Cobb
Authors: Al Stump
OBB
A Biography
by Al Stump
with a foreword by Jimmie Reese
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
1994
To my wife, Jo
Â
“The honorable and honest Cobb blood ⦠never will be subjected. It bows to no wrong nor to any man ⦠the Cobbs have their ideals and God help anyone who strives to bend a Cobb away from such.”
âTy Cobb, 1927
“Ty Cobb, the greatest of all ballplayersâand an absolute shit.”
âErnest Hemingway, 1948
ONTENTS
THE LIFETIME RECORD OF TY COBB
5. FOR SALE, ONE REBEL KID, $25
8. PILGRIM WITH A PANCAKE GLOVE
13. THE GREATEST PLAYER WHO EVER LIVED
16. EMERGENCE OF A MILLIONAIRE
20. NEW DECADEâNEW ENEMIESâNEW JOB
21. “WHY CAN'T THEY DO IT MY WAY?”
24. SLUGGING IN A CAREER TWILIGHT
25. “REPREHENSIBLEâBUT NOT CRIMINAL”
APPENDIX: TY COBB'S UNBROKEN RECORD OF HOME-PLATE STEALS
LLUSTRATIONS
COBB IN EARLY YEARS WITH DETROIT TIGERS
THE TIGER OUTFIELD, 1907â1912: DAVY JONES, COBB, SAM CRAWFORD
COBB AND NAP LAJOIE IN 1910 CHALMERS AUTO
COBB SLIDES INTO THIRD AGAINST JIMMY AUSTIN
SLIDE INTO HOME RUN BAKER THAT TOUCHED OFF NEAR-RIOT
CHRISTY MATHEWSON AND COBB IN ARMY UNIFORM, 1918
TY COBB, HERSCHEL COBB, BOBBY JONES, AND BIRD DOG
COBB AT 1925 WORLD SERIES, PITTSBURGH
EDDIE COLLINS, COBB, TRIS SPEAKER ON 1928 A'S
BABE RUTH AND COBB WITH YOUTH BASEBALLERS
OREWORD
BY
J
IMMIE
R
EESE
Babe Ruth had it right about his greatest rival, Ty Cobb, when he told me, “Cobb's the meanest, toughestâââwho ever walked onto a field. He gave everybody hellâme includedâbecause he couldn't stand to lose. All he wanted was to beat you on Saturday and twice on Sunday. Otherwise he was miserable.”
I'm a former New York Yankee infielder and, at age ninety-three, the oldest surviving major-leaguer in the Association of Professional Ballplayers. I serve now as a coach with the California Angels. Not many are left who saw Ty Cobb on the rampage in the years 1905â28. None of us can ever forget him. At bat, his eyes blazed at pitchers. He was the only ballplayer I can remember who started each game with a snarl and ended it the same way. What a wildcat he was. Cobb was so shrewd and talented in every aspect of the game that he didn't need to make baseball a war, but he was always in a battle. In a day when the game was already a tough enough fight, Cobb added a new dimension. He'd force errors time and again by his wild offensive play, such as stealing home base against a veteran battery. We called him “Jack Dempsey in spikes.” The story is quite true that Cobb filed his spikes to razor sharpness to first intimidate opponents and then gore them. I
don't know how he stood twenty-four years of punishment from the players who retaliated. Call it another Cobb “incredible.”
Here's a typical story about him: One day a Yankee rookie pitcher threw a beanball at Cobb and it nicked his ear. Big Ty didn't say a thing then, but next time up he drag-bunted down the first-base line. The pitcher went to handle the bunt, and the next thing he knew he was flying through the air, halfway knocked out. Cobb's spikes had actually cut the pants and part of the shirt right off him. The man was left bloody, ragged, and permanently scarred. Lou Gehrig of the Yankees, a sweet guy, became angry enough to say, “Cobb is about as welcome in American League parks as a rattlesnake.” Another true fact was that far fewer beaners and dusters were aimed at Cobb than at any other hitter, because of fear. I can't tell you where he studied psychology, but he was a master at it.
Babe Ruth, my roommate on the Yankees, once went on a hunting trip with Cobb, and Ty wouldn't share the same tent with Babe. He refused to get friendly with anyone on another club even while relaxing in the off-season.
Babe, of course, became baseball's biggest box-office figure; Cobb was growing old when Ruth's home-run output had the country going crazy. Ruth was all power and Cobb was mostly science, with some power added. They broke fairly even in statistics. Ty Cobb's .367 lifetime batting average is still the best ever recorded, whereas Babe averaged .342. Cobb remains tops today in runs scored, with 2,244 to Babe's 2,174. Ruth edged over Cobb in slugging average, runs batted in, and by far in homers. So the spoils were fairly even. Which of them was the greatest player of all time? Who contributed most to his team? They'll be arguing that one well into the next century. I guess you know whom I favorâthe one they never called a “rattlesnake” in the dugouts, the one with a big belly. But what a wonderful player was the Detroit Tiger, as you'll learn in reading this book by a savvy baseball writer, Al Stump, who knew Ty Cobb well.
Editor's Note
: Jimmie Reese, who wrote this foreword early in 1994, died while this book was in the final stages of production in July 1994.
REFACE
Ty Cobb always was a taciturn man; he grew more and more reclusive with advancing age, and upon reaching seventy-three in 1960 he was holed up in a pair of dreary homes worth $5 million in Atherton, California, and at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Baseball's greatest, most thoroughly disliked player of this century lived without electric lights (candles only in one of his hideouts) and without telephone service (in both). The multimillionaire had been estranged from his five children decades earlier. Two wives had charged extreme cruelty in divorces, each deposing that the Georgia Peach was uncontrollable when crossed or drunk, or whenever he was reminded of how he had regularly bloodied opponents with his spikesâ“Cobb's kiss,” as one victim, Frank “Home Run” Baker, called his slashing.
Cobb chose me to ghostwrite his memoirs early in 1960 largely on the recommendation of New York editor, biographer, and Hollywood screenwriter Gene Fowler, and of Grantland Rice, dean of sportswriters. He had fired several previous ghosts who had displeased him in one way or another. Various other autobiographical projects had fallen through.
As a U.S. Navy combat correspondent in World War II, I had met
General Douglas MacArthur. “Take the writing job,” counseled MacArthur, an old West Point shortstop, who was Cobb's number-one fan and close friend. “The world has known only one like him.”
So began a turbulent period of close to one year with the most brilliant player who ever lived. Cobb's competitiveness and truculence remain unmatched in American sport. His compulsion to win was awesome. As Paul Gallico wrote, “There was a burning rage in Ty Cobb never far from the surface. He brought a fury, cruelty and a viciousness heretofore unencountered even in the roughest kind of play.” Gallico, a longtime sports editor at the New York
Daily News
who closely studied Cobb in his late career, felt that Cobb's weird conduct, both on and off the field, could have been signs of significant mental illness.
It was to be expected that a man as abidingly competitive as Cobb, as emotionally wrapped up in what his career was and wasn't, would not be able to maintain a detached objectivity about that career. Too, the memories of elderly men are notoriously fallible. Therefore his version of long-ago events is not to be taken as unvarnished factâalthough his recall was often strikingâso much as an index of the way he saw things as having happened.
What resulted from our collaboration was
My Life in Baseball: The True Record
, which was finished and at the publishers before Cobb died in July of 1961. We first conceived the book in January of 1960, traveling together to various parts of the country, including New York, Detroit, Georgia, Arizona, his home in Atherton, California, his lodge at Lake Tahoe, and my beach house in Santa Barbara, California.
It was the Georgia Peach's combination of acute intelligence and powerful, sometimes uncontrollable passions, placed in the service of his remarkable physical abilities, that made him the embodiment of baseball excellence as the game was played in his day. Precisely that personality is demonstrated in the way that he could shape his recall of what actually took place into something closer to his heart's desire.
One reason for the tediously slow going on the first book was that the records of his 24 seasons, 3,033 games, and 11,429 at-bats were badly jumbled, out of sequence, and fading in clarity. He had set more than ninety major-league records at various points in his incredible, unequalled run from 1905 through 1928. He was the original baseball Hall of Famer, the first named to the shrine, and we were enmeshed in yellowing game descriptions, photos by the hundreds, statistics, correspondence,
old contract copies, and sporting journals published before the turn of the twentieth century.
That 1961 autobiography was very self-serving. Cobb had the final say in its contents, accorded him by the publisher. And when we did not agree, which was often, it was his word that was accepted by Doubleday. The book sold moderately well and was called by some one of the finest books of its kind. But it was a subsequent article I wrote for
True Magazine
, which Bob Considine called “possibly the best sports story I have ever read,” that won sports awards and, finally, a contract for a movie based on the relationship between Cobb and myself, which is scheduled for release in late 1994.
During the long stretches of time we spent together, my feelings for Ty Cobb were often in flux. My respect for his greatness, my contempt for his vile temper and mistreatment of others, my pity for his deteriorating health, and my admiration for his stubbornness and persistence produced a frustrating mix of emotions. With so much material left over, there was need for another manuscript, but it wasn't until three decades later that I finally felt compelled to put the real Ty Cobb to rest. Since much of the material is presented in the first person, as Cobb told it to me, the reader is invited to watch not merely Ty Cobb in action on the diamond, but his memory at work as well.
âAl Stump
Southern California
July 4, 1994
ROLOGUE
“I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even close to him as the greatest all-time ballplayer. That guy was superhuman, amazing.”
Casey Stengel, 1975
“Few names have left a firmer imprint upon the pages of the history of American times than has that of Ty Cobb. For a quarter of a century his aggressive exploits on the diamond, while inviting opposition as well as acclaim, brought high drama ⦠This great athlete seems to have understood from early in his professional career that in the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.”