Cobb (58 page)

ANOTHER STRESSFUL
season affected Cobb's diet. Stomach pains forced him to eat bland foods, such as eggs, fish, oatmeal, and mashed potatoes. He gave up eating meat. He was steadily on the road to banquets and testimonials in his honor and cooks were required to serve him special dinners. Developing a cough, Cobb stopped smoking cigars,
but by early 1924 he was back to consuming six or more Havanas per day. His drinking of hard liquor, never immoderate, remained unchanged. He signed one of his most lucrative outside contracts—$25,000 per annum to promote General Motors automobiles—and appeared across the eastern seaboard.

Long vanished now were the days when, as a hazed, ostracized rookie, his bats were sawed in half by Detroit veterans. In those days, Tyrus, on team road trips, would kill time by going off, alone, to tour the Statue of Liberty, Boston Tea Party docks, Ford's Theater, Mount Vernon, and other historical sites. Once he had stood in the crowd outside the White House. Now, three presidents—William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren Harding—had invited him inside, and they had exchanged autographs. He had played golf with Taft and Harding. He remembered, “I attended Masonic rites with Taft in Augusta. He interrupted it with his snoring. He weighed about three hundred. Sounded like a buzz saw. I had to nudge him awake.”

Not in the best of health, Cobb persisted in staying on in 1924–25 as the Tigers' player-manager, hoping to find a combination that would end the Yankees' three-year reign as champions. Time was running short. Headed toward middle age, Cobb had grown jowly and had developed liver splotches. In civilian dress he resembled a prosperous merchant or banker—or so he appeared until you saw him stripped; then he became 210 pounds of hard muscle. Damon Runyon of the Hearst press called him “Tire-us, the Jewel of Jawjah” for his endurance. Runyon said a good many observers felt that, contrary to widespread opinion, Ruth did not overshadow him except in power hitting. Other writers cited the judgment of some American League players in contending that Cobb still possessed more offensive and defensive abilities than the glorified Babe. For one basic consideration, he struck out far less than Ruth, the chronic fanner. (Over their careers Ruth compiled 1,380 strikeouts to Cobb's mere 357.) And the Peach personified fine points of American baseball that did not much interest the distance-obsessed Ruth. He held fast to his doctrine that games were meant to be won with a tight defense, by exploiting the hit-and-run, the disguised bunt, sacrifice fly, the squeeze play, hitting through holes, and the steal in its various forms—the delayed steal, double steal, stealing off the pitcher, the fadeaway slide into base, the “suicide” long lead off base, the spikes-high “threat” steal—along with the psychological
upsetting of opponents. You got the job done with daring, thinking two or three plays ahead, and outfoxing and outgaming the other team—and you commonly did it by small margins.

Yet sometimes a hero remains on the scene overlong, and the feeling grew that the game was passing by Cobb's methodology. “Ty is living in 1905,” said Bill Donovan. In the past ten years, home run totals in the big leagues had exploded. A bigger, stronger generation of players had emerged. In no consistent way could Cobb's approach offset long-ball hitting.

Cobb discouraged his men from taking a full swing most of the time. Homers were an incidental factor; bat control was everything. Assembling the Tigers for spring training in 1924 in Augusta, he stressed meeting the ball sharply for singles and doubles and going to the opposite field. And he wanted pitchers who could throw knee-high strikes—making batters hit into the dirt—and catchers who could fire throws to second base without leaving their crouch. He wanted base runners quick enough to execute the double steal. Bunters were instructed to put hard-to-handle backspin on the ball. The Tigers were told to spoil pitches with deliberate fouls until the pitcher made a mistake. Cobb valued men who were willing to crowd the plate and deliberately, painfully, let themselves be hit by pitches.

When he failed to have most of his needs filled, Cobb took matters into his own hands. For the first few weeks of the campaign he averaged a blazing .450 at bat. He was unable to steal in his former style—9 steals were all he had managed in 1923—but within five days in April he stole home base twice, against wily Ted Lyons of the White Sox and Bill Bayne of St. Louis. It was wonderful to see the old-timer work that most difficult of plays. Against the Yankees at Detroit in June, Cobb exchanged hard words with Babe Ruth and followed with a pair of triples and a single as the Tigers walloped New York, 10–4.

One day later came what fans everywhere had waited to see: a physical clash between Babe and Cobb. Not just a pushing match, Cobb later revealed, but the real thing, a release of four years of hostility. As could be expected, Cobb started it. Bob Meusel, a strong, silent type, came to bat against Detroit's relief pitcher, Bert Cole, with the Yankees leading 10–6 in the ninth inning. Ruth had batted just ahead of Meusel. Babe had fouled out after Cole threw a fastball at his
head. He warned Meusel, “Cobb signaled Cole to bean me. So watch out.”

From the outfield came another whistle from Cobb to Cole and Cole obediently hit Meusel in the ribs with a second fastball. Meusel threw his bat at Cole and charged the mound. “Before you knew it,” wrote one correspondent, “every player on both sides was involved.” Cobb raced in from the outfield and Ruth met him at the plate. Descriptions disagreed, but it was like two football fullbacks colliding head-on. They crashed, bounced off each other, and started exchanging punches. More than one thousand rioting Tiger fans attacked the Yankees, swinging seats uprooted from concrete. Police finally broke up the worst brawl of the season. They escorted the teams to their clubhouses through a mob gone wild. Cobb tried to reach Ruth again on the way out, but his blows were blocked. “You're a rotten cur dog!” yelled Meusel at Cobb. “Ruth would kill you if he had a chance.”

“Bring him around to the pass gate!” shouted Cobb. “I'll beat the hell out of both you and that nigger!”

The umpires forfeited the game to New York, Cole and Meusel were suspended for ten days each, and Meusel drew a hundred-dollar fine. Cole was fined fifty dollars, as was Ruth. Cobb was gleeful—he came out of it with no punishment, although his beanball signals had been intercepted by umpire Billy Evans and reported to Ban Johnson's office, and even though it had been the Peach who ran in 350 feet to collide with a waiting Bambino.

Seeing a possible Detroit pennant, Cobb performed at close to the same pace in succeeding weeks. His play and that of Harry Heilmann and Earl Whitehill, a left-handed addition to the pitching staff, put the Tigers into first place on June 23. The Yankees and the surprising Washington Senators were right on their heels. In a Boston series, Cobb scored four runs and stole four bases, one of which was home base. In a 13–7 beating of the Red Sox, he made obscene gestures to a hotheaded Boston-Irish audience. Fans littered the field with junk and, invading the diamond, tangled with the police. “Lurking beneath Cobb's uniform is a pyromaniac,” charged the
Boston Globe
. “He loves to start fires.”

Thereafter the Tigers faded. They could not keep up the pace. Ultimately they dropped out of contention. In late September, in Detroit, the Tigers faced the Yankees in a three-game series. Cobb's team couldn't
win the pennant, but could ruin New York's chances. Navin ordered a special two-hundred-man police patrol to control the expected trouble. But fans were peaceful enough while their team swept the series, ending the Yankee's title chances and their three-year domination of the league. Cobb, who made three timely hits in the set, was as big a pain as ever. He razzed New York's manager, the five-foot, four-inch Miller Huggins—“Hey, who's the midget?”—and verbally abused Ruth. Ban Johnson, in the league president's box, sent Cobb a note to stop the profanity. Ladies were in the house. “Tell the ladies to plug their ears,” came the reply.

It was not Ruth who retaliated in this series' last game, but Lou Gehrig. At the time, Henry Louis Gehrig was an insecure twenty-one-year-old from Columbia University, used as a pinch hitter. The muscular left-hander had failed a Yankee tryout in 1923 and had been farmed back to Hartford of the Eastern League. (“He couldn't field a lick then,” said one-time Yankee infielder Jimmie Reese, “but could use the bat. Nobody suspected that Lou would become one of the greats.”)

Fed up with Cobb's abuse, Gehrig and shortstop Everett Scott ran from the bench. Cobb ducked and their punches missed. Umpire Tom Connolly threw Gehrig and Scott out of the game. The Peach went unpunished, since he had not fought back. “We won eighty-six games that year,” Cobb was to characterize 1924, “and some of them came by getting the other side too mad to think.”

Cobb had acted throughout the season as if he had tasted from Ponce de León's mythical fountain of youth. His pitchers once more failed him. There were injuries. And the Tigers fell back to a third-place finish, six games behind Washington and the equally ageless Walter Johnson. But with 625 at-bats, T.C. broke his personal record of 605, and appeared in every one of the club's 155 games. Only three American League base stealers surpassed his mark of 23. “Stealing is becoming a lost art,” he complained. His batting average of .338 was 40 points above his team's aggregate average. Most pleasing of all to Cobb was that he led all league outfielders in fielding, committing only 6 errors for a fine .986 fielding percentage. He could still go and get them.

There was criticism that he would not have lost a championship by six games had he recognized that the home run was implanted to stay, and allowed the Tigers to swing freely for the fences. Under
restraint, they had collected a total of 35 homers to the Yankees' 98 and St. Louis's 67. Cobb's prejudice in this regard, however, never would change. So fixed in stone was “Cobb's Law” that in 1925 the Yankees and St. Louis each would knock 110 balls out of parks to Detroit's 67. “I wouldn't want Ruth's number of strikeouts against my name,” he said. That also went for most of the other sluggers coming up.

Detroit, the factory-workers' town with high auto-industry employment, set another sensational record at the box office. More than 1 million turned out, only thirty-eight thousand less than the Yankees could show. Navin was prospering, and he stopped hinting about replacing Cobb as field chief. Two men so opposite in goals would need to reach some concordance whereby they could live side by side. Gate revenue, and Cobb's solid support of the fans of a baseball-happy city, outweighed their personal differences and the petitions of Tiger players who could not live with their manager's driven, despotic ways.

As 1925 came around, Cobb's threatened eyesight became his most pressing concern. He needed the surgery, delayed since 1923, when his vision had become clouded, particularly during twilight games starting at 3:00 or 3:30
P.M.
or on gray-sky days. Printed material such as small agate type used in newspaper box scores had become difficult for him to read.

He disclosed to his ballplaying brother, Paul, “The ball looks a bit fuzzy … Sometimes I don't pick it up until it's near the plate. That's too late.”

One of his quips became applicable—in reverse. Until now, when asked about his hitting, he had used a lighthearted crack: “Sure, I hit .400 against the fastest pitchers. They have great speed and stuff—for the first sixty feet.” But by mid-1925 the final six inches to the batter's box no longer was a joking matter.

Specialists at the Wilmer Eye Clinic at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, in an examination conducted two years earlier, had been unable to complete their work. The fact that his condition had not been fully identified was the patient's fault. Distrustful of the medical profession ever since his botched tonsillectomy back in 1906,
he called off the eye tests before doctors had reached a conclusive finding. His fear of the result might have entered into that decision. Eventually he explained, “I wasn't ready for it then.”

Opposing pitchers, hearing rumors out of the Tiger camp of Cobb's possible trouble, disbelieved it. That the most hawklike eyes the game had known were not quite perfect was dismissed by opponents as one more Cobb trick, a fake. From opening day the Tigers played poorly, but he ripped everything—beating out bunts, driving screamers down the baselines, handling breaking pitches as well as ever. Still delaying eye tests, he stood among league leaders at a .390 average. He drove in four runs to beat the White Sox, 8–7, and homered twice to help beat the Yankees. “And he says he's going blind,” said rookie southpaw Bob “Lefty” Grove of the Athletics. “There's nobody in the league I hate to pitch to more.”

Despite Cobb's drumbeat hitting and that of Harry Heilmann and others, the Tigers never were in the championship chase. It was the most paradoxical of situations. Taught by their manager to hit and advance correctly, the Tigers were a batting circus in 1925. They scored far more runs than any of their competitors, with an output of 903 as against the 829 runs of second-place Philadelphia. The sixth-place Yankees, with Babe Ruth ailing and out of action for seven weeks, and with only 706 runs, were 197 behind Detroit's production.

Yet with all that offensive strength, the Tigers were on their way to a third- or fourth-place finish at best. Cobb was back to kicking around office furniture. It was a classic case of imbalance. He threatened to resign his job if his “misbegotten” pitchers did not begin winning and his infield did not shape up. His pitching staff went on failing collectively, so that by October only one member, a tired, thirty-seven-year-old Hooks Dauss, would win as many as 16 games. The club's ERA was 4.61.