Cobb (51 page)

“Chapman died at St. Lawrence Hospital at 4:50 o'clock this morning.” Major baseball had its first fatality. Incredibly, it would never experience another.

Outside New York, Mays was lambasted and found guilty, without proof, of purposely beaning Chapman. When it was reported that the victim, before his hospitalization, had murmured in the clubhouse, “Tell Mays not to worry,” anti-Mays feeling expanded. The burly 195-pound Mays, while performing for the Boston Red Sox prior to becoming a Yankee, had built a reputation for throwing close to or at batters. His brushbacks and knockdowns had long brought complaints. At the moment Mays was working on a 26–11 season, helping the Yankees toward what could be their first pennant since the team's founding in 1903. Three times the former Highlanders had finished second; recently they had not done even that well—fourth in 1918, third in 1919. Suspending Mays could kill their chances for 1920.

Cobb was well acquainted with Mays's style. The “slingshotter” never hurled dangerously close to him. If he ever went that far, Cobb let it be known, there would be reprisal of a strong nature. “Mays threw at others with a rising fastball—right at the chin,” Cobb had noted to a few sportswriters, off the record. “We call him Bean-O.”

Cleveland, headed for a pennant it would win, had a popular player in the twenty-nine-year-old Chapman, a fielding flash and a .303 hitter when he died. The Kentuckian had averaged .267 and .300 in the two years before that. He kept the Indians loose by such things as putting garden snakes into his teammates' hotel beds.

Forty-eight hours after his death the Tigers came into New York for a four-game series with the Yankees. Cobb found the city's newspapers blossoming headlines: “
COBB SAYS MAYS THROWS KILLER PITCH
” and “
MAYS SHOULD BE BANNED, SAYS PEACH.
” At least five papers were saying it. From his Commodore Hotel quarters he issued denials. He had said no such thing. But the headlines were believed, and Manhattan fans in large number were set to make it the hottest yet for an old enemy when the teams squared off.

Grantland Rice, always a “friendly,” visited the Peach at the Commodore. An irate Cobb greeted him with, “United Press lied and now everybody is doing it. They're saying that Chapman was slow in ducking and avoiding blame on Mays. Off the record, I'd like to see Ban Johnson run that bastard out of the league. But you know Johnson—always protecting the pitcher.” League president Johnson confusedly
announced on that weekend that Mays might not pitch again, then exonerated him; big Carl was back at work within a week and won his next game with ease.

Rice's subsequent account of his Commodore meeting with Cobb on a Friday, published hours before a Saturday opener with the Yanks, went, “I found him in bed with a temperature of 102. He was as mad as I'd ever seen him. Both of his thighs were a mass of adhesive and torn flesh, testimony to some rough base-stealing. It was enough to turn your stomach. Ty was up to his chin in morning papers—all blasting him for that interview back in Boston … I told him the first thing he needed was a doctor.

“He said never mind the doctor, he had to be at the game tomorrow and face the wolves.” He asked Rice to file a wire story that he had not criticized Mays. Rice did so, but it was too late.

“On Saturday,” described Rice in his 1953 autobiography,
The Tumult and the Shouting
, “33,000 stormed the old Polo Grounds—Yankee Stadium wasn't completed until 1923. Cobb didn't take batting practice, in fact didn't appear on the field until ten minutes before the game. When he did show … making the long walk in from the center-field clubhouse, the crowd stood as one and booed.”

On his way in, he roughly shoved out of his way the Yankee batting-practice pitcher. He stopped near home plate, stared at the audience, and bowed toward the press box, as if saying,
There are the people responsible for this
. Among those yelling crudities at him from the bench was Babe Ruth.

Old New York gave him the worst jeering of his career. The Polo Grounds rocked. In a return gesture, seemingly aimed at his teammates for not speaking up in his support over the Chapman-Mays matter, he did not sit in the Tiger dugout. Until game time he sat in a lower grandstand seat, as if inviting physical attack.

Detroit drubbed the Yankees, 10–3. Cobb had one single, one stolen base, and scored one run. He made a racing catch of Ruth's long line drive. Next day, Sunday, before thirty-six thousand, he gained more substantial revenge. In an 11–9 slugout won by the Tigers, the Peach was next to unstoppable: five base hits in six times at bat, two RBIs, and another run-saving catch. Some Polo Grounders cheered him for that retaliation. One day later, facing a Carl Mays returned to duty, he added two more hits, even while Mays coolly delivered a 10–0
shutout. In the series' fourth game, Detroit was the 5–3 winner. Cobb starred afield and doubled.

Fans noticed no incidents between Cobb and Mays. But there was a concealed one. In his autobiography the Peach spoke of walking past Mays during the game and piping, “Hello, Bean-O, old boy.” Wrote Cobb, “I wanted to upset him.”

His satisfaction was incomplete but pleasant. “The three games we won out of four killed the Yankees,” he pointed out. New York finished the 1920 season precisely three games out of first place.

BACK IN
Detroit to conclude a wasted season, Cobb awakened on the morning of September 28, 1920, to glaring headlines: “
CHICAGO SOX PLAYERS CONFESS SELLING GAMES—EIGHT ARE INDICTED: ALL SUSPENDED.
” The “unholy octet,” named by a Chicago grand jury, stood indicted of laying down to the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series, allowing the Reds to win the playoff, five games to three. All but one were still on the White Sox, who at that point were trailing Cleveland by only 6 percentage points in the standings, with a full week's games remaining to be played. Chicago owner Charlie Comiskey had no choice but to suspend the dirty players, even though it brought a decisive end to the club's pennant hopes.

The news itself was not surprising to Cobb, who had long realized that the 1919 Series had involved rottenness to the core. What may have been astounding even to baseball insiders like himself, however, was the magnitude of the operation. The stunning fix had been wholesale. Those facing prosecution were two starting pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams, almost the entire White Sox infield—George “Buck” Weaver, Swede Risberg, and Arnold “Chick” Gandil—along with outfielders Shoeless Joe Jackson and Oscar “Hap” Felsch and utility man Fred McMullin. They had committed the incredible frameup for gamblers' money. Cicotte, one of the more artistic of pitchers, and celebrated slugger Jackson confessed all, leading to implication of six others. The main gamblers involved were identified as New York's gangland-connected Arnold Rothstein, ex–boxing champ Abe Attell, John “Sport” Sullivan of Chicago, and Philadelphia's Billy Maharg. Investigation would indicate that the fixers had offered sums ranging from a reported $10,000 to $100,000, with some portions of that paid to some of the players. Rothstein, later shot and killed in
1928 by unnamed underworld parties, left behind in his files affidavits showing that he put up $80,000 in bribe money.

In the role of commentator for the Wheeler Syndicate, Cobb had attended the “bagged” Series and for the past twelve months had known what had happened. He had no comment to make to the press after the scandal broke. Privately Cobb remarked to Jennings, “When they get to the bottom of this, Charley Comiskey's cheap pay will come out.” Jennings didn't need a reminder that the Sox owner paid Cicotte, after his fourteen years in the league and recent won-and-lost marks of 28–12 in 1917 and 29–7 in 1919, $5,000 per season. Happy Felsch and Buck Weaver were at $4,000 and $4,500. Joe Jackson, currently hitting .351, drew $6,000. Cobb knew that the White Sox—now universally called the Black Sox—had quietly been talking team strike. Comiskey's payroll was said to be the lowest anywhere in the majors. (In point of fact his salaries were not markedly lower than other owners', but that's what people thought.)

Drawing 236,928 customers, the infamous Series had richly rewarded Comiskey and some other franchise holders. It grossed $722,110, or nearly one-quarter of a million dollars above the former record set in 1912 for games between the Boston Red Sox and New York Giants. Cobb claimed that it had been only a matter of time until the Sox found relief through the Rothsteins and Attells. “A dead lock to happen,” he said later on.

Cobb remembered certain on-the-spot observations made before the dirty work began. He had registered at Cincinnati's Sinton Hotel the day before the opening game. The Sinton's lobby teemed with flashy types—not only the usual ticket scalpers, but gamblers in number. Although no New York team was involved, he noticed that a large eastern contingent had showed up. Cobb recognized Sport Sullivan, odds-setter and bookie. Six or so years earlier, Sullivan had been banned from Detroit's clubhouse area. Arnold Rothstein, too, was greeting people in the lobby and laying bets. This was Cobb's first tip that the Series' outcome might be predetermined.

Another tip was that early odds strangely favored the White Sox only slightly, and then moved, in a rush of money, to favor the Reds by 6–5 and 7–5. That didn't add up. Chicago definitely was the stronger team, with a club batting average on the season of .287 against Cincinnati's .263. The winner needed to take five of nine games of a Series
that had been extended from the usual four of seven—and the Sox had a 29-game winner, the knuckleballing Cicotte, and Lefty Williams, a 23–11 pitcher.

Cobb was warned away from making a bet. White Sox manager Kid Gleason, who had once tried to obtain the Peach for his team, remarked to him, “Some funny things have happened to us [over the past season]. Damned funny.” Cobb replied, “Yes, Kid, I've noticed.” He sat in the press box as an observer and watched the Reds in game number one knock Cicotte out of the box in the fourth inning and win 9–1. In game two, the Reds won, 4–2, over Williams. Some writers were suspicious about the White Sox's erratic play. Then Cobb learned by the grapevine that Gleason secretly had gone to Comiskey to report something fishy going on. Comiskey reportedly consulted National League president John Heydler, who refused to believe the story. Other alarms were sounded to high officials. Nothing was done to stop the Reds from closing out one of the greatest of upsets in eight games. Cincinnati won twice by shutouts and once by a score of 10–5.

“Another thing I heard before the rats got busy,” recalled Cobb, “was that it had been arranged for Cicotte to hit the first batter up in the first inning with a pitch. That was the signal that the fix was on … Well, Cicotte hit Maury Rath right off … so I knew for sure we had a stacked deck.

“Any ball game can be easily fixed,” mused Cobb as an elderly man. “All you need is a pitcher to take a little off his fastball and a shortstop–second base combination to mess up the doubleplay.”

In Cobb's book and that of many others, Comiskey was as despicable as the Black Sox. Much evidence accumulated in the winter following the Series indicated that Comiskey had to be aware of the facts. Yet he dismissed all the evidence as hearsay. Before exposure came, he signed suspected players to 1920 contracts, and in fact gave salary raises to Cicotte, Williams, Jackson, Felsch and others.

The “Square Sox,” those players who had been guiltless, had to play the 1920 season alongside teammates they loathed. Honest Sox second baseman Eddie Collins, a future Hall of Famer, one day confided to Cobb, “I almost quit the game, Ty. Everytime I looked at a guy I wondered if he was trying.” Yet such was the talent on the team that they almost won again, before the suspensions were announced.

NATIONWIDE, THE
reaction to the news of the fix was shock, disillusionment, and disgust. The World Series had attained such a devoted, quasi-religious mass following that in the century's second decade it outranked all native sports classics—heavyweight title fights, the Indianapolis 500 auto race, the Kentucky Derby, any tennis event, and even the Olympic Games when the U.S. was heavily represented. A leading historian of baseball, Harold Seymour, years later quoted a pre-1920 sports-journal poem to show how naive the public had been:

For the baseball season is so soaring
High above all, serene
Unaffected by the roaring
For the grand old game is clean!

But now conspiracy of a high degree had been uncovered, and public faith tottered. Cicotte, Shoeless Joe, Felsch, and Williams signed confessions. On September 28, 1920, a Chicago grand jury brought in indictments against eight Black Soxers. But then the paperwork and confessions were stolen—perhaps by the state at the probable instigation of Arnold Rothstein—and cases against the accused were so weakened that the state's attorney general admitted that he could not win in a trial proceeding. After legal and other delays, on August 2, 1921, a jury returned a decision of not guilty of intent to defraud for all the Black Sox, along with some of the gambler-fixers. It was said that some of the jurors, after the verdict, threw a courtroom party, bringing in drinks and carrying the acquitted players around on their shoulders. To much of the U.S. press, the decision was a terrible miscarriage of justice, an official whitewashing from the league's top on down.

The rejoicing was of short duration, for organized baseball was now being run by a man named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Even before the Black Sox came along, a struggle had gone on among owners and league presidents to reshape the game under a commission of no more than three men, able to rule broadly over everything that occurred. The three-man idea was dropped after long wrangling, and the magnates hit upon hiring a single czar who would prevent more scandal, with its potential to cause fan boycotts and reduce receipts. Fifty-four-year-old federal court judge Ken Landis, small in stature and
without a college degree, was a famously tough jurist, incorruptible, and a lifelong baseball fan. He was also a notorious egotist, a prohibitionist, and a man who hated gambling in all its forms.