Cobb (22 page)

Cobb's version of what transpired en route to Chicago was unilateral, prejudiced testimony, but most of it could be confirmed through other sources. Witnesses to the scene told interviewers, “Murder was in the air that night … There was a good chance that somebody would be shot … Cobb had a terrible temper—the world's worst … He had plenty of reason to think he'd be attacked sometime during the night … It was all out of control.”

In 1961, collecting his thoughts for the memoir he was writing, Cobb declared that on this night he was ready to shoot somebody. He told how Bill Donovan, in an aside on the depot platform before leaving St. Louis, reminded him, “These guys
hate
you. They'll do anything to hurt you.” Cobb said his reaction was, “I figure they're expecting me not to make this trip and avoid them … well, they're wrong. I'm going.”

With his bat bag, uniform roll, and luggage he boarded the night express. Team trainer Tom McMahon reprimanded him for kicking Siever when he was down. Cobb denied any kicking, saying, “I didn't have to kick him, he was well licked when he went down.” McMahon insisted he had seen half a dozen hard kicks strike Siever's head and ribs, kicks that could be deadly. After mounting the train, Cobb looked up Siever. The pitcher had a large beefsteak applied to his battered face. Cobb offered a conditional apology.
If
he had been so carried away that he had kicked Siever when he was down, he was sorry. Otherwise he had no regrets. “Make what you want of it,” he finished.

The Georgian wrote in his personal remarks, “Siever kept mumbling, ‘I'll get you.' Stretched out in my train berth. But didn't sleep. Ready—all night.” Several times he heard whispers outside his berth curtains. Expecting an attack, he stayed awake most of the way to Chicago. “I would have shot the first man who came into that berth after me,” he wrote afterward to Bob McCreary, his team manager in Royston, Georgia, days. His gun remained ready.

At Chicago he did not stop at Detroit's team hotel, but checked into an undisclosed address. That set a pattern for the future—the other Tigers housed in one place, Cobb off somewhere by himself. In the majors, teams stuck together. An observer, George Cutshaw, once said, “That was when it began—Ty going it alone. He was a loner from 1906 on.”

As the season neared an end, he looked for job opportunities in other cities, and pressed Detroit for a trade. He thought that his strong batting mark might attract a bidder, such as Jimmy McAleer's depressed St. Louis entry or Jake Stahl's seventh-place Washington Nationals. Another hope was Boston—the Beantowners had just finished in last place after a bad year in 1905. But the Georgian was too new a quantity, had not been around long enough to form front-office connections, and no team bid for him.

From the time when he had heard that the Tigers were bringing him up from Augusta and the Sally League, he had held the idea of building a career in a lively sports city. Months later he stood disillusioned and discouraged. Armour and the veteran players had given him no coaching, had not even made him feel welcome. In a 1961 interview with a national magazine he said, “They almost ran me out of town. But I stuck it out. If my father had been there I know what he would have recommended—and I went by that. Which was to give as much as I took—and something more.” He quoted a Shakespearean passage from
Hamlet
recommended to him as a boy by Professor W. H. Cobb: “Beware of entrance into a quarrel; but being in, bear't that the oppos'd may beware of thee.” That was explicit enough as a warning. Cobb called it the best guide for a ballplayer ever written.

Detroit was a bad team, badly handled. It finished sixth at 71–78—.477. Experts had no reason whatever to foresee that the Tigers of a season later, in a complete reversal of form, would finish atop the American League and reach the World Series.

Cobb's accomplishments of that first full major-league season of 1906 have been underrated by baseball historians. By any measure they were impressive. Baseball fan Bob Hope one day introduced Cobb to an audience, and compared the team owners of 1906 to the United States Congress. “Ty's rejection was like the Congress turning down Thomas A. Edison when he brought his first electrical invention to the government in 1868,” cracked Hope. “Both Ty and Tom later did fairly well.”

Considering the team hostility toward him, the emotional trauma and loss of forty-four days of play, the throat and hip surgery, and his manager's failure to provide help, it was remarkable that a player of so limited experience was able to appear in 97 games. As it was, the Peach's .320 for the season, best among the Tigers, enabled him to outhit some outstanding batsmen—Socks Seybold of the Athletics, Elmer Flick of Cleveland, Kid Elberfeld and Willie Keeler of New York, Fielder Jones of Chicago, Jake Stahl of Washington, and more.

George “Socker” Stone of St. Louis led the league with a .358 mark, followed by Nap Lajoie at .355 and Hal Chase at .323. Then came the fledgling Cobb, tied for fourth best with Bunk Congalton of Cleveland. The versatile Cobb scored 45 runs in 98 games. His power rating was good—13 doubles and 7 triples in 358 at-bats. His base steals came to 23. The Tigers as a team averaged a poor .242. Cobb overshadowed even Sam Crawford, outhitting the team's main man by 25 points.

He enjoyed his revenge, and the newspapers picked it up. Everyone in the batting order was outperformed by the player that the Tigers had sworn in March to run out of town. He had no sympathy for the likes of Twilight Ed Killian, the star pitcher who had helped lead the vituperation against Cobb, and who fell to a 9–6 win-loss record this time around. It was Killian who had joined in smashing Cobb's bats in Augusta seven months earlier; Cobb was sure that Killian was one of the guilty parties because he had tracked down a boast to a saloon where Twilight Ed had remarked, “We fixed his wagon good.”

Before leaving Detroit for home in October, Ty talked with owner William H. “Good Times” Yawkey. As a contract-negotiating move, Tyrus mentioned that Honus Wagner had led the National League with a .339 average; in fact, only four National Leaguers had beaten or equalled Cobb's .320 figure. Inclusive of both leagues, with current
averages only considered, one could argue that Cobb already was at least ninth-best batsman among the several hundred presently active players. Was that not impressive?

Yawkey's reaction was, “When you can cover half the ground that the Dutchman does, and draw half as many people to my ballpark as Wagner does at Pittsburgh, come and see me again.”

Cobb guessed that the Detroit management was not sold on him as a property who was likely to increase in value, following his mid-season emotional breakdown. That could and probably would be taken for a sign of weakness and the word would go out to other teams, too. Also, there was the cost of living to consider. His income did not cover big-city overhead. “It costs like hell to live here,” he wrote to his old Royston schoolmate Joe Cunningham. “Runs $3 to $4 a day no matter how close I cut it.” There was no hope of buying the automobile he wanted.

Yawkey handed him a hundred-dollar bonus. That made it sixteen hundred dollars' pay for the best part of a year's work. He counseled Cobb to try to make peace with his fellow players: “I don't like what has happened.” His new man's constant differences with the team were intolerable. Still, it was implied that Good Times Yawkey would not trade away Cobb for the 1907 season.

HOME FOLK
in the winter of 1906–07 found him changed from a year ago. He was broody, short-tempered, and unsociable. Joe Cunningham, as close to a friend as Cobb permitted himself to have, recalled in later years that Ty no longer wanted anyone with him on wild-turkey and pig hunts, but now went out alone into the upper Georgia foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. He did not speak of the Detroit situation at home, nor mention his father's name. Playing in off-season semipro games in Atlanta and Athens he was savage against far inferior opponents. Cunningham told of instances where Cobb ran right over basemen with his honed spikes and cut them. Cunningham noted that he did not need to do this to impress people with his big-league ability. “It was more than that,” said Cunningham. “Tyrus was always angry.”

Those who knew how badly he had been hurt in the foreign territory of Detroit made allowances. He was a home boy come home, a hero, and people took him for that.

THERE WAS
one way to get more money out of Detroit and get it soon. During the season, walking past a jewelry store on a Detroit night with infielder Bobby Lowe, Cobb had noticed a gold watch on display. A sign read: “
TO BE AWARDED THE BATTING CHAMPION OF THE AMERICAN LEAGUE, 1907.
”

“If hard work will do it,” Cobb told Lowe, “I'm going to win that watch.”

Link Lowe was amused. The Pennsylvanian had been in the majors for eighteen years, had hit above .300 five times, and not once had come close to earning a championship watch. “You've only been around for a few games,” said Lowe. “Don't you think that's hurrying it?”

“No,” answered Cobb coldly, “I don't.”

“Before a fight we had in 1921, I asked Cobb if he was carrying a knife … He said if he had a knife, he'd cut my throat … then he knocked me down and tried to kick my head in … He came close.”

Billy Evans, Hall of Fame umpire, 1953

“He forced a lot of his trouble, but a hell of a lot of it was dumped on him.”

Tris Speaker, Hall of Fame outfielder, 1956

It always struck Ernest Hemingway as the strangest twist to Cobb's nature that without warning he could switch from equanimity to militancy. The two men, for a time in the 1930s, had been big-game hunting partners out west. During a 1954 “Sport Night” at the San Francisco Press Club, Hemingway was asked, “How would you describe him? What was Cobb like?”

Hemingway grimaced, replying, “He had a screw loose. I never knew anyone like him. It was like his brain was miswired so that the least damned thing would set him off.” On a bighorn-sheep hunt in the Wyoming back country, said the Nobel prize–winning author, their guide led them down a wrong trail into a swamp: “It was easy enough to climb back out, but Cobb went wacko, grabbed his rifle like a bat, and decked the guide. I jumped in too late to stop it. He was raving over nothing. That was it for me—I packed out next day and after that avoided him.”

In the 1910s, growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, and Kansas City, Hemingway was as devout a fan as Cobb ever had—much like another worshiper, young Army officer Douglas MacArthur—and the novelist followed Cobb's successes and malefic adventures for decades. Later, seeing no change in his rages and indigestible actions off the field,
Hemingway changed his mind. Roughhouse as he was himself, Papa wrote a letter in July of 1948 to Lillian Ross of the
New Yorker.
Published later, the letter expressed his opinion that Tyrus Cobb was the supreme player of all time—but an “absolute shit.”

LESS THAN
ten months had passed since his emotional breakdown and recovery when the Georgian began a 1907 season in which Detroit was not considered a factor in the pennant race, and Chicago and Philadelphia seemed to hold the winning American League cards. He was depressed. His financial position was shakier than ever. The fearsome boll weevil plague had invaded the cotton crop of his inherited acres and done heavy damage. Detroit could not be blamed for his low pay, which was up from $1,500 to $2,400; Yawkey and Navin were coming off a year when attendance at Bennett Park had dropped by nearly 30,000 to 135,000 paid admissions, with receipts of under $80,000. The experiment of declaring Detroit a big-league city appeared to be foundering, after consecutive finishes of third, seventh, fifth, seventh, third, and sixth.

By now Bill Armour had been fired, replaced as manager by Hughie Jennings, a jaunty, redheaded Irishman of thirteen major-league campaigns once known for his lively hitting with the Baltimore Orioles and Brooklyn Superbas, and a disciple of the brawling John McGraw school of baseball. Jennings made news copy with a series of misadventures—near death in an auto crash, being hit by pitches forty-nine times in one season, and diving into an empty swimming pool at the cost of a fractured skull. “Nothing can kill Jennings,” went the crack, “except a new ball team.”

Over the winter, Cobb had written to Detroit, “I have no money for buying spring cotton and wheat seed. Have forty acres going fallow.” He disliked asking for a pay advance of five hundred dollars, but did so. Bill Yawkey, from his bank-owner's office, grumbled that Tyrus could have earned the five hundred playing winter-league semipro ball in Dixie. Cobb answered that he had done that, performing as pitcher-outfielder for the Augusta Sockers and other teams—at ten to fifteen dollars per game. It seemed not to have occurred to his superiors that it was a sorry note for their number-one hitter to be back scrambling for small change with Georgia bush-leaguers. However, the Tigers advanced him three hundred dollars at interest on a six-month note.

At age twenty, built now like a running back in today's pro football, Cobb first met the new leader, Jennings, in spring camp at Augusta. As Cobb told the story years later, Jennings, for openers, gave him news of Matty McIntyre and Ed Siever. The two were more determined than ever to have Cobb gone from the club. From Florida, where McIntyre was located, had come word that they wanted a disruptive influence on the team eliminated, or else they would not sign contracts. “They're asking to be traded if we keep you,” said Jennings. “They say they won't play with you anymore.”

Cobb said he felt the same way. “Can you deal for me in this league?” he asked. “I want to stay in the American.”

Jennings was dubious. “We don't see a trade to our liking available,” he said. “What I want you to do is stop all this fighting. Get smart. And I want you to play the hit-and-run more and use the double steal with Claude Rossman.” A rangy first baseman lately obtained from Cleveland, Rossman had hit .308 for the Naps.