Cobb (28 page)

Before he went on the Euclid Hotel rampage, Cobb had been nothing less than phenomenal. Against New York he had doubled for two RBIs, and at Washington hit two home runs in a game for the first time. Again against the Highlanders (they would not become the “Yankees” until 1913) he had driven in or personally scored all five runs in a 5–3 Detroit cliffhanger win. So dependable had he become in the pinch that—the story goes—one day the
Detroit News
published an extra edition before a sixteen-inning struggle with Washington had ended. While the teams played on, newsboys ran the streets, telling
readers that heroic Tyrus had beaten the Nationals with a last-moment base hit. It wasn't true. Faith in local journalism fell. The story has it that William “Billy” Durant, founder of General Motors, bawled out a
News
editor in public.

“How could you print that?” demanded Durant. “Why, dammit, the game ended with Cobb striking out with the bases full—and we lost.”

“How often does the Peach do that?” replied the crestfallen editor.

Interest was so high in the battle of the Euclid Hotel that
Cleveland News
writer Ed Bang said he filed twenty thousand words on it cross-country. Luckily for Navin, detectives sent to Cleveland's League Park following the event arrived too late to detain Cobb for questioning; by then the Tigers were en route to St. Louis. Stansfield added a five-thousand-dollar civil damage suit to his criminal complaint. His lawyers claimed that their client was suffering severe pain. “He was trying to kill me,” Stansfield deposed.

No information was released on what it cost the partnership of Bill Yawkey and Frank Navin in the next days to persuade Stansfield to drop his suit—a settlement figure of ten thousand dollars was rumored—but to Cleveland officials a payoff was not the main issue: Cobb had shown murderous intent. Police were keeping the case open. By leaving town he had committed another crime. The accused man remained subject to apprehension.

Cleveland detective Jake Mintz was reported to have advised Navin that with Cobb's record of violence, he was sure to be convicted in court. Police would watch future Detroit team travel and the next time a train carrying the Tigers entered Ohio, that train would be entered and the offender seized and brought to trial.

If and when the Tigers hung on in the late season and qualified for the World Series, they probably would open the playoff against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Pittsburgh on October 8. Passing through Ohio on the Lake Shore Line was the regular route for the Tigers when going east. Cobb got out a map and made plans to avoid jail and to not miss the Series.

“Ohio is blocked to me,” he wrote a Georgia friend. “But I can get to Pittsburgh another way … although it means going into Canada and then a lot of train-hopping.”

BEFORE DETROIT
could clinch a third straight World Series appearance, the matter of defeating the Athletics at hostile Philadelphia had to be faced. The Tigers led the A's by four games when the teams squared off at Philly on September 16 for four decisive contests. A clean sweep by the A's would mean a tie for first place. Connie Mack's campaign to punish Cobb for spiking Frank Baker had led to group frenzy. Placards carried by “Philly Phanatics” outside Shibe Park, the A's new concrete-and-steel arena seating twenty-five thousand, showed a knife sticking out of Cobb's chest.

Hughie Jennings, given the public temper at the rematch, was reluctant to use Cobb. Syndicated columnist Bugs Baer wrote that Cobb was well advised to sit out these games. Dire warnings came from Horace Vogel of the
Philadelphia Bulletin,
a longtime Cobb hater, who sounded like he wanted a hanging. A frightened Charlie Cobb urged her husband not to appear. His fans in Augusta and Atlanta wired and phoned to the same purpose. They wanted revenge.

Ban Johnson did little to cool feelings. Earlier, the league chief, a former sportswriter, had stated, “One more attempt at spiking a fellow player will put a sudden quietus on this man's career … Cobb will stop it or quit the game.” Johnson was talking about outright banishment. A few days later, however, he waffled, saying, “Cobb has learned his lesson and will behave.” Philadelphians did not care if he came onto the field waving a white surrender flag.

The Peach and Jennings sat in a suite at Philadelphia's Aldine Hotel on the night before game number one. On a table before them were thirteen anonymous letters. Each promised Cobb's termination. Some were specific: “If you're not too cowardly to show up, you'll be dead. Our guns are ready.” And: “I'll be on a roof across from the park with a rifle and in the third inning I'll put a bullet through your heart.” Other notices, preserved by Cobb in the event of a lawsuit, named the killing as happening by knife during a field melee bound to follow the first game.

Jennings was on the spot. He had been forced to revamp his slumping infield. Several Tigers were hurt. Meanwhile, Mack had his four pitching aces, left-handers Eddie Plank and Harry Krause and right-handers Chief Bender and Cy Morgan, in their best form. The four had produced 20 shutouts on the season. (Detroit's top four throwers had 12 shutouts.) The A's fast-rising Eddie Collins at second
base and Home Run Baker at third were hitting at more than .300. So Cobb, at close to a .370 figure, was very much needed.

His conference with Jennings, as Cobb remembered it many years later, went like this:

Jennings: “These home fans mean business. With you standing in right field a good rifleman couldn't miss.”

Cobb: “It's all bluff. We'll have an overflow crowd no doubt, and I'll need some protection. Get me some cops. I just hope the A's hit one out past me where I'll have to make a catch falling into the crowd … Let's find out how tough they'll get.”

Jennings (wincing): “Sit out the first game, at least.”

Cobb: “I'm playing.”

At a late hour, people by the hundreds milled about the Aldine Hotel, yelling threats. Tiger trainer Harry Tuthill and several hired guards were positioned outside Cobb's hotel room. Tuthill had brought along bottled Detroit water for Cobb's use and personally cooked his food; he trusted nobody.

Connie Mack, alarmed at the town's choler and beginning to wonder if the major leagues' first public execution-murder would occur, arranged for some three hundred policemen to mix with the audience at Shibe Park, which would range from twenty-five thousand to a league record of thirty thousand. A cordon of fifty armed cops would stand behind Cobb, ringing his position in right field.

Cobb was moved from the Aldine Hotel to Shibe Park in a taxicab with a twelve-man police motorcycle escort. “I never heard such noise as when we reached Shibe,” he said. During warm-up, other Tigers stood as far away from him as possible.

He wasn't shot at, but at one point there was a loud explosion, causing Cobb to leap upward. A cop explained that it was an auto backfire from nearby Lehigh Avenue.

If the furor slowed Cobb, it was not noticeable in this first game of the Series. He charged into shortstop Jack Barry and gashed his knee. The whole park arose in a roar, but stopped at that, deterred by the heavy security force all around.

“Another strange thing happened,” related Cobb in his memoirs. “On a long fly ball I had to dive into the crowd [roped off behind the outfield] to make a one-handed catch. There was a tangle of bodies … In diving I fell on a fan's hat and crushed it. So [next inning] I got a $5
bill from my purse and found the fan and said I was reimbursing him. He stood with his mouth open.”

President Benjamin Shibe of the Athletics had guards touring the stands with megaphones, asking people to remain peaceful. If Cobb's five dollars for the hat helped along that line, it wasn't noticeable when the game concluded with a 2–0 Philadelphia win. Fans trampled the ropes and Cobb found himself surrounded by mean faces. Just then, according to Cobb in later years, a dozen or so men quickly shoved forward, boxing him in, and saying, “Ty, we know you're a Mason and we're fellow Masons. If you want to run for the dugout, we'll be right with you.”

“I never ran off a field in my life,” replied Cobb. With Masonic help, Cobb claimed, he reached safety as the crowd overran the field. (In actuality Cobb didn't join the Masonic Order until 1912, three years later.)

At around 10:00
P.M.
that night, after dining at the Aldine, Cobb did what Jennings had implored him not to do. He went for a solitary walk amongst a large crowd ominously gathered in the street outside. Cobb stood, a challenging figure, on the hotel steps and called out, “Now I'm going for a walk. And I just want to say that the first rotten, cowardly hound who tries to stop me is going to drop dead, right where he stands. Now get out of my way.”

New York reporter Westbrook Pegler estimated the turnout at about three hundred. Cobb kept one hand in his pocket, where he was known to carry a gun. A path opened up, he strolled a few blocks, and returned. “A fool's act,” Pegler labeled it. “He did it with no cop close by.” Perhaps so, conceded Cobb, but he was armed: “I would have shot the first fee-simple son of a bitch who came at me or showed a weapon. Nobody laid a hand on me.”

Pegler and other eastern newspapermen had heard that he was fearless, saw it demonstrated, and complimented Cobb, but did not spare the criticism when he went hitless in one game, had two bunt singles and a sacrifice fly in another, and only two additional singles during the set. Three of the four games went to the Athletics, behind the fine pitching of Eddie Plank and Chief Bender. They threw so tight to Cobb that several times he had to hit the dirt.

“What were you thinking about most during that series?” I once asked Cobb.

“About getting a base hit,” he said. “I wasn't doing much.”

Rocks were thrown at the Tigers' horse-drawn carriages when they left town, their lead reduced to two games. Jennings let his boys enjoy a “whiskeyfest” on the train to help them relax. They bounced back by beating Boston twice—with Cobb averaging .714 off his five hits in seven times at bat. Meanwhile the Athletics lost two to Chicago. That clinched the title for the Tigers. They finished at 98–54 to the runner-up Athletics' 95–58.

Back in 1904 the Boston Red Sox had set the existing American League record for most season wins at 95. The Tigers' 98 beat that. In an unreal year Detroit stood first. It had two 20-game-winning pitchers, George Mullin (who won 29) and Ed Willett (22). Old reliable Wild Bill Donovan fell to 8–7 on the mound. On offense, besides Cobb, only Sam Crawford at .314 topped the .300 mark. Good defense, and contributions from a few newcomers such as infielder Donie Bush (.273), and from vet Davy Jones (.279) were a help. But it would have been something like a third-place finish for Detroit at best if not for one man, Tyrus Cobb, whose .377 was the highest batting average anywhere in the game.

In numerous ways, Cobb's 1909 season was the most brilliant yet reprehensible any player ever lived through. In that span of time Cobb fixed his reputation both as a very great performer and a deeply flawed human being. At year's end he stood indicted in Cleveland for assault with a deadly weapon, denounced by the black press for flagrant racist behavior, threatened with a life suspension by the league president, targeted by demonstrating Philadelphians, and viewed by tens of thousands as a down-and-dirty ballplayer. He also caught hell from the press in general. The influential
Sporting News
said in September, “Complaints that Cobb uses his spikes to injure and intimidate infielders are so common that his mere denial will not relieve him of the odium that attaches to a player guilty of this infamous practice … The list of his victims is too long to attribute the injury of all concerned to accidents. Down with this Cobb!”

Yet his .377 bat mark was 31 points higher than the league's next best, a .346 by Eddie Collins. He was the only player in the league to drive in more than 100 runs—107 to be exact. In total bases, his 296 easily topped everyone in the American League and the National League as well: 242 by Hans Wagner was second best. Cobb accomplished
this all while appearing in a full 156 season games, limping through some of them. He became the first man to win the Triple Crown, leading the league in the same season in batting average, home runs, and runs driven in. Through the next seven decades, such Hall of Famers as Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron would never attain this sweep. If his sweep in 1909 was not the most impressive batting performance of the twentieth century, that would only be because Cobb would have even better seasons in 1911, 1912, 1913, and on up into the 1920s.

Cobb's 1909 title was his third straight batting championship in only his fifth year in the league. Babe Ruth did not lead the league in batting average, in his one and only time as number one in that department, until seven years after he turned from pitching to slugging specialist. The great Rajah—Rogers Hornsby—needed six seasons before he led in average.

BEFORE THE
World Series opened against the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had a whopping 110 wins in the National League, Cobb's dilemma was how to reach Pittsburgh, some three hundred miles from Detroit, without being arrested and jailed en route. In Cleveland a wanted-man warrant in the Stansfield-knifing-gunplay case remained very much active. Ohio authorities held that Cobb had started a near-murderous brawl. He claimed self-defense. His status was that of a fugitive from justice under Ohio felony law. And the way to reach Pittsburgh from the west was via Ohio.

Studying maps, Cobb saw that by zigzagging around on train lines, taking the Michigan-Pennsy Line by way of Canada, passing through Ontario to Buffalo and thence to Erie and Pittsburgh, he could make it to the game. It would require close rail connections and some luck. Cobb's description of it to me went, “In case any cop bastards were on my train, I kept to my compartment and had meals brought in by porters. My best bats were with me all the way.”