Cobb (33 page)

Cobb's solution was to go to the lobby, suitcase and bat bag packed, and call for a Chicago-to-Detroit railway schedule. At 2:00
A.M.
a train was leaving for Detroit and he was aboard it. Detroit's
Free Press
reported: “The unhappy bird flew the coop, his feathers badly flustered.”

Jumping a performance contract was a serious matter. Jennings phoned Bill Yawkey in Detroit. “He did
what?
” exclaimed Yawkey. “He didn't like his room,” said Jennings. “He just left.” For lesser offenses other players had been handed heavy fines and suspensions. Cobb was not even reprimanded.

Yawkey and Navin, at close to $475,000 cost, had built a new park, named Navin Field. It was one of the most modern in the majors, with a capacity of twenty-five thousand. Old Bennett Park had been a disgrace, and the new arena was filled on inaugural day, April 20. Pregame ceremonies featured numbers by the Germanic Harmonie Singing Society. For the Irish of racially diverse Detroit there was a chant: “Oh, the Hogans, Grogans, O'Briens and McGurks, the Clancys, Caseys, Sullivans and Burks!” Pennants flew. Black fans were given extra seating in the colored bleachers. City streetcars were painted yellow-orange, the Tigers' colors. Firecrackers burst.

Before a record-setting turnout, Cobb, now caught up on his sleep, blocked two possible Cleveland home runs with racing catches, singled twice, engineered two double steals with Sam Crawford, and was all over the park in a 6–5 defeat of Cleveland.

His follow-up performance, against St. Louis, was to plant a ball in the right-field bleachers, the first home run hit in Navin Field. The jest went around that maybe he should walk out of more hotels in the middle of the night, if it meant producing like this.

One of the livelier games of the American League in this period came after Detroit's city fathers, but not the clergy, gave their consent to expanded Sunday ball. Although sometimes played, Sabbath games had been discouraged. Detroit was becoming a city of industry and manufacture, however, and factory workers wanted to hear bats crack
on their only day off of the week. It was arranged that provided the Sabbath was not profaned by bad behavior in the stands, Sunday might be added to schedules. Churchgoing owner Yawkey was especially anxious for a good, clean game when the Boston Red Sox came in for a Saturday-Sunday series.

Cobb was awaiting his turn at bat when George Moriarty, on third base with the score tied, suddenly set out for the plate. He was called safe with the winning run. Red Sox catcher Bill Carrigan disagreed. Carrigan spit tobacco juice in Moriarty's face. It might have ended there, but Cobb, as sore as if it had happened to him, shouted, “Punch the bastard!”

Moriarty did, and Carrigan swung back. A newspaperman's description went, “Tiger fans did their best to keep it from being a private fight. About 1,000 of them came running.” Riot followed. Both teams battled their way to dressing rooms, with citizens in their wake. An hour later the dust had not settled. Catcher Carrigan eventually escaped from the park by borrowing a groundskeeper's overalls. Three cops were injured.

Yawkey himself was seen on a dugout roof, pleading for quiet. This was not the Sunday he had foreseen. Cobb, the instigator of the incident, was nowhere to be found; he had left early.

Hilltop Park, at Broadway between 165th and 168th streets in New York, and referred to as the highest elevation on Manhattan Island, was built in 1903 to accommodate the entry of a new team into the American League. The Highlanders, before becoming the Yankees, were bankrolled by Big Bill Devery, former New York police chief, and Frank Farrell, so-called king of the bookie syndicate, controlling a reported 250 poolrooms where gambling on anything that moved, including ball games, was wide open for wagering. Devery reputedly was bag man for operators in illegal enterprises permitted by Tammany Hall. Neither he nor Farrell was what you would term an exemplary citizen; but the American League needed a franchise in the largest of cities, and the pair had the funds to join up. In his later days, when Cobb got around to issuing his exposé of the game, he charged Devery and Farrell with faking their box-office ticket counts as a tax-avoidance method.

At fifteen-thousand-seat Hilltop, the lower seats were only a stone's—or a bottle's—throw from home plate. Park policing was scant. Because of its architecture and its uncontrolled fans, Cobb hated Hilltop more than any league park. Ripe tomatoes were a specialty of the
house. He had ducked bottles, marbles, and pieces of chairs. From the time he took his position, the razzing never stopped.

On a breezy day at Hilltop, May 15, 1912, Cobb counterattacked. Among his many career blowups, this one perhaps ranks first. In about ten minutes, he rocked baseball law to its foundation and brought on the first strike in history of a major-class team.

“
COBB RUNS AMOK
” was headlined after the first game of a Tigers-Highlanders series, when he had collided with Cozy Dolan at third base. Dolan, who in 1924 would be blacklisted from organized ball for offering a five-hundred-dollar bribe to a Philadelphia player to throw a game, gave Cobb a shove. He shoved back. Junk flew from the stands.

Four days later came the capper. “I got out to the park early to take extra hitting practice,” Cobb declared later, “and right away a guy sitting near our bench got on me. He yelled things nobody could take. He was hollering, ‘Your sister screws niggers' and ‘Your mother is a whore.' He kept this up for four innings. I did nothing about it except to yell back that he was a rotten dog. I even went to the Highlanders' bench … to warn their manager [Harry Wolverton] to throw this fan out … and I asked their president [Farrell] the same during inning breaks. I went right to Farrell's box on this. They did nothing.” So went Cobb's version of the affair.

Unknown to Cobb, the spectator, named Claude Lueker, was crippled. Lueker had no fingers on one hand, only two fingers on the other; he had lost them in an industrial accident. He also was connected with a one-time New York County sheriff.

From his manager's seat, Hughie Jennings watched Cobb's face harden—he knew that chilling expression well—and realized what would happen. It did. Leaping a railing, his star hitter trampled fans to get at the tormentor, sitting a dozen rows up in the stands. He battered Lueker's head with at least a full dozen punches, knocked him down, and with his spikes kicked the helpless man in the lower body. Fans scattered with shouts of, “He has no hands!” Witnesses said they heard Cobb retort, “I don't care if he has no legs!” Umpire Silk O'Loughlin ejected Cobb from the game.

League chief Ban Johnson, informed of the incident, issued a ruling: since Cobb was habitually insurgent and prone to violence, he was suspended indefinitely, perhaps permanently. “Any player who is abused by a patron has only to appeal to the umpire for protection,”
proclaimed Johnson. Johnson was angered, too, by the fact that after his ouster from the game Cobb had remained in place on the bench. Three innings later he was still directing profanity at umpire O'Loughlin. Only then did he obey the order to leave.

Press conferences were called, witnesses summoned, and behind closed doors Cobb testified to Johnson that he had repeatedly urged O'Loughlin and others to have Lueker removed, but without relief. Every member of the Tigers team verified that Lueker, now in a hospital bed, had been the aggressor. All of them had heard the fan call Cobb and his family some intolerable names. What would any man do in such a situation? Johnson decided that the public's protection came first, even though Lueker had initiated the verbal exchange.

Within hours of Lueker's trip to the hospital, Johnson found himself dealing with outraged Tigers. They had stood at Hilltop Park railings with bats raised against the crowd in defense of Cobb while he hammered Lueker and then fought his way back to the field. Some of the players even had gone into the stands to back him up. Jennings was surprised by his men's emotional reaction. At least 80 percent of his club's roster disliked Cobb and resented him. But now 100 percent of the team was lending him support! Sixteen Tigers telegraphed Johnson a promise that they would not play another inning of ball until Cobb was exonerated.

During the fracas, talk arose of the league's players forming a coalition to see to their rights. Until now such a union had failed to become formalized, and since 1910 had been bruited about mostly as an idea. Now the feeling grew that it needed to be enlarged and given muscle. Cobb supported the suggestion. He was heard, and within months, in September, a Base Ball Players Fraternity was incorporated (annual dues eighteen dollars). Within thirty days the BBPF had three hundred members, although such unity among the workforce was opposed by almost every owner and stockholder in the country. “We the men who make baseball must have some rights,” Cobb told a roomful of reporters. “Personally, I won't take any more. Let Johnson ban me and the hell with him.”

With that, it all became very interesting—and unprecedented. Minor strikes by a single big-leaguer, or by two or three stars in unison, had happened through the years, but never had an entire team refused to take the field. Detroit's collective challenge to the easily irritated
Johnson read, “Feeling that Mr. Cobb is being done a grave injustice, we, the undersigned, refuse to play another game until such action is adjusted to our satisfaction. He was fully justified in what he did, as no one could stand such personal abuse. We want him reinstated or there will be no game. We must protect ourselves.”

It must have been painful to the Tigers to file that message. Voluntarily they were backing, at considerable risk to themselves, the teammate who had perversely abandoned them during the 1908 pennant race to be married, who had caused internal dissension and anti-Detroit publicity time and again, and who said he wanted to leave them in a trade. The Tigers were thought by some of the press to be behaving not from any love of Cobb, but because they needed his bat and glove in the lineup. More likely, it was a matter of banding together to protest the toleration of extreme abuse by fans; no player should be expected to take such personal insult and invective without retaliating, they felt. Everyone's honor was at stake.

Cobb felt that the revolutionaries would win their case. “That wasn't smart of me,” he said at a later time, “since that mugwump Johnson already had no use for me.”

Opinion was divided. Most New York papers, as expected, rapped him. The
New York American
, however, was willing to listen.
American
ballot boxes were set up around the city, with citizens asked to vote on how they felt. In the Midwest it was suspected that Cobb would find a way out. The
News
of Motor City wrote, “You can't beat Terrible Ty with a club. If he fell off the Ford Building here he'd land on his feet unhurt. If he fell into the Hudson River he'd come out with baskets full of fish. He's taken more chances of breaking his neck than anyone who ever played this game and the injuries have been received by the other fellow. He kicks himself into more dire situations than any person in public life today … and always he comes out the winner with his name on every tongue.”

But Johnson held fast. The offender was barred. A National Commission rule stated that a thousand-dollar-per-day fine would be levied on any league member not fielding a team on schedule, except for a train wreck, flood, or other act of God. Navin faced loss of a small fortune. Cobb's length of suspension was unstated.

Detroit's next game, against Philadelphia, saw the Tigers suiting up at Shibe Park and coming out for batting practice, with Cobb among
them. “Cobb, get off the field,” umpires Bill Dinneen and Bull Perrine ordered. “You're suspended.”

He approached the two threateningly, but Jennings persuaded him to leave peaceably. Not so the other Tigers, who departed shouting threats, and returned to their hotel to confer and order a big lunch. Headline: “Tigers Unique In The Annals Of Strikes. First Strikers In The World Who Live At The Expense Of Their Employer While Refusing To Perform.” With this went the opinion: “Raving Of Bugs In Stands Must End … Bugs Must Be Exterminated.”

None of the Tigers was willing to face the Athletics. One day earlier, Connie Mack had called them “quitters with no sense of responsibility.” Mack had gone to Jennings with the desperate idea of drafting a team of substitutes from around Philadelphia—semipros, college boys, ex-minor-leaguers. “That way Detroit won't be fined,” submitted Mack, “and we'll keep the schedule intact.”

On the same day, Cobb quietly pulled the Tigers together at a hotel to say, “Don't do this, boys. I appreciate it but you're only hurting yourselves. I can take it. Go out there and play.” Although facing individual fines and possible expulsion, not a man would back down and cancel the strike.

Mack's scheme was adopted. The most farcical lineup the majors ever had known put on Detroit uniforms. Pitching for the subs was Aloysius Travers, a young theology student studying for the priesthood at St. Joseph's College; at second base was a prizefighter, Billy Maharg, alias Graham spelled backward, who could punch people but not hit baseballs; the catcher was Deacon Jim McGuire, a forty-eight-year-old Tiger coach; a forty-one-year-old ex-pro was at first base. Seven sandlotters were drafted. These “park sparrows,” experiencing the thrill of becoming big-leaguers for a day, or more, were paid ten to twenty dollars per man and warned, “Don't get killed.” The game counted in the AL standings, and about fifteen thousand curious spectators turned out.

Strikebreaking by this hybrid lineup was hilarious to see. Newspaperman Arthur “Bugs” Baer wrote, “These bums in disguise didn't try for a double play, they were lucky to make a putout now and then against the A's great Eddie Collins, Stuffy McInnis and Frank Baker. The sandlotter who replaced Cobb in the outfield wouldn't give his right name. When he came home late and told his wife he'd been playing at Shibe in place of Ty Cobb, she hit him with a skillet.”