Cobb (23 page)

“I hit .320,” Cobb reminded Jennings. He felt he could work with Rossman, if Rossman could remember the Tigers' complicated signals.

Rossman was intelligent, assured Jennings. And no doubt Cobb had heard that Jennings was known as the “Eeee-yahhhh Man” for yelling that penetrating cry from the coaching box. There was a reason for this. “My yell is to keep you boys awake,” Jennings went on. “When I change it and pause for a few seconds between the ‘Eeee' and the ‘yahhhh,' that's the sign for Rossman to bunt you over from first to second.”

Retaining doubts about the workability of screaming signals, the Peach came to bat for the first time in 1907. He lined a triple off the fence, stole a base, and scored three runs on the day. It was a forewarning. It would be a hell of a season—and, despite all the marplots and interruptions, one of the finest times of Cobb's life. Jennings, a gambler, would give him the green light on bases, and he would run so wildly and productively that special “Cobb defenses” would fail to stop him from leading the American League in base-stealing. There would be serious injuries—doctors would treat raw, infected sores acquired from sliding, and stitch a gashed hand—yet he'd execute such characteristic Cobb devices as scoring from first base on a single, scoring from second on a bunt, and stealing a guarded home plate from third. Backed by almost the same cast of Tigers that had flopped
in 1906, Cobb would lead Detroit in a tight race for the pennant against the Athletics and White Sox. When the season ended, twenty-five thousand fans in the Motor City would be staging torchlit parades through the streets.

SOMEHOW—JENNINGS
couldn't understand it—the team's distaste for lone-wolf Cobb appeared transferable to the lowliest people on the Tiger staff. During spring training in the south, Cobb found one of his four-fingered gloves missing some fingers. He assumed that the groundskeeper was behind the dirty deed. The groundsman, a black man named Bungy Davis, denied it. But then one morning Bungy tried to shake Cobb's hand and clap him on the shoulder. Cobb slapped Bungy to the ground and kicked him in the head. Bungy ran for a shack adjoining the clubhouse, with Cobb in pursuit. Bungy hid himself, but his wife faced a raving Cobb with, “Leave Bungy alone!” Several players heard Mrs. Davis yell, “If you hurt my man I'll have the law on you!”

When Cobb slammed the woman to her knees and began choking her insanely, the Tigers came running. Charlie “Boss” Schmidt, a powerfully built catcher from Coal Hill, Arkansas, and quondam heavyweight prizefighter, jumped on Cobb and tore him away.

Schmidt was reputed to have fought exhibitions against world-title-contender Sam Langford and coming champion Jack Johnson. He could bend steel rods in half, was all hairy brute, and had no use for bullies. He called Cobb a “rotten skunk” and let go a punch that sent him reeling.

Hughie Jennings and others broke it up, formed a circle around a struggling, incoherent Cobb, and marched him to the boss's office. Jennings blistered him, ending with, “You're gone from Detroit.” Cobb protested that Bungy had been drunk and had overstepped bounds in a South where blacks didn't get familiar with whites.

The shameful “Bungy affair” occurred on March 16, and on March 17 Jennings and Navin were on the telegraph in an effort to send their woman-beater elsewhere. Cleveland manager Nap Lajoie was offered a straight trade of his former league batting champ, Elmer Flick, for Cobb. Flick had been a stubborn salary holdout, but had just signed. Lajoie openly stated that he saw nothing much more in Cobb than a clubhouse problem player, surely not equal to Flick in ability. Connie
Mack of the Athletics showed a brief interest. But Mack had solid-hitting Socks Seybold, Topsy Hartsell, and Rube Oldring in his outfield, and he also passed.

New York's Clark Griffith offered sore-armed Frank Delahanty, even-up. Despite Delahanty's “average player” status, Jennings was tempted, but finally backed away. Stalemate. Afterward, for years the press would wonder what might have happened had Cobb become a Highlander and then, after the team's name switch, a Yankee. In New York, Cobb would have had all that great press coverage and been teamed with Babe Ruth. Cobb's contradictory reply: “Ruth came along seven years too late to be of any good to me. And look at the rotten Yankee record.” Between 1907 and 1918 the New York American League entry finished better than fourth only once; under seven managerial changes, they did not win a pennant until 1921.

Not one franchise in either major league would commit itself to taking on a man who carried a loaded gun, played the loner, had throttled a woman, and remained unproved as a run producer. The hardest knock came from Pongo Joe Cantillon, manager of lowly Washington, who was quoted, “At this rate the kid won't last until opening day.”

In the March 18 edition of the
Detroit News
a story appeared:

WHY COBB MUST
BE SACRIFICED

—

‘Harmony In Any Case'
Is Manager Jennings'
Final Decision

—

—

Cobb Knows He Has No
Friends On Team: Is
Proportionately Aggressive

Under the byline of
News
correspondent Malcolm W. Bingay came a denunciation: “The situation is this—Cobb did have some who stuck by him when the training season opened. They turned against him when he got into trouble with Charlie Schmidt, the most even-tempered man on the team. Cobb admits himself now that he has not
a friend on the club, and even if he should come out and admit he was in the wrong it would help matters little. No matter what action he should take there would be fifteen more players against him.”

Not changing his behavior, Cobb a day later got into an argument with Matty McIntyre that almost became one more fistfight. Jennings stopped it just in time.

JENNINGS “REGRETTED
” having to give up on a player he had planned to use regularly, but when the Tigers' tour reached the Carolinas he still did not have a buyer in sight. So he could not oblige Cobb, who fully agreed he should be dealt away.

With no solution in sight, unrepentant and defiant, Cobb walked out of camp for Royston and home. He was on strike until the stalemate was resolved.

Cobb's state of mind was not helped by the knowledge that his mother's name was still being bandied about in Augusta and Atlanta, in the matter of the fatal shooting of twenty months earlier.

Cobb never learned who started the rumor, a new version of the killing, but it appeared that women in Royston had it as “God's truth” that Amanda Cobb had deliberately shot her husband. Her acquittal had been a miscarriage of justice. The women's tale went that Amanda had not fired at an “intruding burglar” from her bedroom window at midnight; far from it. Their story was that Amanda was two-timing the Professor, and that he heard of it when he asked a neighbor to close a house of ill repute the neighbor was running in Royston. The neighbor told him to look at his own home first. When Cobb asked him what he meant by that, the man tipped him that Amanda had a secret lover. Checking up, Cobb found clues suggesting his wife was guilty.

An infuriated Amanda, so went the account, warned her mate that if she found him sneaking around the house, she'd shoot him—which she did when he came prowling. There had been some suspicious gaps in Amanda's testimony at her trial. New rumor fed on it.

Such a scandal was nothing the Georgia press dared publish, but the love-triangle story spread by word of mouth to southern ballparks. Such gossip was to haunt Cobb for years. Long after he stopped swinging a bat, the
Detroit News Magazine
and other journals would run the “love-nest” yarn in some detail. For now, early in 1907, it was something Cobb had to endure.

When he quit the Tiger road trip that spring, what passed between mother and son in the several days he was gone to Royston remains unknown. But any fair estimate of Cobb must take into account that in 1907 he was still reliving a death that anguished him and undoubtedly was causing an extreme emotional reaction.

THOSE WHO
thought Cobb a mental case were vindicated by what happened next. Returning to training on March 23, Cobb had a rematch fight with Boss Schmidt. Of all things to do, taking on Schmidt was the most unwise. With a forty-pound weight advantage, the ex–pro boxer could handle Cobb easily. Their second battle came because of Schmidt's previous disgust with the way Tyrus had abused groundskeeper Bungy and wife, and because Cobb foolishly taunted Schmidt about his clumsiness at the backstop position. Schmidt called Cobb “a yellow dog.” They went at it on the clay infield of the park at Meridian, Mississippi, before an exhibition game.

Cobb always claimed that Schmidt sneak-punched him and he never had a chance. “I had just laced my shoes and was walking toward the outfield,” he described it, “when I heard a voice growl, ‘Cobb.' I turned and Schmidt's punch caught me with both hands at my side … a wallop that knocked me down and broke my nose … From then on a terrible anger was on me.”

A dozen or so Tigers gathered around to cheer while Schmidt handed Cobb the most one-sided licking of his career. In a nothing-barred fight, Schmidt hammered away until the smaller man's mouth was gashed, his eyes nearly closed, and he was spattered with blood. Schmidt ended it only when Cobb went down for the fourth time, able only to rise to his knees. But it was noticed by players that at no point did he quit. The loser kept getting off the ground. “You did better than I thought you could,” consoled Wild Bill Donovan, the pitcher who had partially sided with Cobb during his 1906 clashes with his teammates.

The damage was extensive enough to leave Cobb unable to play at Meridian that day. At Vicksburg, still limping, Cobb remained out of action. A doctor who stitched his mouth and chin asked, “What ran over you—a horse?”

Everything about Cobb—the Colt pistol he packed was only part of it—left his teammates and even Jennings feeling uneasy. Sam Crawford, the club's best run producer until now, once told how Cobb suspected
him of not bearing down at bat when the Peach was on base and positioned to score. Cobb already had a beef with Crawford, believing he had been one of those who earlier had smashed his bats.

“He walked up to me red in the face and wanted to fight,” Wahoo Sam said. “I didn't know what he might pull on me—a knife, brass knucks, or a gun. I waited until some other players came along and said, ‘Let's go.' He changed his mind pretty fast then.”

ONCE MORE
Jennings tried for a trade—Cobb for Billy Hogg of New York. A curveballer, Hogg in two seasons had won 23, lost 26. President Yawkey, intervening, killed the deal. As the season started, fans saw small hope for more than another sixth-place finish. Adding up the past three years, it came to 242 losses to 212 wins for Detroit. Most of the same talent was returning: Pinky Lindsay, Charlie O'Leary, Bill Coughlin, and Dutch Schaefer in the infield, Matty McIntyre, Davy Jones, Sam Crawford, and Cobb in the outfield. Just one pitcher, George Mullin, could show 20 or more wins for the prior year.

With McIntyre refusing to play alongside Cobb, his enemy, Jennings experimentally shifted Crawford to center field, thereby splitting McIntyre in left and Cobb in right, far away from each other. Jennings theorized that there would be no more wrangling over who should handle a fly ball or a drive up the alleys. That is what Jennings hoped for. But his problems had only begun.

From opening day on, when his two hits, a key stolen base, and two runs scored helped beat Cleveland 2–0, Cobb lived in a four-second world. Stealing became his chosen instrument for putting runs on the board. Sprinting from first base to second was only the preliminary to traveling another 180 feet to home—sequential thievery based on getting the jump on pitchers by reaching full speed in three steps, and one way or another avoiding tags. At upward of twenty miles an hour, Ty Cobb on the bases was a big blur to fielders.

He began keeping book on opposing batteries, noting their weaknesses and tip-offs. “Boston had a left-hander, Jesse Tannehill,” he named as an example, “who had a habit of squeezing and resqueezing the ball before he threw to the plate. I stole three times on him in nine innings. Long Tom Hughes of Washington stiffened his right leg just before he spun and threw to first. There were others around you could beat with mental speed.”

By “mental speed” Cobb meant that he obtained a full picture of the pitcher who stood there deciding which way to go—whether to pitch or try for a pickoff. He took extremely long leads, often forcing as many as fifteen throw-overs as he dove back headfirst. “In the rain,” he said, “I looked like a mud pie.” But he wore out the pitchers. Through all of this he was memorizing the action of moundsmen's knees, hips, and, in particular, feet and elbows. Cobb told me, “Cy Young [whose 511 total victories of 1890–1911 remain the record as of today] had me stopped for a while. Then I saw something. Other pitchers would throw a decoy ball over to first only fairly hard, then turn as if to pitch and shoot another one to first at full speed. Young's speed never varied, except when he stood with elbows slightly away from his chest. That meant a hard pickoff coming. With his elbows pulled in, it was damn sure he was going to the hitter. Well, you can imagine what that was worth.”

Leaving the park one day after double-stealing, he was asked by Young, “What am I doing, bo?” Replied Cobb, “Not a thing—you're the toughest of them all to read.” Young walked away, shaking his head.

Detroit started 1907 unimpressively, as did their right fielder. Not until the arrival of June and warm weather—Cobb thrived on the heat he'd grown up with in balmy Georgia—did he get going. Then his batwork climbed from .250 to above .350. He was fisting off-plate pitches for singles and doubles and running recklessly. Against Chicago, with Cobb on second base, on a ball hit deep into the hole at shortstop, Cobb ignored an urgent stop sign from third-base coach Jennings. Rounding third he sideswiped Jennings, sent him sprawling, and continued toward the plate. As Cobb analyzed it in a split second, the shortstop had to knock down a spinning ball, regain his balance, turn toward the plate, and plant himself for a longish throw home. Cobb beat the throw by inches. Umpire Frank “Silk” O'Loughlin hesitated, then yelled, “Yerrrrr—safe!” And muttered, “Damned if I see how.”