Cobb (24 page)

Unlikely plays of this type were constructed in part by Cobb spotting small advantages as he ran, and by forcing fielders, caught by surprise, to throw before they were ready or could get ready. Even experienced men would commit fielding errors when jolted by a totally unexpected tactic. Success depended upon two factors: gall and foot speed.

Fastballing George Mullin was on the mound for Detroit when
Cobb, whom Mullin disliked, won a game for him. It began with a single that Cobb stretched into a double. In moving to second, Cobb flashed his spikes at Cleveland's Rabbit Nill, and the unnerved shortstop, ducking away, failed to make the tag. Moments later Cobb riskily moved to third, beating catcher Nig Clarke's hurried, off-line throw. Then, after another Naps' misplay on a pickoff attempt, he came home to score.

A proposition, not well recognized until then, was stated by Cobb: a defensive play was at least five times as difficult to make as an offensive play. The potential was there for an unassisted fielder's error, a bad throw, a misplay from a bad hop of the ball, the shielding of the ball by the runner, and a mixup of responsibility between two infielders or two outfielders. On offense you had fewer ways to fail after putting the ball in play. Therefore: attack, with the confidence that the odds are with you.
Attack, attack—always attack.
Once you put the ball in play, the defense has to retire you. Make them throw it. Let them beat themselves with a mistake.

As the schedule moved into June, the surprising Tigers were in a close race with Chicago and Cleveland for the league lead, and without question the individual whom Detroit's management had repeatedly tried to get rid of was the player making it happen. Sportswriters spoke of his “theory of suggestibility,” and even his apparent use of ventriloquism, as in the following: One World Series day in October, as Cobb remembered it, he romped down the line to second base against the Chicago Cubs and seemed a probable out. Second baseman Johnny Evers took a throw-in from shallow center field with his back to the bag and with shortstop Joe Tinker out of his line of vision. Evers heard the cry, “Tag him!”

Hearing that, Evers swept his glove around—and touched only thin air. Evers's first thought, as Cobb had expected, was—
why did Tinker tell me to do that?
His mind was on Tinker's seeming call, not on the runner.

It required a second or more for Evers to realize he had been tricked, that it was Cobb's voice he had heard. It took a bit longer for him to recover from his lunge, wheel into a throwing stance, and fire to third base. Evers was slightly late. Not having paused, and with his broad back blocking Evers's full view of third base, Cobb did a hook-slide and was safe by inches.

Another element entered here, showing how Cobb's mind worked. Crab Evers and Tinker, in company with first baseman Frank Chance, were a heralded (and overrated) double-play combination. But Evers and Tinker did not like each other. Most of the time they did not speak. Aware of this, Cobb, as he remembered it, figured that in the instant before Evers realized that he had been duped by Cobb, he would be all the more upset at Tinker and liable to err on the next play.

Back to the regular season. To prevent or reduce Cobb's multiple base thefts, league catchers began to use the trick of placing their heavy face masks—“birdcages”—squarely on the third-base line when Cobb was headed home. That gave him two choices. He could slide into and through the masks, at the risk of tearing a foot or ankle tendon, or come in over the top. Using the first route would be an act of surrender, so Cobb came in high and hard. In late June, against Cleveland's Harry Bemis, who was an early-day Johnny Bench at blocking home plate, Cobb went for the score with spikes out in front like lances. He knocked Bemis back several feet. The ball rolled free. Cobb was still on the ground when an infuriated Bemis, retrieving the ball, began beating him over the head with it. Dazed and bloodied by repeated blows, Cobb tried to crawl away. Not one Detroit player came to his rescue. Jennings ran from his coach's box, shoved Bemis back, and dragged his man away. Detroit fans threw odds and ends at Bemis, who was ejected by the umpire.

A trainer bandaged Cobb's head. He went on that day to score four runs in one game for the first time in his big-league career. Hurt or not, he never wavered from his doctrine:
attack.

In July he was better yet. Against Rube Waddell of Philadelphia he stole home, another career first, had a three-steal game versus Washington, and in the outfield was outstanding in doubling runners off base when they tested his arm. In New York, Clark Griffith, who would always deeply regret his failure to trade for Cobb that spring, said, “He does things I've never seen. And he doesn't drink at all, from what I hear.”

Whiskey and brandy did not attract him, and would not do so until World War I, when he would develop a taste for hard liquor. He did not chew tobacco or smoke cigars. Baseball men were impressed by his progress at so early an age. He was so damned
young
to be doing all this. “He could pose for Castoria ads for kids,” someone said.

THE TIGER
management and players fighting for an unexpected league championship were an odd mixture. One Detroit front-office figure, Jimmy Burns, was a wrestler, cockfighter, and saloonkeeper on the side. Secretary–general manager Navin originally had bought into the franchise with five thousand dollars won in an all-night poker game. He was a heavy horse-track gambler. Navin was called “The Chinaman” for his slitted eyes. Number-one boss Yawkey, worth millions in Midwest timber harvesting, feared pickpockets and mugs and went around with Tommy Ryan, light heavyweight champion of the world, as his bodyguard. Straw-haired second baseman Herman “Germany” Schaefer toured the Lyceum vaudeville circuit in the off-season with a soft-shoe and poetry-reciting act.

One day Schaefer was sent in as a pinch hitter. His recent season's averages had been a paltry .238 and .258. The pudgy Herman faced Doc White of Chicago, one of the best of spitballers, but he doffed his cap and bellowed to the crowd, “Ladies and gents, permit me to present to you Herman Schaefer, the world's premier batsman, who will now give a demonstration of his marvelous hitting power. I thank you.”

The crowd booed. Schaefer then smashed the longest home run seen in Chicago for years. He slid into first base, hollering, “At the quarter, Schaefer leads by a head!” He slid into second with, “Schaefer leads by a length!” At third it was, “Schaefer leads by a mile!” and at home plate he slid in with, “That concludes the demonstration by the great Schaefer and I thank you one and all!”

The Punchinello of the ballpark once amazed the crowd by stealing second base and then crazily reversing his route, “stealing” his way back to first—just to see if it could be done. On some days, he could upstage even Cobb.

The same was true of Hugh Ambrose Jennings, the thirty-six-year-old dramatist hired to revitalize the club. Jennings's four-part act was to tear up grass on the sideline, let go his “Eeee—yahhhh!” yell, and blow a shrill policeman's whistle. He also did an Indian war dance. Suspended for ten days by American League president Ban Johnson for “objectionable” noisemaking, Jennings moved into the stands, where he clanged a cowbell. Detroit fans loved Jennings—with all the nonsense going on, the Tigers were winning for a change, were they not?

You could not love Cobb, only watch him with awe. He brought
about “a miracle a day,” according to Jennings, and was “absolutely fearless—why, he's running on legs so gashed and unhealed that he loses a cup of blood in nine innings of sliding.” Molded sliding pads were not yet invented. Cobb's pads were of a cheap fabric that bunched around his hips and limited his maneuverability so much that at last he discarded them and ran “naked.” On bare flesh, he went on stealing with a high percentage of success.

Amidst pennant fever, there appeared in Washington in his big-league debut a gawky, six-foot, two-inch right-hander who had started in southern California as a catcher and been discovered in the Idaho bushes by a traveling cigar salesman. The cigar drummer had passed the word that the hayseed, now a pitcher, had thrown 72 innings without allowing a run. Walter Perry Johnson was extremely long-armed, and with his slingshot delivery had shocking speed, along with good control. At nineteen he broke in against the Tigers on an August day.

Routinely Cobb inspected all new players, even rookies, before facing them. After watching Johnson warm up, he told Jennings, “Have everybody stand deep in the box today. This farmer throws out of his hip pocket so fast that you can't follow it.”

As for Cobb, he bunted, and the rookie misfielded the bunts. Cobb also did the usual on the base paths, and Detroit beat Johnson, 3–2. That night, Cobb said, he urged Navin as follows: “Get this kid even if it costs you twenty-five thousand dollars. That's the best arm I've ever seen. He's so fast it scared me. When he learns a curve, nobody can stop him.”

Big Train Johnson never did find an outstanding curve, yet the quiet man became a pistonlike career winner of 416 games, threw 110 shutouts, and once rang up 16 consecutive decisions. “And all he did for the next twenty years was beat Detroit,” said Cobb, sarcastically, long afterward. “Jackass Navin did nothing to sign him when Johnson was still available.”

The Tigers continued to hover in first place or close to it until September, when Cobb was laid up. At Cleveland he consulted a doctor for his “sliders”—raw sores spread from ankles to thighs—and was advised to use salve and stay off his feet in bed. Otherwise infection was likely. Cobb on that same day went after a fly ball hit into a roped-back crowd bordering right field. Diving for it, he made the catch, but landed on a broken bottle. His right, throwing hand was gashed from
thumb to palm. Except perhaps for players who have stayed in the game despite broken bones, nothing much in the records beats what then transpired. With a bandaged hand he remained in the lineup and made several mostly one-handed base hits.

Making two to four base-stealing attempts per day, he gave his wounds no time to heal. In St. Louis the press spoke of him as “a model of bravery,” although he was as much disliked and feared in Browns country as in any locality. A bottle thrown by a fan and thought to be aimed at Cobb hit umpire Billy Evans in the head.

Meanwhile, with sulfas and penicillin nonexistent, Cobb's hand became infected. When the Tigers reached Chicago, he was again urged to bench himself. Instead, caught up in a pennant race, he made two hits good for two runs, stole two bases, scored two more runs, and raced from first base to score on another of his “dazzlers.” His hand was still swollen, but he removed the bandage, saying it bothered him.

His methods and toughness when injured caused opponents to declare that Cobb was more than an intimidator; he was an outlaw who played dirty, made no excuses, and stood pain with incredible fortitude. The
Philadelphia Bulletin
demanded that the league suspend him indefinitely—this after he spiked Danny Murphy of the Athletics with his “corkscrew” slide, in which he swerved away from the baseman, then slashed back into him to make him drop the ball. Cobb's message was “The slide is legal, get out of my way.”

Veteran baseball writers found him uncooperative.
Cleveland News
writer Ed Bang tried to interview the Peach before a game. A “strange glare” drove Bang away. “To him it was war,” wrote Bang. “He couldn't stand being interrupted [in his concentration]. He gave me such a look that I walked away.” Several New York newspapers, hitherto caught sleeping by Cobb's fast development, now suggested that here was the best ballplayer in the United States, at least for the moment.

Beyond doubt the Tigers would not have made a run at the championship, after so many failures, without the fiery Cobb. His injured hand mostly healed, he was batting at nearly .350 after a series at Washington in which he connected for thirteen hits in eighteen at-bats—a .722 rate. He tripled and doubled in four runs versus St. Louis. Three steals a day were common. Often these gambles were outlandish and doomed from the outset. But Cobb was planting what he
called “the threat”—making them worry about when and where and on what pitching count he would strike.

After a New York series where he had again “toured the world” to score on a single, the
New York World
editorialized, “With young Cobb there's never any telling what might happen … the fantastic, impossible twist is an easy possibility and we sit there like children wondering what miracle he'll perform next. There is an infectious, diabolical humor about his coups. He seems to derive unholy joy at the havoc he causes. Cobb charging home when expected to stay at third makes it more than a game—we see
drama.
He's the Br'er Fox of baseball, a never-failing source of enchantment.”

Yet he frequently failed—he was cut down on wild steal attempts three times in one day—and the Detroit management, with no choice but privately to be much impressed with his work, remained cold to him publicly. Cobb was equally standoffish. “The fans gave me a diamond-studded watch for becoming the first man in the league to get one hundred hits,” he remembered. “None of the fat-ass Tiger bosses showed up for the award.”

By September his legs were in such bad shape that he needed aid to pull on his uniform pants. No teammate helped; a clubhouse attendant did the pulling. The widening schism between team and star showed again when on a ninety-degree day he stole second against Washington and wrenched a knee, then stole third with a football-type collision with the baseman. He called time-out and limped around.

Cobb described what happened in his memoir. “Up came Rowdy Coughlin for our side and he hit to Billy Shipke at third base for the Nats.

“I was groggy, but saw an opening. I dashed in and then up and down the third-base line with three infielders and the catcher after me. I was in a hotbox … finally, Jim Delahanty caught up, slammed the ball into the small of my back. The force of that on top of my [earlier] exertions and the terrific heat all but knocked me out … I sprawled forward. After tagging me Delahanty dropped the ball. It rolled loose. I was out, but could see the plate three feet away. They said I looked like a wounded crab as I crawled toward it, using my fingernails … the whole park was up yelling.”