Cobb (55 page)

He did spend forty thousand dollars of Navin's money while out west on a likely pair of Portland, Oregon, pitchers, Herman Pillette and Syl Johnson. That didn't guarantee his return to run the Tigers on the field in 1922. “I'm just scouting players as an accommodation for the ball club first in my heart,” he explained. In private, Cobb commented about Detroit to a Los Angeles writer: “Navin is a two-bit loser.”

He was far from home base, yet he easily arranged to stay in the headlines during the Coast League winter. One of the Seals' opponents, the Los Angeles–Vernon team, employed the services of a cross-eyed umpire named Steamboat Johnson. Johnson had set a league record when a count of bottles showed that some three hundred beer containers had been thrown at him after one of his decisions. Fans had presented Steamboat with a seeing-eye dog to guide him from the park to home. He was one of the richest characters that baseball had produced on any level.

Cobb took an immediate dislike to this sideplay. When Johnson called a San Francisco runner out on a close play at the plate, Cobb burst from the dugout to put the blast on Steamboat. After a verbal exchange, he ripped off Johnson's face mask and said, “You're blinder than a potato with a hundred eyes!” And hit Johnson on the nose.

If he thought that his fame would carry him past such behavior in a minor league, his judgment was wrong. Frank Chance, the one-time Peerless Leader of the Chicago Cubs and a tough man, was president of the Coast League. Chance was no admirer of Cobb's way of running the bases and his history of molesting umpires.

“You're fined one hundred and fifty dollars,” said Chance. “One more infraction and you're finished on the coast.”

“I won't pay it,” said Cobb. “Your umpire is incompetent.”

“Then go back to Detroit, where they put up with you,” declared Chance.

Cobb did leave for home, but by way of New York, where before a conclave of big-league owners he reintroduced the need for a pay scale enabling players to live “decently” and a system whereby permanently and totally disabled players would be supported for life by a system similar to the Workingmen's Compensation Act. He had been lobbying along this line for some time. But he could not obtain an affirmative vote on either of the projects. Baseball operators saw him as a chronic malcontent who had repeatedly put salary squeezes on Detroit and was talking a fifty-thousand-dollar package, should he elect to again perform in 1922—acts that would have the effect of forcing bigger paychecks for premium players throughout the leagues. Owners who soon would draw a record two-league seasonal total of 9.45 million fans also agreed that the ten thousand dollars they annually donated from World Series receipts to support the game's disabled was sufficient. Cobb's reaction was: what can you expect from a monopoly?

At home in Augusta he found Charlie still sickly. That condition would linger through what remained of their marriage. Father stayed at home for several weeks before leaving on one more big-game hunt. One of his daughters, the late Shirley Cobb Beckwith, who died at eighty in 1991, said in remembrance, “Mr. Cobb would line up us children like soldiers, review our school grades and piano playing—then he'd be gone for months. We never knew him except as a great man. We were afraid of him—afraid of his awful temper.”

FORTY YEARS
later, in 1961, sitting in an easy chair on the patio of his home at 48 Spencer Lane in Atherton, California, Cobb added a footnote to 1921: “It was right about then that I wrote a new will. Tore up the old one [written before he left for France during World War I]. One of the bequests at my death was for twenty thousand dollars … to go to a worthy Georgia student who couldn't afford college. I'd always regretted that I missed college. My students had to meet strict standards. Later on I enlarged on the Cobb Scholarship Fund to take care of several hundred kids.”

Ty Cobb would not go out of life known as a tightwad.

Babe Ruth, twenty-seven and approaching his peak, underwent what was seen as his comeuppance in 1922. He had a miserable season. After sweeping the league one year earlier in runs scored, home runs (59), and runs driven in, he now failed to place first in even one category.

By comparison, and though hard used at thirty-five, Cobb was a joy to watch that year. He would hit .401—the third time he had averaged past .400. No man had hit so high on three occasions; only one man, Rogers Hornsby, would equal him in .400 seasons.

The Babe's flop was seen as a retribution for whooping it up in bars, hotels, and clubs, where he broke most of the codes against drinking, gambling, night-owling, and sexual reveling. He turned off his bosses and many of a nation of followers when he let his physical condition slide. His behavior opened the door to a renewal of the feeling that the sober, fanatical Cobb was the greater player, the most consistently effective and probably the most valuable of his or any time.

Even before his home run output and other contributions nose-dived, Ruth was suspended by Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis for six weeks, beginning on opening day. Landis further fined the Yankee captain his share of the past autumn's World Series purse—in the
amount of $3,362—for violating a rule dating to 1911 prohibiting players of World Series games from appearing in exhibitions after the Series. Babe Ruth's All-Stars had appeared in 1921 from Buffalo, Elmira, and Jamestown to Scranton, partying as they went.

When Landis was a federal judge in Chicago, he was noted for his iron-handed decisions. He had sent men to prison for twenty years for violating the antidrinking Volstead Act. Hired to crack down on baseball and sanitize it, Landis cited other codes being ignored by Ruth. He hit the bottle with enthusiasm, gambled heavily at Jamaica and other racetracks—he once lost $25,000 on a single race in Havana—and at Hot Springs, Arkansas, casinos. “His horses finish about 5:00
P.M.
, but still he backs them,” jested Bob Considine of the Hearst press. Amidst it all, baseball's Falstaff refused a $50,000 salary offer, insisting on $1,000 per week, or $52,000, for 1922. Yankee president Jake Ruppert paid it. Reading of his demand in the papers, Cobb informed Georgia friends, “It's like I thought. Ruth hurts himself every time he opens his mouth—or a bottle.”

Fifty-two thousand dollars, a huge sum compared to the $8,500, $10,000, and $6,500 annually earned by other Yankee stalwarts such as Wally Schang, Bob Shawkey, and Wally Pipp, caused a negative public reaction. New York writers spoke of fans from Manhattan to the Bronx to Queens asking, “Why should Ruth break the bank when everybody else is paid so much less?” The playboy was too damned greedy. Nor should he have brawled with Pipp, one of the best men with his fists on the Yankees. Ruth in midseason fought at fieldside with the hefty Pipp. The first baseman slapped him around, leaving Ruth with welts and the embarrassing disclosure that he was not much of a fighter.

When the Babe came off the suspension on May 20, the Yankees stood in the league's first place. They appeared not to need their key run producer. Five days after that, he was suspended for throwing dirt at an umpire and cursing fans who booed him for striking out too often. A second suspension followed on June 19, for similar malfeasances. Two more suspensions came atop that, until Ruth had lost $1,500 in unpaid salary while benched. Not finding his groove for weeks, he did not reach the 14-home-run mark until July 6, and he trailed powerful Ken Williams of the St. Louis Browns in what had been Ruth's singular specialty. Also set back by a tonsil operation, a discouraged Ruth was on his way to a final 35-home-run season, a
drop of 24 from his 59 of 1921. Williams would become the new home-run champion with 39. Babe's hitting would fall to .315, a plunge of 63 points from his previous mark. The same was true for runs batted in—down from 171 to 99. His games played dropped from 152 to 110.

While Ruth was engaged in faltering, fans and writers who had dropped off Cobb's bandwagon after the Babe's arrival on the New York scene were again paying close attention to the Georgian. If he had another big year personally, and somehow managed the Tigers to a better finish, Cobb might well find himself back on top in general opinion. Grantland Rice thought as much. Other writers followed his lead.

“
WHAT RUTH
did concerned me not a damned bit,” said Cobb years afterward. “I had enough habitual dead asses on my second Detroit team to make a second-division finish almost guaranteed. The only reason I returned for another try was that I hated to go out with a loser. I was looking ahead to 1923 and 1924 when the right trades and deals with the best minor-league clubs could change everything.”

Reading between the lines, it was evident that one reason why Cobb remained as manager was that he stood on the threshold of monopolizing the all-time record book as no man had done.
Baseball Magazine
editorialized, “His have been monumental achievements. Now he is about to break every longtime offensive mark ever set. Honus Wagner still is chief in total hits with 3,420 safe hits. Ty's total is 3,055. In one more time around he will be all but assured of surpassing Wagner. He is also close to most seasons with an average of .300 or better. By 1923, Cobb no doubt will wipe that out with 18 straight years at over .300. It would be a tragedy were fate to deny him the crowning touches to his epic career.”

He didn't believe in fate. In luck, yes, to a degree, but fate was for the mystics. At Detroit's spring camp at Augusta, he used fear as a motivator. Applicants for Tiger jobs who didn't go all out were in town one day and aboard a train to elsewhere the next. In some people's opinion, he was much too tough. “He suspended me three days without pay for missing one fly ball,” nineteen-year-old rookie outfielder Floyd “Babe” Herman went about saying. “And this was just in training.” Herman would leave Detroit before long for the Brooklyn Dodgers, his talent unrecognized by Cobb. There he would average
.340, .388, and .393 to become, as one of the “Daffyness Boys,” the toast of Flatbush.

Dutch Leonard cursed Cobb to his face during their running dispute over how to pitch to such batting machines as Sisler and Speaker. Leonard quit the team in the spring, terming Cobb “a horse's ass,” leaving to run his Fresno, California, fruit farm and await his day of vengeance. He would return in 1924 in explosive form.

A picturesque former border-guarding Texas Ranger, Harry “Rip” Collins, who had won 14 games in two of the previous three seasons for the Yankees and Red Sox, joined Detroit, and almost at once lined up with the disgruntled players. Collins's published contribution later was, “Cobb stirred up bad blood in the club. I would say that more than half of us hated him. I couldn't figure out what he was trying to accomplish as Simon Legree. Finally, I stopped talking to him except when I couldn't avoid it.”

Within the next twenty-four months, fifteen Tigers would parade into Navin's office, asking either for a trade or Cobb's dismissal. Complaints ran from the tongue-lashings he handed out, to their disgust at having to supply water buckets in hot weather to Cobb's pet dog. A cur who had wandered in that March had been adopted by the boss. Each player was under instructions to pet the dog at least once a day. Why such a requirement? Veteran players saw symbolism in it—they were a “dog” of a team. When the pet disappeared, Cobb replaced him with an ocelot cub from the South American jungle, who scratched people.

It was evident to opposition scouts visiting Detroit's camp that Cobb was desperate to restore the Tiger glory of the 1907, 1908, and 1909 championship years any way he could. If he achieved a turnaround, he could retire in satisfaction. In interviews he missed few openings to point the finger at Navin for the caliber of talent supplied him. “A ball team is like a machine shop,” Cobb was quoted as saying. “It's a business. When you have a high state of efficiency, things run smoothly. You are turning out a good product, the workmen are happy. But if you fail to produce, if you are indifferent to quality, you can only blame the management. It is precisely the same problem of the field manager who takes a losing team and tries to make it over into a winner. The Tigers, when I took them over, were like a broken-down machine shop … filled with the losing spirit.”

That lackadaisical condition, he strongly implied, was due to the
failure of Navin and Briggs, over the winter, to sign infield replacements and dependable pitching. When the Yankees beat them to two sure-handed infielders, Jumping Joe Dugan and Everett Scott, they had to settle for three unproved infielders in Fred Haney, George Cutshaw, and Topper Rigney. Next, pitcher Howard Ehmke, a former 17-game winner for Detroit, asked to be traded. Ehmke's relationship with Cobb stood at the breaking point. The seven-year veteran found his manager too frantic, too hypercritical. His wish to go elsewhere was rejected. For now, Ehmke stayed with Detroit.

The Tigers lost their season's opener to the Cleveland Indians, 7–4, before dropping six straight games on the road. A little later, rubbing it in, on April 30 rookie Charley Robertson of the White Sox beat them, 2–0, with a rare, perfect, no-hit, nobody-reached-first-base gem. It was only the fifth such blanking in big-league history. In game footnotes, the Peach was portrayed as raging on the sideline, kicking bats and jockeying Robertson in an attempt to unsettle him. His temper was heated all the more because that spring Cobb was on the disabled list with injured leg ligaments, torn again when he tripped over a divot in the grass. Laid up for a month, walking with a cane, he returned on May 1, with the Tigers seemingly sliding out of contention.

PERHAPS THE
club was fed up with his ranting. Perhaps it was the example he set, beyond fiat, through his own performance, with a hitting outburst that put him close to the .400 mark in June and July. Perhaps the American League, with the exception of the Yankees and the surprising St. Louis Browns, was not as strong a league as judged. Possibly, too, it was gross overemphasis on the Ruth-style home run and neglect of all-around, timely hitting, as suggested by the 1,050 homers blasted in the majors in this season against 339 hit only a few years earlier. Whatever the causes, the Tigers righted themselves, went on a tear, and became a wholly different organization. Happiness gripped the clubhouse in June when they won twenty-two and lost only four. In July and August, the Cobbmen had a pair of eight-game winning streaks. They climbed to only five games behind the Yanks and Browns for first place. “I can taste the pennant,” said Cobb, who was swinging at .415 and leading the league, 13 points above Sisler of the Browns.