Cobb (21 page)

Armour asked, “What's wrong?” Cobb, keeping his own counsel, replied that he was “off his feed.” Armour reported to Frank Navin, “The boy's gone all wrong and I can't see why.”

Navin—not that he was much of a judge of form in a ballplayer—took a look and was puzzled. The Tiger president called in Billy “Kid” Gleason, a one-time Detroit strategist now near the end of his career. “He doesn't look healthy,” said Gleason. “He looks tired, like he doesn't give a damn.”

Cobb knew why he had slumped. He was ill and dangerously so. By his way of describing it, he had “caught a handful of hell.”

On July 17, during a series at Boston, Cobb disappeared. He was nowhere to be found—not at his team's hotel or clubhouse or at any Boston spot where ballplayers hung out between games.

Bill Armour initially offered no explanation for the vanishing act, but then he said that Cobb had been ordered back to Detroit for treatment of “stomach trouble.” That story appeared to be true. Then, on July 21, Cobb disappeared once more, and could not be located by members of the press corps.

Armour asked the writers not to play it up—the matter was private club business. Not until later did the press learn that Cobb's illness was so serious that he could no longer function on the field, and had been sent to a sanatorium, suffering from a nervous breakdown. That was the only fact released by management.

In the early 1900s, psychological study and treatment of mentally disturbed players was a little-understood science. Those in trouble were treated as sports-page comic characters, and called “bugs,” “loonies,” “nutters,” and “bad actors.” All too often the emotionally distressed, given no help at all, destroyed themselves. From 1900 to World War I, sixteen suicides by active or recently active big-leaguers
were reported—among them Detroit pitcher Win Mercer (poison), Boston Nationals pitcher Dan McGann (gunshot), Chick Stahl, Red Sox outfielder (carbolic acid), and Christy Mathewson's brother Nick (gunshot). A man's torment, under the circumstance of a short career and fast living, went unrelieved. “They come up farm-sober, go bad in the big-time, and drink themselves out of the business,” observed the
Police Gazette.

Reporters on Detroit's four newspapers covering the Tigers were aware that Cobb was unwanted and ostracized by the team and was fighting back, but either nobody seemed to realize what this was costing him, or else they were indifferent to it. None of the observers, for instance, had noticed his behavior before games. Adjacent to Bennett Field's left-field stands was a wooden shack in which the grounds-keeper stored old base bags, lime sacks, grass cutters, and the like. During warm-ups before games, Cobb used the shack as a retreat, a place where he could find temporary peace. He had reached the point where facing steady insults and rejection was more than he could bear.

Decades later, in a letter to me, he wrote, “That shack was my hideout … when I came onto the field, to take practice, the gang would hit me with bad plays I'd made. If I went for the water bucket, somebody would kick it over. They cut nicks in my bats, put horse turds in my spare shoes. They were waiting for me every time I turned around.”

“My nerves were shot to hell,” he wrote of that summer. “I was like a steel spring with a dangerous flaw in it … if wound too tight the spring will fly apart and then it is done for.”

By his own testimony, we see Cobb at this point of his life: In the groundskeeper's shack he paces the floor. Warming up ninety feet away are men who have excluded him and caused him to fear for his safety, to carry a gun. Batting practice is under way and the Tigers wait for him to appear, so that pitcher Siever, Killian, or Mullin can throw at his ankles and feet and pretend that the ball “got away.”

He emerges into the sunlight. Backs are turned to him. He goes to the outfield to shag flies. As he expects, few balls are hit his way. He leans against an outfield wall, marking time. A few fans in the stands, out early for the game, call to him, as fans do when a player is slumping: “Hey, Cobb, get off your tail, show us something.”

For three baseball seasons little has gone right for him, other than his vault to the major leagues straight from the low minors. Now yet another team is aligned against him.

Under that pressure, his mental and physical health have reached the cracking point.

HIS CASE
was treated in a sanatorium over a period of forty-four days; not until September was he judged fit enough to rejoin the club, even on a curtailed schedule. Armour and Navin continued to put out the fictional tale that he was suffering from stomach trouble and, since he was not around to be questioned, the Detroit papers went along with “Cobb's bellyache” as the reason for his long absence.

The sanatorium where he was confined by the team doctor was located on the Detroit outskirts. He received medication that kept him sleeping for long periods. No visitors were allowed while the patient was recovering. As Cobb related years later, the rest home was in a heavily wooded area, and he took long walks in the forest, fished in a lake, and received no news of the Tigers. Detroit newspapers were not made available to him. Doctors urged him to forget about baseball and the worries connected with the game.

For a brief time, his breakdown caused a worn-out Ty Cobb to consider quitting for the rest of the season. “I thought of it awhile,” he said in his memoirs. “But I felt like I was getting close to making a real reputation for myself. And I never quit on anything in my life, even when it looked like the smart play. Matter of honor. I rested up … pulled out of it.

“When I got back I was going to show them some ballplaying like the fans hadn't seen in some time.” To increase the chance of that, he left the sanatorium toward the end of his convalescence to play in semipro games outside of Detroit. Cobb found that, although with lessened power, he could once again swing a bat without shaking.

UPON HIS
return to the lineup in September, nothing much had changed. Cobb's enemies knew where he had been, if not the details of his illness, and made the expected comments. Pitcher Ed Siever wondered, “Did you have a dose of the clap?” Cobb ignored the hazers; his power of concentration was extraordinary. Underweight, he soon regained his speed and batting eye and then the pounds. Within ten
days, he stole six bases and doubled and singled against Chicago's pennant-headed White Sox. Cleveland's Bob “Dusty” Rhoades threw a beanball that grazed him. Getting up from the dirt, Cobb shook his bat at Rhoads in warning. Then he hit a pitch deep into the right-center-field stands for a home run.

At Washington he took off from first base on Germany Schaefer's weak bunt and advanced to third, chased by throws just too late to catch him.

Harum-scarum stealing again became his habit. At New York he pulled one of his most outrageous pieces of base-running. New York catcher Fred Mitchell later reconstructed it in
Sporting News:

Cobb was the runner at third base. I was catching, Frank LaPorte was our third baseman. Cobb made a sudden move to the plate. I shot the ball to LaPorte, but Cobb got back safely.

LaPorte took a few steps toward the pitcher. The pitcher walked toward LaPorte. Cobb slightly sauntered off the bag. As players often do, LaPorte tossed the ball a foot or two in the air and caught it while talking to the pitcher. Cobb apparently was paying no attention. He was looking toward his own dugout.

LaPorte again tossed the ball into the air and did it twice more. With the fourth toss, at that instant, Cobb made a break for the plate. I never in my life saw a man spring into action so fast. Bear in mind that LaPorte was about 55 feet from the home plate. Cobb was at least 85.

There was yelling and confusion. LaPorte didn't see Cobb, didn't realize what was happening. By the time LaPorte awoke and threw home, Cobb had slid across the plate and scored standing up, brushing off his uniform!

For a recent invalid to be able to play like that seemed to discourage Matty McIntyre, who was swinging hard but ineffectively. He asked to be traded away from Detroit, but was turned down. McIntyre's side-kick, Siever, co-leader of the Cobb-hating faction, appeared in the clubhouse drunk, was fined by Armour and suspended. After wrecking a few tin lockers with a bat, Siever left Bennett Park in a rage.

The discontent spread. Old pro Sam Crawford complained about his twenty-five-hundred-dollar salary. Catcher Jack Warner, turning
clubhouse lawyer, criticized Armour's field methods and was dropped from the roster.

Cobb's natural batting form gradually returned. His nerves under control, he built back his average to .315, then a few points higher. Improbably, in September, despite his bout at the sanatorium he still had a chance to finish near the top in the league batting race, even while dissension left the Tigers far out of the running for the pennant. He played with grim concentration. In Chicago the poor-hitting—.230—but defensively artistic White Sox had stood in fourth place in early August. But then a major-league record of 19 consecutive victories carried the Sox, known as the Hitless Wonders, to the top with a final 93–58 mark, enough to nose out the runner-up New York Highlanders' 90–61 for the league championship.

Cobb doubted Detroit's ability to win the pennant. “I saw no hope of reaching the Series, not when I was carrying the team more than anyone right after being sick,” he remembered.

OSTRACIZED BY
almost all of the team regulars, Cobb had a limited social life. On free days late that season he would walk down Detroit's bustling Automobile Row on Woodward Avenue and stop at the fashionable Pontchartrain Hotel bar. Detroit fans were plentiful at “the Pontch.” The Peach's loudest fan was millionaire John Kelsey, an exuberant Irishman whose charitable deeds had made him legendary in Detroit. Good John Kelsey was a master of malapropisms. He referred to field laborers of Ireland as “pheasants.” To Kelsey, the French national anthem was “‘The Mayonnaise.'” Even pronouncing Cobb's name was difficult.

“Here's that grand boyo, Cy Tobb! Up from fair Dublin down in Georgia,” announced Kelsey to the saloon crowd. “A cheer, gentlemen, for Cy Tobb!”

No one bothered to correct Kelsey on the “Cy,” the “Tobb,” or “Dublin,” and Tyrus, enjoying the first hard drinks of his life in stylish social circles, met get-rich-quick automobile men and listened to their advice on investing in horseless carriages.

He enjoyed a reunion with young Louis Chevrolet, champion race-car driver of France, who was in the United States to race the famous Barney Oldfield on midwestern tracks. Earlier Chevrolet and Cobb had met at a speedway.

“Could I learn to drive a racer?” asked Ty.

“Probably,” replied the bilingual Chevrolet. “But you might get killed,
mon ami.
”

Chevrolet knew nothing about baseball, but he remarked that if the Tigers paid as little as Cobb said, then why didn't Ty take a job in the expanding new auto industry? Several companies were turning out ten to fifteen passenger models per month, priced at $650 or, with the addition of fancy canvas tops and windshields, costing $1,000 and more. Two Oldsmobiles had crossed from New York to Oregon in an eye-opening fifty-five days. With Chevrolet's help, Cobb might find a good position in the sales field or as a demonstration driver.

Cobb replied, “I think I'll stay on. Breaks are coming my way.”

A SHOWDOWN
with his teammates erupted in the late season at St. Louis. The Browns' big hitter, George Stone, drove a ball between Cobb in center field and McIntyre in left. It was a familiar story. Both started for the ball, but stopped dead to exchange glares and shouted accusations. The base hit rolled all the way to the fence for an inside-park two-run homer. Ed Siever was pitching. Siever cursed Cobb so loudly that the crowd could hear.

Back on the bench, Siever offered profane descriptions of Ty's ancestry. Cobb challenged, “Get up! Get on your feet!” Siever stayed seated, muttering that he had a game to pitch.

At the Planter's Hotel in St. Louis that night, Cobb was buying a cigar when Siever walked by and was heard by Cobb to say, “You're still a Dixie prick whose folks live off nigger slaves.” When Ty grabbed Siever, pitcher Bill Donovan got between them. “No fighting here!” Donovan ordered. “Step outside for that.”

Cobb's reply, he would say next day, was, “I want no trouble—I didn't start this.”

A “war party” of Tigers, as Cobb saw it, gathered in the hotel lobby. Concealed behind a pillar, Cobb tried to overhear their conversation. Then, suddenly, around the pillar came big Siever. “He threw a left at me that would have taken off my head if it'd landed,” went Cobb's blow-by-blow description. Ducking and moving inside the punch, he swung a right to the jaw that started Siever to the floor, followed by solid punches that put him down, bleeding and dazed.

All the pent-up enmity boiled over. Other Tigers started for Cobb,
who was now furiously kicking the helpless Siever. A mass attack on him was about to start. Cries from hotel customers of “Call the police!” prevented a brawl. Siever, jaw swollen and one eye closed, was carried out. Cobb's left hand was swollen.

Navin placed most of the blame on his youngest player, and fined him fifty dollars—big money for the time. Cobb replied that where he came from, men had been killed for using Siever's language. To end the feuding, Navin considered sending Cobb down to a minor league. Scheduled to pitch in Chicago, Siever was incapacitated.

Later that night of October 6 the Tigers were scheduled to travel from St. Louis to Chicago. For hours they would be confined within a train. Navin promised that if any more violence occurred, he would trade all those involved. “By god, I'll send you all to Washington!” he threatened. The Capitals were the second-worst team in the American League.