Cobb (56 page)

But the Yankees and Browns kept winning steadily, too, and yielded less ground than was needed for the accomplishment of a
Detroit miracle. It was a dogfight. One of Cobb's more unusual acquisitions, the blimp-shaped Bob “Fatty” Fothergill—five feet, ten inches, 260 pounds—responded outstandingly as a pinch hitter. Fothergill, wearing a size-52 uniform, came from the International League. His eating habits approached Ruth's. In one Yankee game, when Fatty waddled to the batter's box, New York pitcher Lefty O'Doul called to Cobb, “The rules say that only one man can bat at a time!”

Cobb replied, “So what?”

“Then why are there two men standing at the plate?”

Despite his bulk and slowness afoot, Fothergill batted .322 on the season. The team's climb to the first division brought on a rush for tickets. People lined up a block away to obtain favorable seats in a Navin Field about to be expanded to thirty-seven thousand capacity. Hundreds camped at the gate all night, sitting by bonfires. “Of course,” reported Fred Lieb, “Navin quietly raised the seat prices by two bits.” By October, Navin's paid attendance would set a franchise record of 851,000 paid admissions, ranking with the leading teams.

Cobb's $50,000 contract was structured to pay him an override of ten cents for every ticket sold beyond 700,000, and he was also paid $2,500 for public-relations appearances during the season. That left him, according to several sources, slightly ahead of Babe Ruth in baseball-only income, with endorsements not included. “Ruth,” Cobb later caustically noted, “endorsed whorehouses by word of mouth. He talked a lot. I advertised milk and Cobb candy.”

But misfortune arrived as the season moved along. During a dispute at St. Louis, Cobb tromped on umpire Frank Wilson's foot with his spikes and was suspended by officials for three days. Harry Heilmann, with 21 home runs to date, fractured his collarbone in August; the big slugger was gone for the season. Two pitchers, Lil Stoner and Carl Holling, were caught drinking in Boston at a late hour; Cobb fired them on the spot. Team hitting cooled off. Only one pitcher, rookie Herman Pillette, threw well, and by September the back-to-normal Tigers were out of the race.

Having been given the opportunity to reach the World Series and failing to have made it there, a frustrated Cobb left for Georgia within hours of closing day. His whip-cracking, punitive methods had worked for a while, but not over the long run. Detroit had barely beaten out
Tris Speaker's Clevelanders for third place, with a 79–75 final mark. However, a few bright spots encouraged him. The team had won eight more games than in 1921. Navin's record box-office draw and Cobb's personal batwork meant that he could negotiate for more money in 1923, if he elected to stay on as manager. His ability to improve a man's hitting was again evident. Detroit as a unit had batted a spectacular .305, which was 18 percentage points above the pennant-winning Yankees, who averaged .287.

Against that, the Yankees, now on the way to compiling a dynastic sweep of American League championships—in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1927, and 1928—had been 22 percent more effective on defense than Detroit. Cobb could only wish he had such double-play mechanics as New York's second baseman Aaron Ward and shortstop Ev Scott. Despite the prevailing home-run mania, the cutting off of enemy runs remained as vital as it always had been.

His other comfort was his own .401 bat average, at an age when most men were winding down careers as reserves and nearing retirement. Leg injuries in his thirty-sixth year had limited him to 137 games, but he made them count, with 99 runs scored and 99 runs driven in. His 211 base hits in 526 trips to the plate computed into a mark topped only by Sisler's .420. In just one way could the Peach be seen as slipping—his stolen-base totals of the 1909–15 period had stood at 76, 75, 83, 61, 52, 35, and 96. Now he could steal only 9 times on battered legs. At the same time, few men in their prime could match Cobb's 42 doubles and 16 triples of 1922.

However, it was an ordinary ground ball struck by him in May that after the season ended caused more furor than anything involving Cobb and a Louisville Slugger stick since the ugly Larry Lajoie affair of 1910.

At the Polo Grounds on a soggy field, Cobb had pushed a grounder to Ev Scott at shortstop. Scott juggled the ball and Cobb beat out the throw by part of a step. Fred Lieb, scoring for Associated Press, ruled it a base hit. John Kieran, the official league scorer, called it an error. In his
Baseball As I Have Known It
, Lieb explained, “Irwin Howe, who was the American League statistician, took his figures day by day from the Associated Press box scores. Howe did so in this case, and in October it meant the difference between a .401 for Cobb as against
.3995, using Kieran's scoring.” Lieb quite properly offered to defer to Kieran, since Kieran held official status. But Ban Johnson, for once taking Cobb's side in a dispute, stood behind the AP's judgment and certified the Peach at .401.

With almost anyone else the dispute would have faded out. With Cobb it spread nationally. Some members of the Baseball Writers Association of America loudly condemned what became known as the “Case of the Two-Point Base Hit,” insisting that Cobb be given a .3995. Lieb reported, “Vitriolic telegrams were exchanged among the BWAA.” Balloting of the eleven chapters of the BWAA was held and the vote, two chapters abstaining, was 5–4 in favor of lowering Cobb's average so that he would miss another .400 season.

Cobb was furious. He saw his long-running feud with the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston press exemplified in this attempt to deny his just rights. From Augusta he spoke contemptuously of the BWAA: “Why should I give a damn what those twenty-five-dollar- and thirty-five-dollar-a-week newspaper sons of bitches think?” Visiting New York in November, he played host at a dinner for a few famous sportswriters and editors whom he had found supportive—Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Granny Rice, Gene Fowler, and Bill Phelon. Their competitors were not invited. During the evening he was chided by his guests for abusing their fellow journalists. As the Georgian remembered it decades later, Runyon said, “They're all for Ruth, of course, in picking the greatest player. I say they're wrong. But you have to live with these writers.”

“Not me,” said Cobb. “I'm fed up with those phonies and I may file a lawsuit.”

“Worst thing you could do,” counseled Ring Lardner. “In a pissing match with the big daily papers, the press always gets the last splash.”

Cobb claimed that a secret conspiracy existed to rob him. “In May of 1921,” he fumed, “the scorers took three safe hits away from me and added two more times at bat that I didn't have. That happened in New York. It's just one more example of knifing me.” He recalled 1913, a season in which he should have been credited with a .400-plus mark. Some “fancy pencilwork” had made it a .390.

Long after, in the 1950s and 1960s, several retired eastern sportswriters I consulted pretty much agreed that, whenever made at home in Detroit, questionable hit-or-error decisions often went in the Peach's
favor; on the road it was the opposite. This was 1920s baseball, when unsupervised official scorers sometimes showed their own form of civic boosterism in reports they turned in. A little padding also gained the statisticians some favor with certain players.

Umpire Billy Evans, once the loser in a bloody fistfight with Cobb, felt that Sir Tyrus arrogantly went out of his way to antagonize the game's officials, scorekeepers included. It was then the standard practice of team managers to present the umpires and the evening newspapers with their starting lineups some ten to fifteen minutes before game time, which was usually 3:00 to 3:30
P.M.
That enabled beat writers to wire their downtown sport departments and catch early editions with the nominated batteries. Almost alone, Cobb refused to cooperate. His starting nine was “confidential,” his own business, until the last moment.

Ban Johnson's office sent Cobb a memo, insisting that he release his pitcher's name in time to accommodate the press box. “Again Cobb called us writers two-bit sons of bitches,” wrote Lieb of the
New York Evening Post
. “I gave him some good roasts in the paper in 1922 and 1923. And then he called me into his dugout. He challenged me to fight it out, man-for-man. I declined. Nobody in his right mind would tangle with that wildcat. He fought by no rules and had maimed too many people with his Jack Dempsey stuff. Not to mention his Wild Bill Hickok act with a loaded gun.”

However, Cobb did finally disclose his concealed reason for not supplying pregame information. “It's the bookmakers,” he revealed. “Unless the bookies know ahead of time who I'm pitching, they can't form a betting line. They're only guessing.”

As for the crowds, lacking the advantage of stadium public address systems, they learned the names one or two minutes before the first pitch. A man in a derby hat, standing at home plate with a megaphone, typically would bellow, “Pitching for Washington—Walter Johnson! Catching—Patsy Garrity!” Usually the complete lineups were given. This served well enough with such easy names as Bill Doak, Joe Judge, Snooks Dowd, Max Flack, Addie Joss, and Ivy Wingo. But when the megaphone man had to deal with such twisters as Pembroke Finlayson, Dominick Mulrennan, Ossee Schreckengost, Grover Lowdermilk, Val Picinich, Elam Vangilder, Jefferson Pfeffer, and Ivy Higgenbotham, the pronounciations drew laughs. So did such oddities as Pickles Dilhoefer, Chicken Hawks, Yam Yaryan, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Baby Doll Jacobson.

Charlotte Marion Lombard Cobb—“Charlie”—was a long-suffering wife. By 1923, she had undergone one miscarriage, one premature birth, serious postpartum complications, and was warned by doctors never again to become a mother. “She's not built for the strain,” said Ty Cobb's mother, Amanda, who knew about such things. Amanda had been only fifteen years old herself, when, after long, difficult hours of labor, she delivered the seven-pound son christened Tyrus Raymond.

According to family sources, Charlie Cobb's parents were offended by the fact that her husband was not in attendance at three of the births. Al Ginn, part-time chauffeur for Cobb and his favorite relative, felt that Charlie was unprepared and poorly suited for life with such a fast-moving, tempestuous mate. Somehow Charlie, the convent girl bred into a society of garden parties, cotillions, and southern gentility, stayed on, bore children, and was discreet about anything she said to the inquisitive press. Cobb became even more withdrawn from and unavailable to her in the 1920s. If Charlie had not been able to retreat for long periods to the Lombard clan's estate in Augusta, she might early on have become an unusual woman in her circle, a divorcée. “When Tyrus wasn't going around making baseball people hate him,
he could be sweet to his wife,” attested an old Georgia friend. “I guess he sort of loved her. With Charlie, I think she was mostly scared. For sure she wasn't happy.”

FACING OVERLAPPING
troubles—domestic, occasional business-venture setbacks, an elusive pennant—Cobb disappeared early in 1923 into the backwoods of Wyoming, Colorado, and Canada and the mountains of northern Mexico. His aim was to kill the rare “Big Three” of bighorn sheep, the Rocky Mountain, Mexican, and Canadian varieties. He had bagged the first two as of 1923, lacking only the third.

Cobb's hunting expedition was motivated in part, that spring, by off-season rumors that he might be fired as manager and replaced by an old Detroit favorite, Bill Donovan. Cobb maintained an office back of the third-base stands at Navin Field and there he read in a Boston paper that the colorful forty-seven-year-old Donovan, now managing New Haven in the fast Eastern League, was “likely” to take his job. When Navin came by his office, Cobb asked, “What's this about Donovan?”

“Nothing to it,” said Navin.

“Suppose I don't believe you?” came back Cobb.

“Well, if you're not happy … ,” replied Navin, seeming to give his highly paid club leader an out, if he wanted one.

“Happy? Damned right I'm not!” barked Cobb, releasing his frustration. “We're headed for third or fourth place again, and I don't see you doing anything about it.” He handed Navin a list of players that he urged be obtained. “Get me those boys and we can do some good.”

On the list one year earlier had been the name of twenty-two-year-old Henry “Heinie” Manush from Tuscumbia, Alabama. Cobb had been tipped off to Manush by a hardware salesman who had seen him play in the Western Canada League, and the Peach had put out inquiries. Navin had not heard of Manush. Nor was he much impressed. “Get me Manush and stop wasting time,” went on Cobb. “All he did last season was hit .376 with Omaha, with forty-four doubles and twenty homers.”

The Manush case was decisive to Cobb's plans. If Navin had failed to land left-handed outfielder Manush, he said in later years, almost certainly Tyrus's career would have ended in Detroit and he would have retired, waited a year, and signed with another team—probably
Cleveland—or quit baseball to expand his two automobile dealerships, buy Coca-Cola franchises, or, a growing possibility, run for the Georgia state senate. All this was forgotten when Cobb, brushing aside Navin, personally signed Manush.

Heinie Manush was young and raw, exactly the type that T.C. enjoyed rebuilding. His bad habits were not fixed. In 1923 spring training, Cobb converted Heinie from a dead pull-hitter to using the entire field, taught him patience at bat and how to keep a notebook—as Cobb did—on rival pitchers' tendencies. Rookie Manush responded with 25 doubles and triples and a .334 average; within three seasons he became the American League's champion hitter at .378. One day he would become a Hall of Famer. “Ty Cobb was always on my ass,” reminisced Manush before his death in 1971. “If I went without a hit on Friday, he wouldn't speak to me on Saturday. I couldn't like him as a man, no way. He ran things like a dictator. But as a teacher—well, he was the best.”