Cobb (30 page)

Upon Stengel's being named Brooklyn's manager in 1934, Cobb, at a banquet honoring his unearthly friend, stood and told the cadaver and manhole stories. As a boyhood student at Western Dental College in Kansas City, considering dentistry as an occupation, Casey dissected the mouths and jaws of dead human bodies. “That,” said Cobb, “is how he got so gabby—getting right into it.”

Stengel was the dental class's clown. “He'd cut off a cadaver's thumb and stick it in somebody's pocket. And put cigars in the bazoos of corpses,” declared Cobb, as Casey blushed.

While Casey was a struggling minor-leaguer in Alabama, this later inventor of such managerial maxims as “he executed splendid,” “if a fella won't change his nighttime habits, disappear him,” and “you could look it up,” noticed a manhole cover in the outfield. For the hell of it, Casey climbed in the hole. When a fly ball was hit his way, he wasn't to be seen. “At the last second,” chuckled Cobb, “up popped the lid and Mr. Stengel shot from nowhere to catch the ball.”

“Bare-handed,” interrupted Casey.

THERE HAD
not been too much that was humorous about the three-year period of Cobb's career that followed the 1909 World Series defeat. One insurgent act followed another. He made it easy, almost routine, for the press outside of Detroit to demonize him, as when reporting on the day when several cops were needed to wrestle him down after Cobb charged into the bleachers to assault an abusive fan. In a Detroit hotel dining room he slapped the face of one more black, a waiter who served him the wrong order. Meanwhile the Tigers of three straight World Series appearances fell to third place and second, and then to sixth, sixth, fourth, second, third, fourth and seventh—only two runner-up finishes in almost a decade.

Renewed discord among the Tigers was blamed for their falling off in 1910. In Cobb's earlier Detroit experience the bad feelings had been
over attempts to maneuver him off the team. Now it was the opposite: how to live with his favored status. Matty McIntyre, Sam Crawford, Davy Jones, and other regulars criticized Hughie Jennings for not lowering the boom on “his pet,” who reported for spring-training camp on whatever date he wished, insisted on a set of batter-to-base-runner signs dictated and flashed by Cobb from the plate, and who required, and received, the only private hotel quarters provided team members when on the road.

When his three-year contract at nine thousand dollars per season was about to expire in 1912 he predicted, “They'll be paying me twenty thousand dollars before long or I'll be out of here … maybe to New York.” As he forecast, within two years Cobb was drawing twenty thousand dollars, when no one else on the club, not even Wahoo Crawford, with a twelve-year .313 average as of 1914, was paid anywhere near that. Navin, hardest of bargainers, weakened on their money differences when he saw the Peach step up with the bases loaded and Detroit trailing by a run or two and deliver one of his pulled-down-the-line singles or fence-reaching doubles. Cobb ran the bases with a high, jaunty step—“
Look at me, folks, and see the best
.”

One day after hitting a stand-up double, Cobb patted second baseman Eddie Collins of the Athletics sympathetically on the back. Collins screamed at him. One more opponent had been jarred out of his composure.

Sportswriters sought to interpret his behavior. As the New York
Daily News
's Paul Gallico read him, “He is an endless paradox, the most outrageous yet the most inspiring of athletes. No one so aggressive and infuriating has come along. Cobb seems to understand that while Americans profess to be peace-loving people, we actually love violence. With his tendency to undress fielders and catchers with his slashing spikes, there's always the chance that we'll be witness to an accident. On top of that comes his immense conceit.”

The brilliant syndicated columnist Ring Lardner was notoriously cynical about baseball's acclaimed importance to America's masses, even its honesty. During the 1919 World Series, which turned out to be fixed by gamblers and eight Chicago White Sox players, Lardner would sit at his typewriter well before the fix was uncovered, whistling to the “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” tune, “I'm forever blowing ball-games.” Yet with Cobb he was as starstruck as a kid in the bleachers.
‘It defies human capability for anyone to
average
almost .400 in the past five seasons,” submitted Lardner in 1914. “Is he bribing the pitchers?” The multifaceted Cobb couldn't be diagnosed: “He's simply from a higher league than any we know.”

John “Little Napoleon” McGraw (also “Muggsy”), icon of the New York Giants and manager of five National League champions by 1917, rarely was called foolish, but he drew laughs for claiming that “Christy Mathewson is more valuable than Cobb. Christy wins twenty-five to thirty games for us every year; his pitching puts whole teams in slumps.” Mathewson, of course, was in action for about 300 innings per season, Cobb for 1,300 or so, while driving in and scoring 200-odd runs in his top seasons. Big Six Mathewson did not steal bases or hit enough to notice.

When he was playing well, Cobb kept his temper under control. When out of his groove, not hitting in high figures, he was all but impossible to team with. “If I went three for four and T.C. was blanked,” Sam Crawford once recalled, “he'd turn red and sometimes walk right out of the park with the game still on—same as he did when he left the Tigers to get married.” Outfielder Kangaroo Jones verified that.

Jones's troubles with Cobb heated up again during a Chicago White Sox game when Cobb's attention was drawn to an open iron gate in the left-field corner. Chicago had built a new ballpark, and the gate was not fully installed. “Watch me put one through it,” said Cobb on the bench. Jones hooted. The opening was about 5 feet wide and 340 feet away.

After a swinging strike thrown by Big Ed Walsh, Cobb placed a fastball over the left fielder's head and through the gate on the bounce for a home run. His astonishingly precise drive won the game for the Tigers, 6–5.

Jones thought that a lot of luck had been involved. He said so, and hard words followed. Back in Detroit, against the Red Sox, Jones was on first base, watching for T.C. to give him the hit-run sign. Jones claimed the signal never was given. With one strike on him, Cobb backed out of the box to yell at Jones, “Don't you know the go sign when you see it?”

Jones took the open insult silently. According to him, Boston's first baseman, Jake Stahl, told Jones, “Anybody who'd holler down here like that is a rotten skunk.”

On the next pitch, for strike two, Cobb threw his bat away to shout, “By god, I won't team with anyone who misses the sign twice!” He stomped over to the bench, pulled on a sweater, and refused to continue. Jennings ordered him to finish his hitting turn, Cobb refused, and a substitute hitter was inserted. Shortly afterward Cobb left the park, to the jeers and protests of the crowd.

It was obvious to the Tigers that he had used Jones as a scapegoat. Left-handed Ray Collins, the pitcher at work when Cobb left the scene, always had been a tough fellow for him to hit, so with two strikes on him, Cobb had invented an excuse. In Frank Navin's office a hot exchange ended with Navin's threat to suspend him, but Navin eventually backed off. (Another occasional Cobbian habit, when the hit-and-run or run-and-hit was on, was not to swing at a delivery in the strike zone that looked too difficult to handle, even though this could leave base runners committed and stranded. Almost to a man the Tigers were certain that he was principally out to advance his chance for another league batting title.)

Jones approached Cobb in the clubhouse, declaring, “I won't be your fall guy.” Cobb heatedly replied, “Go to hell. I'm not playing until you're out of the lineup.” He was serious. Either Jones, a good leadoff man, got the ax, or Cobb was leaving.

Jennings would not hear of trading Kangaroo Jones. Cobb sat in the Bennett Park stands during the following game with Boston in civilian dress. He was “sulking,” wrote Ed Spayer in the
Detroit News
. On the next day he entered the clubhouse just before game time and reached for his flannel uniform. Trainer Harry Tuthill was rubbing down a player.

“Don't bother,” said Tuthill. “Jennings said to tell you that you're not in there today. You're benched.”

“Does Navin know about this?” asked Cobb.

Tuthill shrugged. “Probably does.”

Confronted in his box seat by a seething Cobb, Navin supported Jennings, but, wishing to avoid a major mistake, offered a compromise. Kangaroo Jones would be moved from the number-one or number-two spot in the batting order down to number six. That way Jones would not usually be on base when the Peach came to bat. The arrangement upset Jennings's strategy, but what else was there to do? Cobb had to be appeased. Jones was moved down. Returning to the lineup against
New York, Cobb went on singling, doubling, and stealing when it counted most.

Davy Jones, in 1950, expressed to me what a relief it had been to get out of baseball and into business (he eventually built a chain of profitable drugstores). “Cobb was born without a sense of humor,” said Jones. “He was strictly for himself. He spoiled the game for me.”

COBB SUSPECTED
that Detroit would not win the pennant again, and that the chances that he would take the field in a World Series again anytime soon were poor. “It wasn't hard for me to guess,” he said. “Navin and his scouts couldn't make a good trade if it bit them.” His own lack of teamsmanship must be counted in. An example of that came during another losing contest at Philadelphia. Fans were walking out after the Athletics ran up a 7–0 lead in the ninth inning. In such almost-hopeless situations the trailing team takes no chances: the percentage move is to play it safe and pray for a miracle. At the game's near ending it is folly to go for a high-risk, no-gain stolen base.

A roar burst from the crowd. Cobb struck a high, slow bounder into the hole between second base and shortstop, which shortstop Jack Barry juggled, then recovered, as the
Detroit News
reported. Cobb kept going, and slid into second base before Barry's throw. Detroit's next batter caromed one off pitcher Jack Coombs's glove that rebounded to Eddie Collins at second. Collins snapped a throw to first to retire the runner, thinking that if Cobb kept going, he would be retired 3–5—first to third. But even before Collins completed his arm action, T.C. was partway to third. Despite the lopsided score, he darted on for the plate, reaching it simultaneously with first baseman Harry Davis's relay—a throw Davis had not expected to make. Cobb was safe in a tangle of bodies. The game ended minutes later with the score 7–1. He had improved his own record with a run scored, but at the risk of being thrown out when his team was behind.

A vaudeville-like name was given Detroit in the years when the club ran out of the money—“Cobb and others.” “Tigers” was spelled “Tygers” by some writers. Cobb himself seldom praised his teammates. His snubbing of Sam Crawford, who retired with bitter feelings in 1917, of Jones, of Matty McIntyre, was a way of getting even for the past. Steady-hitting Bobby Veach came to Detroit in 1912 and lasted in the outfield until 1923. Deferential to Cobb, the genial Kentuckian came
around in time to saying, “If T.C. didn't like you he could run you off the club. He had that kind of drag with the front office from about 1914 on. He was a sorehead. I hit .355 one year to his .384 and I swear he was jealous of me. What an odd bird.” Veach could not forget that in 1914, with postseason exhibition games left on the schedule, their leader dropped out to attend the World Series between the Boston Braves and the Athletics. He was paid a high fee to write a commentary, “Cobb Says.” “You can guess what that did for our morale,” said Veach.

McIntyre left the Motor City earlier, in 1911, glad to be gone to the Chicago Americans. He, too, could not fathom a Cobb who would prowl the clubhouse before games, darkly muttering to himself, gritting his teeth with game time two hours away. Players who saw a decade or more of him admitted that the teamwide cruel hazing he received when he was a rookie could explain some of his behavior, but not all. The aftershock should have worn off. It had not. Others who knew the facts about his father's death felt that this tragedy relentlessly preyed on his mind. He was still getting even for that loss, in some mentally contorted way. Or so they guessed.

Sam Crawford had said it before and said it again. He felt rather sorry for the one who walked mostly alone, not sharing in team camaraderie. Crawford noted, “That's no way for anyone to live. But I know one thing—he was never sorry for what he did.” For as long as he lived Cobb retained a copy of a letter he sent to J. G. Taylor Spink of the
Sporting News
, reading:

Dear Taylor:

Crawford never helped in the outfield by calling to me ‘plenty of room' or ‘you take it' on a chance. Not only that, when I was on base and tried to steal second to get into scoring position, with Crawford at bat, he would deliberately foul balls off so I'd have to go back to base, so that the first baseman would have to hold me on … giving Crawford a bigger hole to hit through.
I ran hundreds of miles having to return to first
.

Crawford, upon learning of the letter in 1946, shook his head. “Cobb dreamed that up,” he told several reporters. “He could come in
on a ball with the best. He wasn't so good going back for a big lofter in the wind. So he blamed me. As to my fouling them off, it was always my way to pick at pitches until I got one to my strength. Cobb was just the same way.”

Far worse than that charge was Cobb's postmortem to Jack Sher, writing for
Reader's Digest
. To Sher he claimed that some teammates actually tipped off opposing pitchers to his batting weak spots. “They were out to get me so much they'd risk losing ball games to see me strike out,” he swore. “I never knew of another case where men would do anything so scurvy as that.”