Cobb (11 page)

Leaving the park, Cobb was called into Strouther's office. It took about fifteen minutes for the ax to fall. The contract Cobb wanted so badly, placing him on the payroll and picking up some of his room-and-board expenses, was not forthcoming. In his blunt way, Strouthers said, “Our outfield problem is settled. Bussey just got word from the league office taking him off suspension. He's going to first base and McMillan back to center. That makes you low man out, Cobb. You're a free agent … you can sign with any team that wants you.”

“But I'm hitting for you,” choked out Cobb.

“You've had a few knocks, that's all, and your throwing isn't up to snuff,” retorted Strouthers, who then pointed out that since Cobb had not earned a place on the Tourist roster, the club owed him nothing. He had to gain a permanent berth to collect any pay. “But, tell you what …” Strouthers offered him five dollars cash.

“I wouldn't play for you if you asked me!” shouted Cobb. “You didn't give me a fair chance, only eighteen innings!” He refused the five dollars.

To Augusta's regular players, the scene was all too predictable and laughable. A gag about fresh bushers was retold:

Manager: “You're gone, pack your duds.”

Rookie: “But won't you give me a recommendation?”

Manager (writing it out): “This fellow played one game for me and I'm satisfied.”

Not many fans noticed Cobb's disappearance, and few questions were asked. Back at his hotel, Cobb sat alone in his room. Augusta was a place where he would have been happy to live. The growing port of forty-five thousand on the Savannah River had charm, with its blooming flowers, paved streets, healthy climate, and feeling of busyness. He hated to leave before he had shown he belonged.

Nap Rucker, a member of the Tourists at the time, was a witness to how hard Cobb took his discharge. According to Rucker and others, Cobb's drive to make good was so strong that he became physically ill. As Rucker related it, “the kid” shed tears, raved, and threatened to get a gun and shoot Strouthers. In later years Cobb denied that he had any violent intentions at the time. He called Rucker “full of bullshit” and brushed off the stories with: “I was hurt and damned mad for a while, but I wasn't stupid at seventeen. When that Strouthers and his gang made it miserable for me from the start, I halfway expected I wouldn't last long. It was something you could feel in the air.”

Muddy Ruel, a major-league catcher who was close to Cobb, put it this way: “Long years after it happened, Cobb was still burned up by the way Augusta dumped him. And proud of how he finally got even with Strouthers. More than even—he got revenge.”

Grantland Rice's opinion of his condition then was: “I don't know how much the Augusta affair affected Cobb. Severely, I'm sure. During those early years I found him to be an extremely peculiar soul, brooding and bubbling with violence, devious, suspicious and combative all the way. This twisted attitude he never lost.”

Whatever his resentment, after April 28 Cobb did not waste time. He contacted several other Sally League franchises, asked for a tryout, and was told that the clubs were set for the season. He wrote as far away as Memphis in the Southern League, but got no reply. Dreading to return home a failure in his father's eyes, he applied for a cotton warehouse clerking job. Nothing was open. As April ended he had spent part of the funds supplied by Professor Cobb, and the basic need to support himself had him trapped and in no emotional shape to find a solution.

Thad “Mobile Kid” Hayes, a rookie pitcher who had also been cut by the Tourists, joined Cobb on a trolley ride into the countryside.
They sat on a fence and talked it over. Hayes remarked that he could always find work back in Mobile, where his family owned property, and he might be able to find employment for friend Ty as well. Neither liked the prospect of giving up his effort to play professionally. Bitten by the ball bug, why should they quit so soon? Hayes had a suggestion. They could try Anniston, in Alabama, where a wildcat semipro town team scheduled three to four games weekly against opponents from southern Tennessee and upper Alabama. Anniston fans were a hot group, and Hayes knew the club owner.

“How fast a team is Anniston?” asked Cobb.

“Not as good as Augusta,” answered Hayes, “but some of the college boys they have are so good that Class A scouts come to watch them. But they're an outlaw outfit not recognized in New York or Chicago.”

Cobb was teetering on the edge of walking away from the game to pick up his schooling as a college freshman. He had a feeling that this might be a career turning point—the maxim “Yield not to misfortunes, press forward more boldly in their face” came to mind from his schoolboy study of the Romans. And he asked more questions. What was the pay like in Anniston? Hayes thought the Anniston Steelers paid fifty to sixty dollars a month, and he had heard they needed another pitcher and an outfielder. Cobb told how his father was set on his attending the University of Georgia for a medical degree. “I guess I should try it,” he said, “but I'll phone him first. He'll raise hell, probably call me home.”

Their conversation was the opposite of what he expected. The Professor did not react with his usual polemic against baseball. Ty explained that he had been dropped by Augusta without the chance to follow up a promising start. W. H. Cobb skipped the sympathy and asked, “What will you do now?”

His son responded with the Anniston possibility.

“If you get hired there,” said Professor Cobb, “you will be leaving the state. Getting farther from home. However, I don't like the idea of you giving up. To quit is the easy way out. Is playing ball still important to you?”

“Yes, it is,” said Ty.

“Then go on to this Alabama place. Stay away from drink. Do your best to succeed. You have my blessing. I don't like quitters …
don't come home a failure
.”

In one way the Professor was shutting the door to his son's return until results were obtained. In another way he was inspiring his gadfly heir to go get 'em with everything he had. It was more a demand than a request as Cobb remembered it. Never before had the Professor spoken a positive word about the game. Now he had reversed himself, even if only conditionally. The call took a load off Ty's mind. Father wanted him to keep trying. That was enough.

Thad Hayes, who had gone ahead to Anniston, called Cobb with word that the Steelers could use him in the outfield. A contract was forwarded. Taking a leaf from major-league player signings of the day, protecting the employer from anything including spotted fever contracted by the employee, the Anniston Base Ball Association stipulated:

Party of the first part agrees to pay the traveling expenses, board and lodging, of said party of the second part … and when not so traveling the party of the second part will pay all of his own expenses.

Should the party of the said second part, at any time or times, or in any manner fail to comply with the covenants and agreements herein contained, or should the said party at any time be intemperate, immoral, careless, indifferent or conduct himself in such a manner, whether on or off the field, as to endanger the interest of said party of the first part, or should the second party become ill or otherwise unfit from any cause whatever or prove incompetent in the judgment of the first party, then the party of the first part hereunto shall have the right to discipline, suspend, fine or discharge the party of the second part as it shall deem fit and proper, and the said party of the first part shall be the sole judge as to the sufficiency of the reason for such discipline, suspension, fine or discharge.

Anniston's document rambled on to say that any fine imposed on Cobb would be paid by him or withheld from his salary “as for liquidated damages.” Dated April 29, 1904, the contract called for fifty dollars, or exactly what Cobb would have earned at Augusta if that attempt had not been a washout.

He signed the paper “Tyrus R. Cobb,” omitting his disliked middle name. One worry was that he would be paying his own living costs
when the Steelers were not on the road, a considerable item at the going rate of ten dollars weekly for food and housing. Anniston, far from baseball's mainstream, pulled so little at the gate that bare essentials only were provided. In the Southeastern League to which “Annietown” belonged, players shared one bathtub, one or two baseballs served for entire games no matter how lopsided and black a blur they became, outfields grew weeds, and infields went unrolled. As Cobb figured it, even if he found a cheap boardinghouse, he would be close to broke at season's end.

In his earlier phone talk with Professor Cobb, no mention had been made of further financial help from home should he repeat his failure to stick in a lineup. Anniston was make or break.

After Thad Hayes shuttled back to Augusta to settle his affairs, the two crammed into a single upper berth for the train ride to Anniston, an overnight hop. Doubling up saved money but left them stiff and sore upon reporting on May 2. Cobb carried with him the telescope grip he had brought from Royston, his yellow bats, spare shirts, and a new straw hat, worn at a jaunty tilt. He lacked a decent glove. A replacement glove, costing two dollars, would be stiff and need plenty of rubbing with tobacco juice to become useful.

Anniston, a steel-mill town, was located not far from the iron and steel processing center of Birmingham. From his first few days in northeast Alabama, the smoky haze set Cobb to coughing. Travel was rough. His new team bounced around by horse and buggy to small towns in all weather. Lunch consisted of a bowl of bean soup, with hog jowls and grits often the dinner fare.

The Steelers had several promising collegians, along with a pair of workhorse pitchers who split mound duty from game to game. Cobb soon found he was well up to this caliber of play. He could outrun everybody, had a rifle arm in center field, and hit sizzling one- and two-baggers to all fields. No longer, as a left-handed batsman, was he regularly pulling pitches to his “natural” direction of right field; more and more, when outfields and infields shifted to counter his strength, Cobb opened his stance at the last split second to chop bleeders through third-base gaps and into an unguarded left field. The Cobb-style bunt, destined to become one of the most deadly weapons since Willie Keeler developed the “Baltimore chop” high-bounding infield hit with the 1890s Orioles, took shape when he retracted his bat and
punched the ball to a selected spot between the third baseman and pitcher, dead on the baseline and just out of reach.

Another trick he picked up was to bunt for a hit, not as a sacrifice for a teammate on base. In this move he stroked the pitch harder, aiming it to bounce behind a right-handed moundsman's left-sided fall-away on delivery and taking him out of the play, while forcing the second baseman or shortstop to rush in for the throw to first. Making baseball geometry and tactical methods a field of study, Cobb drew upon the advice given him by Wahoo Sam Crawford of Detroit on outfield maneuvers. He often referred to the notebook he kept, filled with Wahoo's tips.

Anniston, after all, was not such a bad training ground. Within weeks Cobb was among the league's top batters with a .350 average and a small clique of fans; the “Cobbies” cheered him from the bleachers. More good fortune came when he met local steel-mill executive and rabid rooter J. B. Darden, who invited the Steelers' lively newcomer to board at his home. Darden would not accept rent, charged nothing for the excellent meals his cook prepared, and even wrangled from the Steelers' owners a pay raise for Cobb to sixty-five dollars a month. Darden's generosity enabled the boy to add five or so pounds to his still spare frame. “You are going a long, long way in baseball,” predicted Darden. The thought gave Cobb his biggest lift in months.

At this stage, seeking to regain confidence, he was less impressed with himself than he had been back home with the Royston Reds. Now he took a more balanced view. Maybe he was making so favorable an impression because competition in the semipro Southeastern League was not up to that played in the official minor leagues. At the same time he was smartening up, beginning to see the game calculatingly, comparatively, and more technically.

Publicity was scarce in the deep bushes. Against the Gadsden, Alabama, club, Cobb slid into second base twice for steals, rapped a triple, and drove in the winning runs. For this he drew only a few buried column inches in the Anniston weekly. His performance improved, but his notices did not. In one instance his name was misspelled in an area paper as “Cyrus Cobb.”

“I worried about that,” he said in a later interview. “I decided that something calling more attention to me was needed.” He became busy.

Against Oxford, Alabama, one afternoon he hit for the rare
“cycle”—single, double, triple, and home run in one contest—and was robbed of a second homer. Oxford's left fielder, feigning a catch of a high drive that cleared the fence, jogged in to show the plate umpire—the only umpire on hand—a ball nestled in his glove. The fielder had carried a ball in his hip pocket for just such an occasion. Cobb was not fooled. When the call went against him, he punched the Oxford man, setting off a brawl among players. Trouble spread to the crowd, which piled onto the field. After things cooled, the umpire threw Cobb out.

Cobb went into an act—at least that was how he explained it in later years. He grew profane, shoved the umpire, and spit on the ump's uniform shirt and shoes. With that the Oxford fans renewed the war, attacking Cobb. Police had to be called. While delaying play for nearly an hour, he managed to keep attention focused upon himself. He was fined one day's pay by the league office, made headlines and also history. It was Ty Cobb's first ejection from a game played under organized rules—“one of the best fights I was ever in. People got to know me.”

In the Southeastern circuit, three days sometimes went by without a game, offering free time for him to use the Anniston public library to check out Georgia's metropolitan newspapers for any mention of his name. He found nothing. The Associated Press did not carry Anniston results beyond Alabama borders; word of his doings was not reaching anyone who counted in his native state. It was then that, turning volunteer correspondent, he thought up a way to advertise himself with nothing more than pen, paper, and gall. His first target was the
Atlanta Journal.
On a postcard directed to sports editor Grantland Rice, he raved about the abilities of one Ty Cobb, a terrific hitter with the Steelers and a coming star. More colorful accounts went to newspapers in Memphis, New Orleans, and Augusta—especially Augusta, scene of his recent failure. Rice and several other well-read sportswriters fell for the trick and wrote up Cobb in glowing terms.