Cobb (8 page)

Atlanta and Augusta newspapers reached Royston by slow mail. On sports pages he read that the 1904 Olympic Games were to be staged in St. Louis. He daydreamed about competing—fast runner that he was—in the Olympics. Meantime, he began to read about other happenings some one thousand miles to the north. Until then, with
the southern U.S. not represented in the game, he had paid slight attention to major-league baseball. A Royston merchant raved to him about Honus Wagner, the famed “Flying Dutchman” shortstop of the Pittsburgh Pirates. “Who?” replied Tyrus. Kidded about his ignorance, he looked into the big-time game. He became aware of such heroes as Rube Waddell, on his way to setting strikeout records at Philadelphia, Wee Willie Keeler, the tiny but wonderful Brooklyn outfielder, Napoleon Lajoie, big hitter of Philadelphia, and Denton “Cy” Young, a pitching marvel at St. Louis and Boston whose nickname derived from “cyclone.” Another whose pugnacious style Tyrus liked was warlike John “Muggsy” McGraw, an enemy of umpires and attacker of opponents in Baltimore and New York.

Star ballplayers, he noticed, moved around a lot from team to team. That appealed to Cobb—he was naturally a wanderer. Which team beat another didn't matter to him. What attracted him were the headlined celebrities, such as Christy “Big Six” Mathewson in New York, who sported high-collar shirts and earned an astounding five thousand to eight thousand dollars and more per season. Someone lent him a copy of
Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide.
He read that northern metropolises were “going wild in an unprecedented way about the sport” and that “there are five seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—and baseball season.” Tyrus hadn't been aware that the game he and local lads played with a flat board and homemade twine ball could be such a big thing. That you might be able to play for good money hadn't crossed his mind.

As the big battalions marched in the War Between the States, traveling with them went shaved-down farm rails, ax handles, and wagon tongues—makeshift bats—along with horsehide-covered yarn balls. During time-outs from battle, both Confederate and Union troops chose up sides for the growing sport of town ball. On open spaces, the sound of base hits rang out. Sheet music was named the “Union Ball Club March,” the “Home-Run Quickstep.”

These Americans were looking for a good game to play. In even earlier form, a ball-bat-base type of contest could be traced to 1778 and Valley Forge in the Revolution, probably the first organized, reliably recorded such match staged in the country.

The adolescent Tyrus Cobb, just short years after the Civil War, knew little about town ball. All he had seen of it had come while he acted as batboy for the “first nine” of his hometown of Royston, the hard-drinking, semipro Royston Reds. You could hear the rambunctious Reds coming. They toured northeast Georgia, playing any opponent available. Wearing crimson uniforms jolting to the eye, the Nosebleed Reds had an average age of twenty or twenty-one. Below them stood the Royston Rompers, a ragtag group of boys aged twelve
to about sixteen. Late in his life Cobb recorded: “As a kid, I didn't see a chance to ever reach the Reds. Maybe the Rompers. I was undersized … still had a runny nose … didn't know what a hard-on was. Didn't expect much.”

Originally he did not even own a bat. Using a flat-sided board, Tyrus got along on sandlots. To ask his father for the money to buy one of the advertised models from a mail-order house was out of the question. To the Professor, unathletic and a bookworm, ball games were a waste of time.

Help finally came in the spring of 1899 from Elmer Cunningham, the town's supplier of waterwheels and coffins. Orders for burial boxes of pine were stacked up at Cunningham's shop after a Franklin County influenza epidemic killed dozens, and he told his son Joe and Tyrus that if they would haul in raw lumber from the woods, he would give them the leftover pieces. When the two were through whittling, they had semiround billets of wood intended for burial boxes. They were clumsy but gave off an impressive
crack!
in action. Tyrus called his best stick, one with prominent knots in it, “Big Yellow.” He would take it to bed with him.

Along with his bats, Cobb always credited his Aunt Norah Chitwood for his start as a ballplayer. “Wonderful woman,” he said of her. Auntie was on his side. Well aware of Professor Cobb's lack of sympathy with anything that didn't improve the mind, she drove Tyrus by buggy from Squire Cobb's farm to the down-mountain settlements of Murphy and Andrews to play baseball. There Tyrus found the early going too tough for him. One of the rules held over from the game's pioneer forms was “soaking.” In “soaking,” base runners could be put out not only by throws to a bag and by hand, but by throwing to hit them anywhere on the body. Conking the skull was preferable, because it might take a star opponent out of the lineup until his senses returned. In one game, Tyrus hit a shallow single. Taking off with a “yaaaaah!” scream to unnerve the fielder, he headed for second base. Came a blackout. He had been hit hard by a soaker to the ear. The next thing he knew, Aunt Norah was helping carry him off the lot with an expression of my-god-what-have-I-done? She cried, “Oh, you're bleeding!”

Ty mumbled that he felt fine. But the buggy rolled homeward and that was all for him that day.

He wasn't accepted by the Murphy gang at country ball, but he kept showing up for more. Norah and Squire Cobb suspected that he was in over his head against older boys; Tyrus knew it for a fact. To be put out between bases was among the worst of “boneheaders.” You were supposed to be an elusive target, ducking, dodging, and generally maneuvering to avoid fast throws. The Cobb conceptualization of base-running tactics began here. In the big league he was to define this as “watching the fielders' eyes, their jump on the ball, body lean, throwing and release habits—every little damned thing about them … keeping one jump ahead of the defense.” Diagnosis and counteraction would be Cobb's quintessential stamp for years to come.

His weak batwork on sandlots improved when he took to standing as far back from the plate as possible. His new, self-contrived deep stance gave him an extra split second in which to time pitches and react. One day, in a tattered jersey of the Murphy Maulers, playing before some fifty fans, Ty slugged a fastball two hundred feet to a rail fence, a triple. Two runs scored. Murphy won. He never forgot that three-bagger, because after that teammates showed him a degree of respect.

Back in Royston, Tyrus baled hay to earn $1.25, enough to purchase a “professional” glove, a flimsy, laceless pad that soon fell apart, forcing him for a while to play bare-handed. At the home dinner table, Tyrus attributed his torn fingernails to horseplay with neighborhood kids.

Someone with the Royston Rompers team for juniors lent him a catcher's mitt. Backstopping was risky. Face masks were hard to come by. As was virtually guaranteed, a foul tip whacked and closed Tyrus's eye. That night the roof was raised on the two-story Cobb home on Central Street as never before over ballplaying. Tyrus never had seen his father so steamed up.

“Stop it!” ordered the Professor. “There's nothing so useless on earth as knocking a string ball around a pasture with ruffians!”

Tyrus's homemade pine bats were confiscated. Not until months later was Bob McCreary, a good semipro player and a Masonic Order brother of the Professor, able to persuade W. H. to relent. McCreary argued that Royston boys of thirteen and up derived muscle-building benefits from town and lesser varieties of ball. Discipline, too, was enforced. McCreary promised to keep an eye on Ty, and pledged that
the boy would not take a drink of corn liquor or chew tobacco. “He's doing better than most at school,” argued McCreary. “Let him feel like a man.”

Tyrus returned to the game, on a short leash. Against Harmony Grove he hit three line-drive singles for the Rompers while making an acrobatic game-saving grab at shortstop. His performance was noticed by schoolmates. But the Professor remained adamant that the fun and games must end soon. Tyrus had to stop wasting time and find a field of endeavor where he could follow his father as a community leader. To the schoolman, Cobbs attained distinction in life through superior intelligence in mathematics, law, politics, history, business management, or teaching. Education was everything. His son had other ideas.

IN 1902
, a sinewy sixteen-year-old of five feet, seven inches and 140 pounds, a left-handed hitter and right-handed thrower, was given a tryout by the “big team,” the Royston Reds.

When he moved up for tryouts, the Reds had greeted him sourly. They saw no asset in someone who had to use a hands-apart split grip to compensate for his lack of batting power. He was unimpressive in looks, with his sharp nose, large ears, pale skin, pigeon-toed walk, and high-pitched voice. An infielder, Crawfish Cummings, suggested that he bow out: “We've got too many left-handers already.”

“I can hit right side, too,” said Ty. This was untrue in the accepted definition of switch-hitting; he could only bunt right-handed.

“How about throwing? Can you do that both ways, too?”

“Well, I've done that,” said Ty. “But mostly I'm right and I plan to play ball here.”

Surprisingly, he passed all tests. Of the fourteen roster players, pitchers not included, nine were in their twenties; the others were thirty or more.

It was an important honor in upper Georgia to be a Red. A whole two-hundred pound hog now brought only four dollars, exports of cotton and tree fruit to market had slumped, and jobs were as scarce as—went the wisecrack—a virgin in McGafferty's saloon. Against that, fans sometimes threw money onto the field at the unpaid town team when it badly beat an opponent. In his diary, Ty wrote: “Collected ninety-two cents today … others got more.”

No uniform on hand was small enough to fit Ty's wiry frame.
Again Aunt Norah came to his aid. She cut flannel pieces to his size, dyed them a screeching red, and the rookie was ready to go.

He was no threat to anyone at first, either as a shortstop or in the outfield, but he ran the bases well enough during preseason practice to please McCreary and the hard-nosed Reds, champions of Banks County. They hit line drives at him, screaming liners and grounders that could knock out teeth. He had never handled anything so difficult. Ty couldn't jerk his head away from grass-cutters without dishonor, so he stayed down and scooped up a high percentage of the drives. For weeks he had mostly sat on the bench, in charge of cleaning bats after muddy games and collecting foul balls.

A pair of matches was scheduled with hot-rival Elberton, two counties away in Broad River country. A gatekeeper stopped the small Cobb at the park entrance to ask. “You the ratshit Reds' equipment boy?” Cobb replied, “No, I play.” The gateman laughed. Ty was not admitted until Bob McCreary came along to claim him.

Getting even, he had a busy day against Elberton. He figured out their base-stealing signals, stole a base himself, and started two double plays. Noting that Royston's new boy batted left-handed and might pull to the right side, the Elbertons shaded their outfield in that direction. Seeing their deployment, Ty shifted his plate stance from square to open and placed both of his singles down the third-base line to the opposite open space in left field. The Reds won, 7–5, and his mates bought their rookie a bacon sandwich in appreciation.

It was partly in physiological and partly in spiritual terms that Cobb, in later years, replayed those turning-point innings at Elberton. In 1953 he told Grantland Rice, of the syndicated “Sportlight” column: “That day the bat actually tingled in my hands … it gave off an electrical impulse that shot through my body … a great feeling … it told me I'd found something I could do extremely well.” Rice's subsequent analysis in his autobiographical
The Tumult and the Shouting
went: “From that start, Cobb never missed an opportunity to refine his craft. A man apart. The shrewdest athlete and perhaps the shrewdest man I ever met.”

After hitting sprees in other towns, the newcomer was taken aside by McCreary. “You may look like a horsefly out there and you waste too much motion,” said McCreary, “but, by God, you show a lot of ability. You might be a natch.”

“What's a natch?” asked Cobb.

“A natural—one in a million.”

Royston's players were country miles below the professional level, yet McCreary's words made the youngster feel special. His bats
did
tingle. The man he most admired in the major leagues was Napoleon “Big Frenchy” Lajoie of the Philadelphia Phillies. Had not Lajoie begun in the tank town of Fall River up in New England and made it big as a hitter?

A sensational fielding play by Ty pulled against Harmony Grove was talked about around town. In the eighth inning Harmony loaded the bases with two out. A high drive was poled to farthest left field. Ty, in center field, intuited that the Reds' fielder in left couldn't run fast enough to make the catch. Sprinting behind him, diving as the ball went off his teammate's fingers, he made a one-handed grab. Almost simultaneously he crashed into the fence. But he held on to the ball, a game-winning effort. Royston “cranks”—as fans were then called—cheered him for a catch they wouldn't forget.

He continued to dive and scramble, and crowds threw coins his way—he once picked up eleven dollars as his share. Side opportunities developed in late season. Villages not scheduled against the Reds wanted to see the little Franklin County streak doing his act. Cobb's territory expanded. He was offered and accepted two and a half dollars per game from Anderson, South Carolina, for moonlighting against Hartwell, Georgia's, town team. Keeping the secret from his father, he used the alias “Jack Jones.” Anderson was far enough from Royston that Professor Cobb almost surely would not hear of the deception. By taking pay he had professionalized himself. If his path led to a college campus, as W. H. Cobb insisted it would, he might be ineligible for amateur sport. Playing pro games under an alias was a common dodge of the day, but a risky one for anyone contemplating college. He played well for Anderson, learned a few things, and the five dollars jingling in his pocket felt good.