Cobb (52 page)

Landis took office as the game's first high commissioner in January 1921. Owners ceded him unlimited power. By contract Landis had the authority “to take punitive action against leagues, clubs, officers and players found guilty of detrimental conduct.” Among his first acts as suzerain was to disregard the jury's verdict and banish all of the Black Soxers from professional ball for life. Landis was a law unto himself. Beyond his initial crackdown, Landis threatened to blacklist any player found taking part in a game in which one of the ineligibles appeared. “Landis batting cleanup,” went the expression; “God help the unholy.”

LANDIS'S OBVIOUS
intent to investigate ballplayers' habits worried Cobb in the winter of 1920–21. The commissioner's office interrogated various prominent players on many teams, including Cobb. He was clean. Other Tigers were checked out. It was clear that Landis's purge was far from ended. One result was that John McGraw and owner Charles Stoneham of the Giants were forced to divest themselves of the ownership of the Oriental Park and Jockey Club racetrack in faraway Cuba. Any form of gambling was out for management and players. Cobb had plans to buy stock in a Canadian track at Ontario, but this was now prohibited by Landis.

He wasn't talking, but Cobb knew of corruption in locations other than Chicago and Cincinnati. He was not surprised when Landis, between 1921 and 1924, after a lengthy survey of conditions, excommunicated four New York Giants—outfielder Jimmy O'Connell, pitcher Phil Douglas, outfielder Benny Kauff, and coach Cozy Dolan—for gambling and other violations. Still more fell, among them infielder Joe Gedeon of St. Louis and infielder Eugene Paulette of the Philadelphia Phillies.

The fixed 1919 Series seemed more and more to be a backdrop to what went on behind scenes at ballparks, bars, and poolrooms. “Back then anything went you could get away with,” Cobb stated in 1960. “There were crooks all over the place … I advised Navin to hire himself a detective.” One day in 1921 Cobb walked past a Detroit pool-ticket room where for a dollar and up you could buy a chance on who
won or lost, an Americanized form of parimutuel betting. Three Tigers were there, just leaving.

“Get the hell away from here,” ordered Cobb.

“Oh, we're just looking around,” they protested.

“Get away now and don't come back or I'll turn you over to Navin's cop. Or would you rather talk to Landis?”

Navin, indeed, had employed a detective, a huge, retired policeman named “Sheriff” Crowe. The Tigers were said to resent Crowe, but with Cobb maintaining his own watch, there were no Detroit scandals in the early 1920s.

Weighing heavily upon Cobb in 1920, and inexorably gaining in popularity, was the figure of George Herman Ruth, who was upstaging all of the four-hundred-odd men in the big time. The Babe in his beginning Yankee years was moving more and more into the national consciousness, collecting more columns of press space than any individual other than Cobb had produced. Moreover, Ruth was coming along in the role of savior of scandal-wracked baseball. His clubbing
was
helping in a major way to minimize the damage done by the 1919 World Series, although that damage was ongoing, as evidenced by Judge Landis's ejections of more players. The Babe hit more homers than entire ball clubs. He provoked an atavistic longing for someone not confined to the old game of science, and who blasted five-hundred- to six-hundred-footers into “Ruthville,” wherever the park might be. He was lovable and magnetic. People dogged him on the streets. United Press would soon run a newspaper box feature each time he furiously lofted a ball out to the Knothole Kids waiting in the streets and parking lots.

It would become news when a bee stung the Babe, when he was jailed for speeding, when a “crazed” fan threatened him with a knife, when he bought his wife a mink coat, arrived at work with a hangover, smashed his bat in two after striking out, had lunch with a movie star, or even lit a big Havana cigar. Following 1920, in which Ruth averaged .376, with an unbelievable 54 homers and a record slugging average of .847, Cobb's detractors in effect told him to step aside. Hercules had arrived to take over.

Veteran baseball people still saw the Peach as the best in the business. Tris Speaker declared that “it goes without saying that Cobb still is the greatest ballplayer around.” Yankee manager Miller Huggins, of the old school, also stuck to his view that to those who knew inside
baseball, Ruth still had a way to go to catch Cobb for ability to start a rally and sustain it, to supply the clutch base hit, lay the bunt, and generally disrupt the defense. Although he was Ruth's manager, Hug confided what he believed to insiders. At the approach of 1921, as Cobb perceived it, Ruth was not yet totally proven, and things might change to the Peach's advantage. Greatness, to him, meant something that came after only ten years of performance.

Yet the Bambino's prowess undoubtedly figured in a crucial change of mind on Cobb's part. At various points since 1918 he had brushed off Navin's offers to him to replace Hughie Jennings and assume the position of player-manager. Yet to take over as manager would obviously center fresh attention on Cobb. Where Ruth would be confined to hitting, fielding, and spot pitching, Cobb would have the status of commander of the whole show. Should the Tigers start winning—that chance was there, if not likely—he might top anything he had yet achieved. Acquiring new personnel would be the key to a comeback. That, and kicking some lazy Detroit tails or trading them.

He had gone on turning down Navin until late 1920, when Walter O. Briggs, an auto-body millionaire of Detroit, made an emotional appeal. Briggs had recently bought an estimated $250,000 interest in Navin's franchise, and was pledged to make Detroit once again a contender. It was Cobb's duty, he declared, to save the Tigers by taking over as manager.

Said Cobb to Briggs, “I don't want the responsibility. Also it would hurt my hitting and I won't have that.”

“Give it a try,” urged Briggs. “It could lead to a partial ownership in the franchise.” Briggs knew that Cobb very much wanted that.

“Hire Kid Gleason,” advised Cobb. “He's a winner and you can forget the Black Sox thing. He had no part in it, as everyone knows.” The fifty-four-year-old Gleason, nonplaying manager of the despised Sox, was tactically as smart as they came.

Cobb continued to say no to managing while off game hunting in the South. Then, at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans early in December 1920, he ran across E. A. Batchelor, a Detroit sportswriter in town to cover the University of Detroit–Loyola football game. “There's no two ways about it,” coaxed Batchelor. “The whole town wants you to manage and, if you don't, Navin will give the job to Pants Rowland.”

That disturbed Cobb. In his ghostwritten book,
My Life in Baseball
,
he stated, “Big leaguers considered Rowland a bush-league manager. He'd never appeared as a player in a game of major league ball. He was a lucky phony … had been released at Chicago to bring in Gleason. I hated to think of Rowland in charge.”

Batchelor went on, “If they sign Rowland, could you play under him?”

“I'd have to think that over,” returned Cobb.

Batchelor phoned Navin in Detroit to report that his man seemed to be wavering.

Cobb summarized what followed. “I was in a unique position for a ballplayer. Newspapers had a stock line, ‘Ty Cobb, the only millionaire ballplayer in history.' By 1921 I had added investments in the auto industry, stocks and bonds, real estate, cotton, and Coca-Cola … had accumulated a fortune outside of baseball. I was independent of my salary and not tempted by the pay raise accompanying the manager's position. But the reputation of the Tigers as steady losers did bother me. I could see many things that had to be done.”

Two weeks before New Year's Day of 1921, he made the carefully considered decision to accept. His takeover would mean that Rowland would not get his hands on two dandy Tiger newcomers: catcher Johnny Bassler and infielder Lu Blue, both with .300 potential, both defensively solid. Nor would Pants Rowland be in charge and mismanage Harry Heilmann, by now a feared power hitter—one in a million, said Heilmann fans. He could play first base as well as the outfield. Another motive for Cobb was to show his versatility. Tris Speaker, his longtime rival for all-around honors, had managed the Cleveland Indians into the last World Series while hitting a big .388 in his role as player, a true mark of greatness. In the past there had been others who doubled as player-manager and won pennants: Frank Chance, Fielder Jones, Jake Stahl, Jimmy Collins, Fred Clarke.

All factors duly weighed, Cobb agreed to talk with Navin, who in December was in New York for the American League winter meetings. They conferred at the Hotel Vanderbilt. Cobb insisted on a one-year contract. He would not commit beyond that. This appeared to be cautionary, in the event that the Tigers flopped (“It was for that reason—and because I didn't get along with Navin,” he said in later years.) In negotiating, he required that Navin agree not to interfere with his direction of the team, and grant to him all decisions on scouting of
minor-leaguers, accept his primary say-so on who would be signed, traded, or sold, and give him a voice on salaries paid. (“Otherwise Navin would have tried to tell me who to pitch and when.”)

It was a lot to demand. Navin deliberated for most of a day at the Vanderbilt. A deadlock was broken when Walter Briggs sided with Cobb. He would be paid $35,000 per year—up from his present $20,000-with-bonuses player's salary—and given the private office Jennings had enjoyed, along with expenses paid for the odd trip home to Georgia. At $35,000 and a few thousand more in previously established bonuses, he would become the highest-paid director of field operations in the game, other than part-owner John McGraw of the Giants and, possibly, Speaker in Cleveland.

On his birthday, December 18, he signed to boss the Tigers in 1921. “I had my lawyers read the contract three times,” he wrote in a memoir. “I didn't trust Navin.”

Thereby he also became, along with Speaker, one of only two player-managers then active in the majors. In the lobby, newsmen waited for the official word. “Well, I did it, boys,” announced Cobb, while Navin and Briggs stood smilingly by. “I feel like I've undergone a change of life.” To questioners he replied, “I'll expect a hustling club. If I have to crack down on players, that will be time to clear them off the roster.”

Damon Runyon of the
New York American
, who no longer wrote about baseball regularly and was gaining fame with his fiction, thought enough of Cobb's signing to join the press turnout. “That's quite a birthday present you're getting—thirty-five thousand dollars,” Runyon said. The Peach had always liked Runyon, who as a sportswriter had not been one of the New York sect who attacked his every aggressive act. Yet now he was short-tempered with the writer: “You're wrong. It's anything
but
a present. This thing has been forced on me!”

At a moment that called for a celebration—how many men ever got to manage in the big leagues?—he was experiencing doubts that he had made the wise move. His reputation would be on the line. “I had signed away my independence,” he told me, forty years later. “Up to now I'd been judged on what I did, alone. But no manager who ever lived could beat the blame when his men fucked up—didn't give it everything they had, boozed it up, alibied their mistakes, faked injuries. There were enough of that kind on Detroit's contract list to
give me a headache. I'd be judged by what they did. And there wasn't much time before training began to hang a price on some and run them off.”

Asked by Georgia friends that winter what would happen to his career, Cobb pulled a long face. “My hitting will get back to normal, because this time I'll be bearing down,” he predicted to his cousin, Harrison Gailey. “But I won't stay more than one season as manager if Veach, Sutherland, Young, Bush, Jones”—naming 1921 roster men—“lay down on me and we finish far out. I won't be associated with quitters.” He told Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola, “It will take three years for me to rebuild this team. Seventh place was where they belonged last season. The first thing I'll do is teach them to hit for percentage, not for the fences. I expect to see that job through.”

In February he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to inspect the Tigers' new training camp. Breckenridge Park was rutty, but no worse than the poor fields where Detroit had worked out in the past. If Navin wanted to save money in renting the place, Cobb did not propose to begin their changed relationship by putting up a squawk.

Back home, he met with associates who were negotiating to buy the minor-league Augusta franchise and physical plant. Cobb's end of it would be nearly fifty thousand dollars. He could afford the investment. When the deal went through, it meant he was co-owner of minor-league teams in two states, Rhode Island and Georgia, the wintertime manager of the San Francisco Seals in the Coast League, player-manager in Detroit, the owner of auto dealerships, cattle and cotton acreage, and holder of what he hoped would be a continued strong position on Wall Street.

One busy fellow … and pushing his luck.

“How much help are you prepared to give me?”
I asked of Navin and his partners at the start of 1921.

“Everything you need to win,”
Navin came back.
“My partners go along with that.”

……

“
His weak spine showing all the way, Navin did nothing of the sort. He sabotaged his own ball club. In my six years as manager, I had the worst ownership any manager ever suffered. At the same time, Navin wasn't giving the government an honest tax account on his gate receipts.”