocked him out of a White Sox game—a fastball to his breastbone. Accumulated injuries forced him to miss much of the fun of a late-season Athletic-Yankee fight for the pennant. “I'm not much to look at,” he told
Baseball Magazine
. “I'm black and blue from my ankles to my hips.”

On September 7, Mack's men tied the Yanks for first place and one day later took over the league lead by a half-game margin. By now Cobb had been replaced in right field by twenty-five-year-old Mule Haas, who was born in Detroit. Cobb overheard Haas joking about how he had watched the Georgia Peach playing in the Detroit outfield when he was a baby in arms. Not many years earlier Cobb might have punched Haas for that. Now, to keep the peace for Mack in a championship race, he let it pass. But a bigger incentive was that if the Mackmen won the pennant, Cobb would get another crack at the World Series.

According to Cobb's very good memory, he was headed down a passage to his dugout at Yankee Stadium during a September series with the Yanks when he encountered Ruth. On a hot day Babe was wearing his summertime home remedy, a wet cabbage leaf atop his hair and under his cap.

“Does that help?” asked Cobb.

“Cools me off, you bet,” replied Ruth. “Stops heat prosecution [
sic
].”

There was an awkward pause. By habit the two men had been jockeying each other with foul language during this series.

“Too bad about Shocker,” said Cobb, speaking of former Yankee pitcher Urban Shocker. A fine control pitcher who had won 37 games to 17 losses in his last two seasons, Shocker was from Detroit and had known Cobb there. Days earlier, on September 9, Shocker had died of possible heart failure.

“Yeah, Shock was a good guy,” agreed Ruth.

“He got me on the slow stuff,” said Cobb.

“Uh-huh,” said Ruth.

They parted on that note, and never again spoke to each other during a game. There would be no opportunity for them to exchange incivilities again. Cobb's final appearance in the American League came before forty thousand on September 11, at “The House That Ruth Built” in the Bronx. Thirty-three-year-old Babe struck a home run so high and so far that you needed a telescope to follow it. His blow won the game, 5–3. Cobb, coming off the bench in the ninth inning as a pinch hitter for infielder Jimmy Dykes, lifted a blooper back of third base off Hank Johnson. Shortstop Mark Koenig caught it for the out. Cobb ran as fast as he could to first base on the play … and a career dating from the turn of the century ended. An era dating from ragtime, umpires with waxed mustaches, and cars you started with a crank passed into history.

He wore the uniform a bit longer. Connie Mack needed the money, so the schedule was interrupted for an exhibition game on September 13 against the Albany, New York, club of the Eastern League. Cobb played and had a pair of singles. Next day came an exhibition affair at Toronto. A small crowd of about twenty-five hundred Canadians witnesses his last appearances at bat in a big-league uniform. Once more he hit two singles. He was truly finished—3,033 games, 11,429 at-bats, 4,191 hits, and 2,244 runs on the official record. Lifetime batting average: .367, to this day the highest ever registered.

In his final season Cobb played in 95 games and batted .323. Only nine other American Leaguers averaged better than that. Only two regular members of the National League champion St. Louis Cardinals of
1928 did as well as forty-two-year-old Cobb. The Yankees clinched the pennant on September 28, two days before the season ended, then walloped the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight World Series games. By then Cobb was retired and looking for something with which to occupy himself for the rest of his days.

A NUMBER
of seasoned baseball beat reporters doubted that anyone still able to hit well over .300 had reached the end of the line, and they were skeptical about his retirement plans almost to the end. At a press conference he called in Cleveland on September 17, Cobb reaffirmed his departure, while thanking those supporters who had stood behind him during his worst times. “Not that there were very damn many,” he said later, privately. Someone remarked that the man who stood first in so many playing categories had been last in making friends.

Once more he expressed regret at having seen so little of his children while they were growing up—the eldest, Tyrus Cobb, Jr., was eighteen, preparing to enter Princeton University—and noted that this would be corrected. The boy had caddied some golf games for him.

His retirement notices were worthy of an abdicating high government official or crime lord. “Say farewell to the most admired, envied and hated of ballplayers”—
New York Evening Post
. “There never has been a player who brought such intelligence, audacity and ferocity to the game”—
New York Evening World
. “Pitchers walk Ruth to dispose of trouble … if they dare give Cobb a base on balls, their troubles are just beginning … He has been every bit as dangerous on offense as Ruth”—
Literary Digest
. “Hell in spikes”—
Police Gazette
.

Ty Cobb set marks that, approaching the year 2000, no major-leaguer has equaled. “He put them so high that a cannon couldn't shoot them down,” said Casey Stengel. As of 1994, more than sixty-five years had passed since Cobb's retirement. No ballplayer in Cobb's time, and none to this day, could come close to matching his .367 lifetime batting average, the most eminent single statistic in sports. Ted Williams, probably the best of modern hitters, finished at .344, 23 percentage points behind the .367 (he might have reached .360 but for two war-service interruptions).

Joe DiMaggio says simply, “Ty was too much for everybody.” DiMaggio stands in awe of the doctored baseballs faced by Cobb—illegal today—and the low-visibility parks of his day, compared to the
ideal lighting conditions after World War II. Despite that major handicap, Cobb ranks first of all-time with 2,244 runs scored, well ahead of Ruth. Cobb's feat of leading his league in batting average twelve times is no less than staggering. Ruth did it once, DiMaggio twice, Williams six times, Hornsby seven and Wagner eight times. In the category of hitting .300 or more per season, the Georgian still stands far in front of everyone, with twenty-three seasons.

He accumulated 5,863 total bases and rang up 3,052 singles, both still existing records. His 5 home runs in two consecutive games tie him with others. His career 892 stolen bases stood for decades. Young baseball-card collectors can tell you which hero stole home base the most times—“Ty Cobb, thirty-five!” In his career he had set 123 records.

ALL ALONG
Cobb had professed that relief from pressure and finding time for a normal family life were his goals. That autumn his children hoped to enjoy their father's company, perhaps to travel with him from their home on William Street in Augusta to places they had never seen. Sticking to his promise, Cobb sailed for Japan in October aboard the SS
President Jefferson
with his wife and three young Cobbs—Herschel, Beverly, and James Howell. The trouble was that almost everywhere they traveled, Cobb had been booked by promoters to hold baseball clinics for the Nipponese. The hosts were eager to learn the game. And time-consuming clinics made the tours less a matter of shared fun and sightseeing than a method for selling Father's name. He was paid one thousand dollars each for staging fifteen instructional sessions from Tokyo to Nagoya and Kobe. In Kobe, someone stole his uniform from his hotel room, added proof of his popularity in the Orient.

Upon the family's return to Georgia, he was not to be seen at home for a time while his prize bird dogs were competing in field trials in two states. And after that the jaunting paterfamilias scheduled a European hunting tour extending from Scotland to Germany to Spain. Cobb's children would not be coming along.

Back home in April of 1929, with time on his hands, Cobb took off in another direction—Europe and the British Isles. He had not been abroad since he was Captain Cobb of the Gas and Flame Division of Chemical Warfare in World War I. He was in good spirits when he and Charlie sailed aboard the SS
Roosevelt
for London.

Charlie was eager to tour the palaces and cathedrals of the Continent. Cobb wanted to test himself against the fast-flying grouse of Scotland and to hunt by foot the fierce boars of Germany. It turned into a lengthy tour of half a dozen countries and so much scenery that he complained to the Ty Cobb Fan Society of Augusta-Atlanta upon their return that he had been dragged from the halls of Versailles, King Ludwig's castles, the Colosseum and Vatican to the canals of Venice to the Tower of London and the Swiss Alps. They even made a side trip to the Pyramids in Egypt.

Between inspecting holy
reliquiae
and the art of the Louvre, he hunted grouse at Keith, Scotland, by invitation of Sir Isaac Sharpe, one of the world's top trainers of retrieving dogs. In
My Life in Baseball
, he wrote, “Keith was the big league of game birds, a pilgrimage place for the finest of shotgun artists. The challenge of trying my luck there in
80,000 acres of moor and heather had been gnawing at me since I was a young man.” The Scots wondered if the American could hit one of their rocketing grouse. He knocked down two on his first shot, and had a full bag for the day. Down in north Georgia, where he had hunted quail since he was knee high to a hedgehog, they had fast birds, too. In Germany he had one shot at a boar—and missed.

BEFORE GOING
abroad, and afterward, he put out feelers to American and National league teams, expressing his interest in acquiring a majority stockholder position and top executive post with one of them. He had come to feel that he could not just walk away from something that had been his life since 1905. At midlife, he needed to practice what he knew best. His name still could sell tickets. His ability to handle money in large amounts was well established. But the dual brotherhood was unresponsive. Both leagues could use a readymade multimillionaire in their ranks—if he abided by the rules. But applicant Cobb had made a shambles of competition in its normal meaning; he had played as if in some kind of primal heat, and as a manager had not led his players so much as intimidated them. No offers were forthcoming above the AA level.

Through 1929 he persisted in trying to buy his way back into the Big Show. A possible opportunity developed at Redlands Park, Cincinnati. Ticket sales there were down, leadership was weak. The city that had introduced professional baseball to America in 1869 had not won a pennant since 1919. Longtime club president Gary Hermann had retired and the new boss, Sid Weil, a used-automobile dealer, had a limited knowledge of team promotion. Weil enjoyed suiting up with his players and chasing fly balls with them.

However, according to Cobb's files, opened by him to this researcher in the early 1960s, their negotiations never became serious. Cobb offered $325,000 for the franchise, including seven of the players currently under contract, the ballpark and furnishings, clubhouse equipment, ticket boxes, flags, and ground equipment. Weil was shocked. His price was $500,000 and he wasn't budging. Weil asked about the rest of his players—why was it that Cobb wanted only seven of twenty-eight?