Cobb (14 page)

Rucker broke off their association after a clash over use of a bathtub. In the early low minor leagues it was the standard thing for players
to dress in uniforms at their boardinghouse or hotel quarters, rather than at the park, and undress back home after games. The facilities at the Tourists' park offered only sponges and cold water. When on the road it was Cobb's routine to beat Rucker to their room in order to take the first hot bath. One evening that schedule was reversed, and when Cobb hurried home he found Rucker pleasurably soaking in their hotel tub. Cobb cried, “What are you doing there?” Replied Rucker, “What do you think?” Grabbing the pitcher by his shoulders, Cobb tried to wrestle his slippery body from the tub. Rucker resisted. Water and soapsuds spilled. “You gone crazy?” yelled Rucker. Cobb stared at him—“with the wildest eyes I ever saw in a human,” claimed Rucker later—and wound up as if to strike him. Rucker faced a man trembling with rage.

“You don't understand!” Cobb gritted. “
I've got to be first at everything—all the time!
”

The amiable left-handed pitcher from Crabapple, Georgia, who would reach the big leagues with Brooklyn in 1907 and win 134 games in his time, found himself another roommate.

Cobb always denied the tub story, but Rucker had a witness who had walked in toward the end of the encounter. It was one more signal to the Tourists that Cobb wasn't “normal” and could be dangerous if provoked, even in a small way. “He was a strange bird, the whole ball club knew it,” said Rucker. “Say something to him and he was likely to give you a dirty look.”

At Warren Park Cobb hung his clothes on a clubhouse peg apart from the others, replied curtly to questions, and was not a catalyst for team rallies. Given the hit-and-run sign while on first base, he might or might not accept it. When signaled by Roth to move left, right, or deeper in the outfield, he would shake off the order to stay in the place he preferred. His season's error total crept up until it reached 13, for a low .927 fielding average. Yet Cobb was Augusta's best clutch hitter. Without his ability to place balls through infield holes for singles and doubles, the Tourists would stand worse than fourth place in the league.

According to Rucker's recollection, Cobb easily led the league in bench-jockeying. Most such jeering was done merely to annoy and distract. Cobb pushed it to the point of field fights. Calling a bald opponent “skinhead” was a warm-up for him. If someone had an arrest
record, he would hear “jailbird!” or “leg-irons.” An ugly man was “pigface” or “ratface.” The Royston Rooster learned in advance of a player's weakness, and in a high screech made sure the crowd knew of it.

Jacksonville, Florida, had a pitcher, Lefty Betts, who was proud of his control and sinkerball. With Cobb at bat, Betts was set to deliver when he heard the yell, “Give me your Lady Godiva!” It came from Cobb.

“My what?” asked Betts.

“Your Lady Godiva!” barked Cobb. “A sinker that's got nothing on it!”

Betts let go his best beanball. Cobb ducked. On the next pitch—a sinkerball that he knew positively would follow—he drilled a double into center field to beat Jacksonville, 3–1.

On the field he was a questionable asset, off it a loner; how could anyone figure such an odd character? On road trips where rail service was undependable, the Tourists sometimes resorted to horse-and-buggy transport. Horsepower was needed after they played league games as visitors in a Sally League park, then moved on to nonleague “hick-towner” games against rural teams miles away from a train line. In such traveling, ballplayers grew hungry and raided orchards of fruit and gardens of vegetables. When it rained, the Tourists put up crude gunnysacking and canvas until things cleared and they could resume their jolting ride along dirt roads to communities spread about Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Florida. Cobb's shelter was always pitched well away from those of his teammates. Arriving at their destination, he would find a boardinghouse not being used by other Tourists.

Across the Southeast the breach between Cobb and his teammates became a topic of conversation among baseball men. One day in mid-season, a businessman named Charles D. Carr, who was about to join Bill Croke as a major stockholder of the Tourists franchise, called Cobb aside, put a friendly hand on his shoulder, and asked, “What's the real problem, Ty, behind all this dissension?”

Cobb stared at Carr and replied, “Nothing, except that most of your boys and Roth are sons of bitches.” He walked away.

So it went for him, a rebel in the ranks, through his first full season. Heavy June rains hit the Sally League. Cobb caught a cold he couldn't shake and played mechanically, without zip. Then, in midsummer, George Leidy came into the picture. “He made all the difference in the world to me,” remembered Cobb.

Nearing forty, Leidy, a good-natured, softspoken veteran of the southern-southwestern U.S. minor leagues, played in the Augusta outfield next door to Cobb, and believed that the fractious rookie was a fine talent in the making. In midseason Leidy was named manager of the Tourists, replacing Andy Roth. With Roth gone, Ty was open to suggestions, and Leidy began a course of instruction. Initially it amounted to a suggestion here and there; since Cobb was listening, Leidy broadened the lessons. He was equipped to do an expert job; he was a former Class AA star and had done some big-league scouting. Articulate, perceptive, Dad Leidy was known to have a touch for identifying raw prospects who might move up the ladder.

Stationed next to him on the field, Leidy noted Cobb's weaknesses, including a growing taste for hard drink. Branching out socially, he had joined a group of college-age sports from well-off Augusta families
who hit the bottle, bet on horse races, and dallied with girls from Broad Street bars. Leidy saw him reporting to work hung over from partying. When I acted as Cobb's collaborator in the early 1960s, he often thought back to that time: “I was losing my ambition to go higher and knew it. Well, hell, I didn't know what I was doing.” And: “Just a half-smart kid against that bastard Roth and his team.”

Soon after taking charge of the Tourists, Leidy invited Ty to take a trolley ride with him to a nearby amusement park. He had noticed that Cobb's mind worked faster than others', that he thought ahead of the inning at hand. He had been held back by Con Strouthers, Roth, and his own ungoverned temper. The two sat on a park bench for the first of what would become a series of talks. Realizing that it would be useless to criticize him, Leidy worked on his imagination. Cobb always afterward credited his new boss as “changing my life one hundred percent.”

The older man did all the talking. Ty listened, and remembered Leidy saying, “Augusta is nothing. In New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities they have ballparks that would swallow several the size of the one we play in. They wouldn't open the gates for our kind of draw. You've heard of the Polo Grounds and the huge new one they're planning in Chicago, Comiskey Park? Will seat fifty thousand. Up there the big-time arenas are like the ones the Romans used for sports shows. You sure should see them.” Leidy told how teams rode in private railway cars with special food, stayed at the best hotels. As for being well known, U.S. presidents shook the hands of the top players. Newspapers played them up in bannerlines and photo spreads.

The old-timer caught Ty's full attention when he mentioned that baseball was verging on becoming big business, that six- and seven-thousand-dollar salaries for stars were around the corner. Ty's annual contract was for just over six hundred dollars.

Nobody reached the majors, said Leidy, without long, hard preparation. The National League's marvelous Honus Wagner of Pittsburgh had been an ordinary infielder until he built himself a trench around shortstop, dug in, practiced endlessly on bad-hop grounders in bare feet, and became the very best at his position. Christy “Big Six” Mathewson had gone, through discipline and application, from a poor-control pitcher to a strikeout king, winner of 33 games in 1904 for the
New York Giants. Other cases were related, such as that of the New York Highlanders' Willie Keeler, a small man who worked at hitting until his hands bled.

In successive weeks Leidy built incentive. He came to the point with: “You don't know what you've got. It's my belief that in a year or two, no more, you can be up there making ten times the money you're getting now. For one thing, you have faster reactions and more breakaway speed than almost anyone I've seen and I've seen the best of them. I'm sure you can become a better hitter than ninety-nine percent of the big boys. But it won't happen if you don't straighten up. Stop breaking training. Stay sober. Apply yourself every minute. You're not playing ball, you're playing
at
it.”

So Cobb always told the Leidy story, his favorite piece of autobiography. As dime-novelish as it sounded, he insisted that every word of it was true. Cobb became sold on growing up and becoming a success when Dad Leidy had put a hand on his shoulder and “with tears in his eyes” promised him, “You can go down in the history books, have every lad in America idolizing you.” And maybe the story was mainly true, at that. When he spoke of meetings between himself and Leidy in future years—“emotional, a wonderful shared feeling between us”—Cobb was being truthful.

Persuasion led to extra batting practice by the hour. When the Tourists were idle, Leidy pitched Ty curves, knucklers, balls in on the fists and low and away, change-ups, chin-grazers, and “lightning” (a term then used for fastballs). He broke down Cobb's erratic batting form, restructuring his cut at the ball. The veteran preached against overstriding, a Cobb habit, and converted him to a controlled, six-inch strider from all three stances: open, straightaway, and closed. Leidy gave him a “quiet head,” with no more bobbing of the skull, shoulders, and hips, which translated into a smooth, level arc of the bat. They worked on grip. As a youth Ty had experimented with the hands-apart choke hold, but then switched to a big, free swing, providing power but inevitably a string of strikeouts. “Forget home runs,” Leidy advised. “Move your hands up and spread them a few inches.” (Cobb habitually choked the bat for most of the rest of his days.) A nervous hand-hitch between the time the pitch was released and reached the plate was corrected.

Leidy was destiny in a dirty sweatshirt—cussing, berating,
demanding improvement. He made Ty feel foolish by tying a rope around his waist and having an assistant coach jerk him onto his rump when he lunged at a pitch outside the strike zone. Cobb hated to be dumped, but he took it. Leidy drove a tall stake in the ground, put a ball atop it, and had his pupil cleanly slice it off, a forerunner of modern batting-tee practice. Since nobody had corrected it, Cobb was a guesser at what kind of pitch was coming. “Guess hitters don't get out of Cowturd, Iowa,” lectured Leidy. “Get deep in the box, take a longer look at the spin, be ready for anything.”

The ambidextrous Leidy pitched to him only left-handed, since lefties were Cobb's most pronounced weakness. Patiently, Leidy went on to show how, with the front shoulder pointed at the pitcher, it should remain there until the last split second, a delayed action enabling Ty to connect with late-breaking curves and outside pitches. Cobb had big paws—hands and wrists. The coach acted out in slow motion how to employ another source of power, the sharp snapping of the wrists upon contact with the ball.

Daily, until the Augusta field was dark, Leidy tutored him on the quick hip pivot, on following through on his swing, on hit-and-run technique, on how to duck a beanball by collapsing straight down instead of falling back or forward. Some of the classes were held in the early mornings. Too tired after long sessions to join his downtown college gang, Ty began sleeping organized hours. He had no idea of diet. George Leidy did. Alcohol was out “ninety-nine percent of the time” by Cobb's estimate.

In San Francisco some thirty years later a noted teacher named Frank “Lefty” O'Doul would employ much the same methods on a rookie named Joe DiMaggio. “Did O'Doul use the rope trick on you, too?” Cobb once asked DiMag. “And twice on Sunday,” said Joe.

Up to now Ty had been mostly a one-way slider into bases—head-first. “Unless you like eating dirt, give it up,” ordered Leidy. “Basemen coming down on your neck with spikes ain't good. And you could dislocate a shoulder.” They borrowed an old base bag from the groundskeeper, spaded up the soil in a corner of Warren Park, and set the bag at one end of a runway. On early mornings Ty practiced all the known slides: hook left, hook right, bent leg, rolling, sitting-standing, sliding past the bag and reaching back to tag it, sliding to break up the double play, plus a few he invented—such as sticking sharpened
spikes into legs, arms, and bellies at twenty miles an hour when basemen obstructed him. After games, he slid fifty or more times, or until his hips were raw. Sometimes Cobb came into the clubhouse with blood staining his pants.

In July, still attending Leidy's free clinic, he wrote home to Professor Cobb, “Had two doubles and singles vs. star Alabama team. Stole two. Making good progress.” Friends had tipped him that his father, no longer quite obsessed with the idea that his son should come to his senses and find honest employment, had been showing newspaper clippings about the youngster's feats to friends.

W. H. Cobb now understood what “AB,” “DP,” “H,” and “R” meant in a box score, according to what Ty now heard. After 130-odd pro games over parts of two seasons in a dozen southern towns and cities where his roaming heir had appeared, the Professor had yet to attend a single contest. But he seemed to be softening. W. H. remained a strong political presence in Georgia legislative and educational circles. To have the Cobb name published in columns of the
Atlanta Journal
or
Augusta Chronicle,
even when Ty went 0 for 5 or the teams brawled on the field, was not the public shame that W. H. had feared. To the contrary, an Augusta victory brought slaps on W. H.'s back in conference rooms. Baseball was becoming very popular in Georgia. In a notebook Ty kept, he pensively wrote, “I hope Father comes out to see me play some day.”