Cobb (44 page)

One outstanding offer came from Carl Fisher of Fisher Auto Body Company. Back in 1904, racing driver Fisher had put acetylene lamps on his Packard, thereby introducing the night driving of cars, and became a millionaire. As of 1917–18, Fisher had the Indianapolis 500 event going, drawing large crowds, and he had invited Cobb to buy in and join his board of directors. Cobb had held off on accepting, since he was unable to give Indy much time and his future was so undecided.

OTHER COMPLICATIONS
preceded his departure for the war theater. One of his children, Herschel, had been ill and might need him around. And in a small way, or so he said, he had already contributed to defeating the German war machine. He told an odd, unconfirmable story of
the French running short of recoil mechanisms for their big-cannon 75s, and their appeal to the United States for help. This led to War Department armorers visiting John Dodge, of Dodge Motors in Detroit, to determine whether Dodge had the manufacturing capability for such precision parts. “Dodge was having trouble making the deal,” claimed Cobb. “I wined and dined them and showed the government boys such a good time at the ballpark that they decided Dodge was okay … and finally signed a contract.” So he told it. Malcolm Bingay's history,
Detroit Is My Own Home Town
, reports the incident, but does not include Cobb as a go-between.

The decisive factor in the summer of 1918, convincing Cobb that perhaps he had delayed too long in signing on with the American Expeditionary Force, was public opinion. The press renewed attacks on the maneuvering by ball-club owners to keep their rosters as intact as possible through draft-exemption loopholes. “With only a few boxoffice names in uniform,” the
New York Times
declared, “the so-called ‘magnates' have proclaimed their adherence to the sleazy fallacy of ‘business as usual,' a policy not calculated to make us proud of the game as an American institution.”
Stars and Stripes
spoke coldly of the notion of baseball as an essential American recreation. “Bullets, not bats” was the way some put it.

The crunch began for team owners on May 23, 1918, when Provost Marshal Enoch Crowder issued a “work-or-fight” order, setting July 1 as the deadline for players to enter needed war work or face induction into service. Slackerism was charged, not just hinted. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker held firm, brushing aside exemption requests by owners, even when Woodrow Wilson, on July 27, 1918, issued a letter stating that he saw “no necessity” for stopping or curtailing major-league play. But Baker did give the owners until September 1, or through Labor Day, to finish a shortened schedule of 126 to 128 games.

The World Series remained imperiled. About to win the National League pennant, the Chicago Cubs, fearing drafts of men before the Series, asked for a written federal guarantee that the Classic would be saved. A special two-week grace period was granted to the Cubs and their likely opponent, the Boston Red Sox, to meet in the Series.

Between the months of June and October many of the top big-leaguers went off to war. Among them—poorly trained for the battlefield
in the short preparatory time available—were Eddie Collins, Grover Cleveland “Old Pete” Alexander (who would be badly shell-shocked in trench combat and have his hearing permanently impaired), Jimmy Dykes, Sam Rice, Ernie Shore, Harry Heilmann (injured aboard a submarine), Herb Pennock, Wally Pipp, Eddie Grant (killed), and Rabbit Maranville. “They gave the boys a short-arm inspection, handed them a gun, and that was it,” Cobb recalled. Some men reached the front, while others staged exhibition games for the troops. Reportedly, 124 American Leaguers and 103 National Leaguers entered the armed forces. Three ballplayers were known to have become fatalities. Such commitment was seen by most citizens as considerably more satisfactory than the thousands of bats, balls, and mitts earlier sent overseas by the leagues, and the declared $7 million in Liberty Bonds and for the Red Cross raised by sixteen teams.

Teams could field only patchwork lineups. Other than reactivating recently retired players, the only source of resupply in late 1918 was the minor leagues, themselves playing shrunken schedules. Records disagree, but one source shows that of nine lower leagues starting the 1918 season, only one, the International League, completed it in full. Class AA and A talent moved up to fill holes. If the war continued into 1919, there might be no baseball at all, at least not of a caliber worth watching.

Ban Johnson, head of an American League that he had personally created in 1901 and toughly, inflexibly ruled thereafter, saw little or no profit ahead. On May 24, one day after the work-or-fight edict, he had announced that the AL would close for the duration. The member clubs, however, defied Johnson and—in a strong indication that his power was slipping—kept going to Labor Day. Cobb was able to get into 111 games, where he finished first in AL triples and second in runs scored. His .382 batting average handily led both leagues. Zack Wheat of Brooklyn topped the National League with .355 in 105 games. Toward the truncated season's end, in Boston, the Peach hammered a home run—“about the longest I ever hit”—into a brewery across from Fenway Park. The story went that workers were bottling beer when the ball crashed through a window, hit a tub, and sprayed suds around. Cobb's “beer-buster” was almost as impressive as his nine base hits in three games at St. Louis.

Income from the World Series, which began September 5, withered
to the extent that each Boston Red Sox player was paid an $890 winner's pittance, while each losing-side Cub drew $535. What went down as the lowest Series payout in history was caused in part by a controversial new format dictated by the National Commission, whereby second-, third-, and fourth-place teams of each league shared in the division. That peremptory ruling—players were not consulted by the commission in making it—cut the already meager pie into so many pieces that the Red Sox and Cubs demanded that the split be postponed until after the war.

Commission members met to settle it with some forty players of both sides under the stands before the fifth game at Boston. Beginning as a shouting match, it blew up into a near riot. Shoves were exchanged. Police with paddy wagons had to be summoned. Players threatened not to take the field and shut down the Series. Ban Johnson of the National Commission was of no help. Known to be a hard drinker, Johnson showed up half-intoxicated and made a maudlin appeal to “you boys” to play ball.

For an hour the field remained empty of contestants, while a crowd of some twenty thousand booed and irate umpires considered an unprecedented double forfeit of the proudest pageant of American sports. Cobb, seated in the press box as a guest of Boston, did not join the brannigan. “I might have punched someone,” he said later. He saw the rebellion as presaging wholesale strikes in the future against the owners' greed. Ballplayers he thought, would be forced to take drastic measures in future labor-management negotiations.

The commissioners held fast on the division of money, until finally, with wounded soldiers in the stands as guests, the game began. Cobb cagily advised the teams to have a public statement from them read before the first pitch was made. Commissioners objected, but ex–Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald stood at the home plate with a megaphone to announce the teams' message: “We will play not because we think we are getting a fair deal, which we are not. But we will play for the sake of the public, for the good name of baseball and for the wounded Army and Navy men in the grandstand.”

“The owners are entirely to blame,” Cobb charged in an Associated Press interview. “The teams were not doing their best out there today, and that's deadly for baseball.” In confirmation, the Red Sox won
the Series with an incredible .186 team batting average in six games, against a .210 for the Cubs.

Players were angered by another management tactic. Those who were not absent at war or engaged in war-related industries were hit by an owners' scheme for avoiding payment of the balance of their salaries for the shortened season. This was done by the blatant subterfuge of “releasing” all of those still in baseball uniform with ten days' notice. Normally, such releases would have made them free agents, but the owners of franchises avoided that with a gentlemen's agreement not to deal with other clubs' players. The early releases saved owners an estimated $200,000. Cobb thought it an unconscionable act and said so, terming it worse than slicing up World Series receipts among clubs finishing far out of first place: “Some logic that is.” As for himself, Cobb was paid in full by Detroit.

In the fifteenth, war-spoiled World Series, Babe Ruth, who remained out of the Great War, pitched a six-hit, 1–0 shutout for the Sox. During the regular season of 1918, the Babe, who had begun to play outfield when not pitching, had hit 11 home runs to tie Tillie Walker of the Athletics for the league title. He thereby established himself as the foremost two-way threat since mustachioed little John Montgomery Ward won 158 games as a pitcher for Providence, the New York Giants, and others from 1878 through 1894, while batting .371 and .348 in good years. On the mound against the Cubs, Ruth carried with him a mark of 13 consecutive scoreless innings pitched in previous Series competition. In this Series he extended the record to a phenomenal 29
⅔
shutout innings, which would stand until Whitey Ford, the superb southpaw of Casey Stengel's Yankees, topped it in 1961.

Cobb happened to be on the same New York Central train that was taking Ruth to New York on a business matter after the Series. Out of curiosity, Cobb asked Ruth, “Why were you throwing at Max Flack?”

“Flack, hell,” said Babe. “That was that other fielder—Mann.”

“No, it was Flack you got right between the eyes in the first game,” corrected Cobb. “Les Mann is a right-hander. Flack is a lefty.”

“Jeez, whattayaknow,” said Ruth. “I was throwing at the wrong monkey all afternoon!” (This same story has been told by others, with variations on Cobb's version.)

These and other events were of lesser interest to the masses of Americans. In August and September, German forces retreated in Flanders, U.S. troops eliminated the Saint Mihiel salient, attacked in the Argonne, and helped break the powerful Hindenburg line. As a theme song, “Over There” sounded more and more optimistic. By the time that Germany gave up on November 11, 1918, the United States had embarked 2,045,169 men for European service, and suffered 320,710 casualties.

DURING THE
weeks before the 1918 season ended, Cobb made four long-calculated moves. He notified Frank Navin that he would never be interested in field-managing the Tigers, if offered the post, but only in a front-office position—perhaps as chief operations executive—provided the salary was right. Secondly, he moved his wife and children from Detroit back into the family's comfortable Augusta residence on William Street, with its two black houseboys and cook—“Mr. Ty's mansion,” as townspeople called it. Further, in consideration of going into battle, he wrote a will (later on the testament was canceled and eventually a new one substituted). Fourthly, in August, with the baseball season still on, Cobb voluntarily enlisted in the Army. His activation was to come on October 1.

“I did a little negotiating,” he said of his insistence upon becoming a commissioned officer. Cobb generally got what he wanted and, while the Tigers were playing at Washington, he met with a general involved in recruitment. “We talked,” said Cobb, “for about an hour.” He was recommended for a captaincy. With that arranged, he underwent a physical and a standard psychological test. “Funny result on that,” he remembered. “The doctors made the finding that I was normal, but on the
shy
side. I wasn't an ego type because of the ‘
shyness
.'” That gave the Peach a wry laugh.

For an assignment Cobb requested and received duty with the Chemical Warfare Service. It was a puzzling choice. With his expert eye for distance and experience with hunting and guns, the Field Artillery would have best suited him. Why become involved with notoriously deadly gas when other options existed? German strategists had introduced airborne poison gas at the second battle of Ypres in 1915 and thereafter employed it widely. Use of the weapon horrified neutral nations and set the U.S. high command to seeking counter-measures.
Chlorine-based “mustard” gas seared the lungs and often asphyxiated its victims. Phosgene gas was as bad or worse; before they died, soldiers turned a livid purple in the face.

Gas knew no rank: six weeks after Colonel Douglas MacArthur reached combat, his eyesight was threatened by gas exposure and he went around blindfolded for a week. “Silent death” attacks were all the more terrifying because the available gas masks were distrusted by the men in the trenches. “I knew the masks were not much good, but they were working on improvements,” Cobb said.

Cobb was well aware of the high risk with chemicals. Charlie Cobb and many Georgians had urged him to enlist elsewhere. At the time, Cobb offered only one explanation: “Christy Mathewson and Branch Rickey are in Chemical—they are guys I like and friends.” Another reason could have been the hard criticism by newspapers of sports figures not in uniform for the United States, so that he felt the need for an act of bravado. Still another reason might have concerned the amount of publicity he attracted in the press; Cobb habitually checked out newspapers and magazines, assuring himself that his notices came regularly and in prominent type. Sometimes he would approach editors of sports periodicals with ideas for punchy articles, such as “How I Flash Signals from Center Field.” The resultant ghost-written pieces would appear in the form of “as told by Ty Cobb” or as mislabled straight byliners. “Cobb of Chemical War” was sure to make a newsplay. Poison gas carried a special image. Finally, there was reason number four: he was absolutely fearless.