Cobb (49 page)

Hornsby called it as vicious a scrap as had happened. Cobb pounded the umpire's head into hard ground. He was still pounding away when players and groundskeepers mercifully broke it up. Evans was carried off to see a doctor. Observers felt that had the brawl continued, Evans could have been gravely hurt, perhaps had his skull fractured.

Cobb had broken his own rule about turning violent against officials, who had the power to expand the strike zone on a hitter. Evans made no protest to the league office. He took his humiliation silently. But somebody talked, and Cobb was suspended for the balance of a season all but ended.

“I wasn't proud of it,” said Cobb to newspapermen who headlined the fight. “But Evans had it in for me and his calls were prejudiced. I had to stop that.”

THE TIGERS
complained that it had been hard enough to live with him before Ruth came along; now it was becoming impossible. After a Navin Field game where he went hitless, home fans booed loudly. One fan invaded the field to jeer. Cobb kicked him in the stomach, then the groin. And kicked him again. An angry crowd grew so dangerous that Frank Navin ordered an escape car to be rushed to the players' gate. Grouped outside were some two dozen Detroiters leaving the park. A white-faced Cobb walked down a line of fans. To each of them he called, “You want to fight? You want to settle this?” He was alone, no teammate backing him up, while he sought to take on someone—anyone. “I never saw anything like it,” marveled veteran Bobby Veach. “All alone like that, he could have been murdered by that crowd.”

“If you're all cowards—then fuck you!” was the Peach's last word. He walked to his own parked car and drove away. Detroit had
plenty of tough truck drivers and steelworkers, but the insane look to Cobb held them back.

His rampages were senseless, ongoing, and frightening. His warpath included his home territory of Georgia. There would be a pathetic scene in Atlanta in 1924 involving a paddywagon and another trip by him to a municipal jail. He was many miles from the big league that winter, but when a waitress at Atlanta's railroad station restaurant handed Cobb his luncheon bill, he threw a tantrum, “That's a dollar-fifty too much!” he objected. When the waitress replied that the bill was correct, she was subjected to a cursing. The $1.50 matter became a yelling match with the house cashier and manager, during which Cobb tore up the check and used ballpark guttertalk. He raved so wildly that the cashier, until now a Cobb admirer, broke a heavy glass platter over his head, staggering him.

Policemen arrived. Outside on the street the Georgia Peach felled one cop with a punch to the head. A crowd gathered to watch him wrestle with other officers. Overpowered, he was removed to a nearby jail, where he ranted at a desk sergeant while authorities debated what to do with him. It was all too sad, and after a few hours he was quietly released from custody on his personal bond and without incurring a formal booking.

Word of his latest outbreak reached Detroit's front office. Navin was said to have shrugged. It was only one more instance of a destructive neurosis in Cobb whereby he stood above the crowd, enabled by some twisted thinking to inflict pain as he went, to assault people, and feel himself justified. Behavioral scientists didn't exist in baseball then, but if they had been on the scene, Cobb might well have been found to be suffering from some form of grandiosity or advanced megalomania, or perhaps delusions of persecution. Modern medical men might trace it to the boyhood trauma of his father's killing by Cobb's mother—accidental or otherwise. Whatever motivated—or possessed—him, he was the most chilling, the eeriest of all American sport figures.

His 1919 season performance was more than satisfactory, considering. Although Cobb had been plagued by a succession of injuries, his bat, along with those of Veach (.355 average) and Flagstead (.331) had lifted the surprising Tigers to a fourth-place finish behind the champion Chicago White Sox. For once he had a few members of the team
responding to his own standard, a league-leading .384 average—the seventh time he had topped .380—his twelfth batting title, and 161 runs produced. His springtime doubters agreed that he was as difficult as ever to put out, to catch in a rundown, or to deal with on well-placed bunts. Navin had made a reported profit of $110,000 at the gate.

The dark notes were Ruth's sustained progress with the radical home run, and unsubstantiated rumors that the Chicago White Sox had thrown the World Series just ended to Cincinnati. The early “buzz” on a fixed Series reached T.C. in October, when he was back hunting and fishing at Bob Woodruff's ranch in Wyoming. He was notified by President John Wheeler of the Wheeler News Syndicate in New York that manager Kid Gleason's White Sox had played to lose in an eight-game Series believed to have been choreographed by big-time gamblers.

Cobb did not need Wheeler's information. He had attended that Series, once more in the role of press commentator, and came away fully convinced of crooked work. Privately, he told Woodruff, “Fixes have been going on since 1910 … when they tried to beat me out for the batting title.” He had always seen the hand of gamblers behind that attempt to make Nap Lajoie the champion, a scheme that came close to succeeding.

In San Francisco that winter he predicted to Yankee pitcher Frank “Lefty” O'Doul, a Bay Area resident, “This is going to cause a lot of hell.” The American public did not learn of the Series scandal until almost a year after the fact, when stunning disclosures were made and, finally, eight White Soxers were banned for life.

BEFORE LEAVING
Wyoming, Cobb bought a dozen head of white-faced cattle for a beef herd he planned to develop on land outside Augusta. There was still some farmer in him. In San Francisco for part of that winter he managed the local Seals club of the four-team Pacific Coast Winter League. This was a sort of Ringling Circus operation. Fans walked right into the dugouts—to chat with players—and were kicked out by an irate Cobb; gamblers laid bets at fieldside; the Los Angeles entry in the PCWL had a chimpanzee mascot, “Hairy Harry,” who wore a little umpire's cap. Phil Douglas, a pitcher with the New York Giants in the regular season, was assigned his own private detective to keep “Shuffling Phil” out of saloons.

In the PCWL he experienced local scandal. On October 20, 1919, the deputy district attorney of Los Angeles County charged before a grand jury that some of the PCWL clubs and the parent Pacific Coast League were controlled by a powerful gambling ring “which has cleaned up enormous sums and distributed thousands of dollars to ballplayers who did their bidding.” The accusation named other league members, but not the San Francisco Seals, led by Cobb. In the end, four players were thrown out of baseball, a regional prelude to the “Black Sox” affair now brewing in Chicago. Cobb quit the Seals soon after, fearing that the infection might have spread into his camp.

On top of everything else, there was gunfire in the still-untamed West. Cobb reported, “I did okay in California in 1919 and 1920 [when he returned to again manage San Francisco] except when gamblers got to shooting at each other in the stands … Bullets were flying around the park.” Quarreling gamblers used pistols in this league. “But I stuck around for a while. I was paid twelve hundred dollars for every game I appeared in as a player, too, and I hit those western boys for about fifteen thousand dollars in a few months.” In the minor league, any game with Ty Cobb in it was a sellout or close to it. Against the Los Angeles club one afternoon, he toured fifteen bases—three home runs and a triple.

Enjoying the California weather, he considered moving there when retirement came—if he could sever his Georgia roots. He was still out west in November of 1919 when several Detroit businessmen called to say that Hughie Jennings would not be retained much longer as Tigers' manager. Twelve seasons in a hot seat had driven the Scranton Irishman to frustration and to drink. He might last one more season. Cobb was deep-sea fishing off Catalina Island with author Zane Grey when he was advised that Navin was thinking of offering Jennings's job to him. Cobb replied informally that he would not accept the Detroit post, if it was offered. “I made that clear to Navin,” he noted in his memoirs. “Running a team like Detroit was a trap.”

Yet he couldn't go on hitting at a .380 pace indefinitely, and Detroit people hoped he would change his mind during the coming months. He wrote to a friend, “What I figured was that I'd get a manager offer somewhere else. Maybe at Philadelphia. Connie Mack was in terrible shape—five straight last-place finishes.”

No offer from Philadelphia appeared in late 1919, nor in 1920.
The Peach's soaring averages would fall by 50 percentage points to .334 in the latter of those two years, and his steals would diminish. He would be advised by specialists that he again needed to consider eye surgery. Eye trouble of the past, which came and went, had left him prepared for an operation someday. Time for a thirty-three-year-old to reconsider his future.

Bell Syndicate of New York City, a sports-promotion agency, arranged a vaudeville tour for Cobb early in 1920. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio small towns he stood onstage and hit balls fastened to a cord suspended from above—out over the audience. When the ball returned he would whack it again to the bang of a drum. A brief lecture by Cobb on grip and follow-through ended the performance. In the hustings it filled theaters. “Made me two hundred, three hundred dollars per night,” he said.

Frank Navin and the ace of his team reached an uneasy peace in 1920. For his part, Cobb, in the clubhouse, laid off disparaging his boss's knowledge of baseball. Insiders were surprised when they stopped barking at each other and appeared to be amiable. Navin even left his private train compartment when on road trips to play poker with Cobb, Harry Heilmann, Jennings, and others. “Navin couldn't play poker any better than he knew ballplayers,” related Cobb. “We cleaned him out at cards.”

Regarding his then-current contract, Cobb was jaunty in recollection: “I had Navin whipsawed. The town would have boycotted the Tigers if he tried to deal me away … so the fat man was paying
me twenty-five thousand dollars without too much moaning and groaning.”

Median salary of a team of also-rans was an estimated $6,500, or about average pay in the two leagues. The lowest-paid Tiger received about $2,000. Navin often quoted a survey that showed that 60 percent of American families existed on $2,000 or less yearly. Players had no complaints, he argued.

But if Cobb were to agree to take over field-managing the depressed Tigers for more money—$40,000 was a bruited-about figure—one person who would not be pleased was Charlie Cobb. Her marriage of 1908, at age seventeen, was disintegrating. Her husband habitually didn't return home for dinner, while using his rooms at the Detroit Athletic Club as a social and business-conference center. Charlie, delicate of health and needing his companionship, was distraught. Once the 1920 season opened, she packed up and left Motor City with their four children, Ty junior, eleven, Shirley, nine, Herschel, three, and Beverly, just a few months old, for the family home in Augusta, an act of independence now becoming habitual with her.

Reconciliations would follow, during which another child was born. Yet it had been a mismated marriage from the beginning—a girl from the well-bred, affluent Lombard clan of Georgia tied to a brawler from a world of foul-mouthed roughnecks. “Mr. Cobb,” as Charlie still called him, provided well, but offered little more in the area of shared enjoyment, of companionship.

Cobb became a bachelor during much of this season. He hired a cook, but took most of his meals out and kept part of his wardrobe of tailored suits and shirts at the Detroit Athletic Club, located off main-street Woodward Avenue. It became a regular sight to watch him drive his Hupmobile from Navin Field to such fashionable restaurants as Churchill's and the Pontchartrain Hotel. His companions at dinner often were from the field of entertainment, such as songwriter-playwright George M. Cohan, and from industry, especially the auto moguls. He would dine early and be in bed by 11:00
P.M.

UNTIL NOW
Cobb had mainly taken criticism in stride. After years of it, however, he had become tired of his constantly harped-upon reputation as a base-running villain. Now, not for the first time, he set out to modify his image, to get it across that he was as much the attacked as
the attacker. It was chiefly Cobb who had altered baseball's running game by introducing the idea that the base paths primarily belonged to the runner, a man confined to a stipulated strip of the field. He wished it to be understood that he simply was one who went at it harder, more recklessly and violently than others when facing a blocked-off bag. If enemies were spiked or had bones broken while interposing themselves between Cobb and his destination, the blame was not with him, but with what he called “basehogs.”

“I'd had more bad raps in New York than anywhere,” he complained. “I'd protested [verbally] before. So I began sending letters to the writers, beginning with that damned Bugs Baer.”

Arthur “Bugs” Baer of the
New York American
was among sporting reporters and cartoonists who pictured Cobb as fiendish in preparing his spikes in advance to cut down infielders. Baer proclaimed that the Peach used a barbershop strop to apply a sharper edge to his steel. Cobb's letter to Baer—clearly he had a little help in composing it—went:

Dear Bugs:

May I ask you to furnish me with the names of any individuals, even you, who like criticism? I think we all try to attain—with our hearts in the right places—certain goals. What is criticism, may I ask? Criticism is breaking down, a destroying influence.