Cobb (48 page)

And he would grow fat early. Along with everyone, Cobb had heard tales of the Babe consuming six club sandwiches, a platter of pig's knuckles, and two pitchers of beer at a sitting. It was publicized that he breakfasted on three-pound steaks, six eggs, a heap of potatoes, and a quart of rye whiskey with a ginger-ale chaser. He became renowned, with the Babe not particularly objecting, for his ability to outdrink anyone in the American League (the National had its own good bottle men). Immature, everyone's hero hit Prohibition beer and rum hard, avoided bed-checks, and habitually stayed out all night. Supposedly, during these sprees, Babe was with a pickup girl or in a bawdy house with ladies of the demimonde. Around 6:00
A.M.
one morning, when the Tigers were in New York for a series, Cobb was up and doing roadwork on Park Avenue when he ran across Ruth arriving home. “Been having a good time?” asked Cobb, pleased to see him breaking curfew.

“Pretty damned good,” replied Babe. “There were three of them.” He was tipsy.

Yankee manager Miller Huggins and his spies often caught Ruth in the act, and a body of reportage, some of it much exaggerated, came to picture the former Baltimore bartender as a Falstaffian character who could combine dissipation with getting base hits to a degree never before seen—or imagined. In part this was true. And Ruth was slow in reforming his ways. Another instance that Cobb said he knew to be a fact was that Babe had rented hotel rooms in Detroit after an important win over the Tigers and threw a team party at which all of the invited females were bluntly told to “put out” or depart.

Ruth's vital juices overflowed. His legend was building. In his first Yankee years he flipped and wrecked a car, was jailed for speeding, lost forty thousand dollars within days at a horse track, ate most of a straw hat as a gag, and had a fifty-thousand-dollar paternity suit filed against him. Fans everywhere loved him no less for his infractions; vicariously they were right with him.

“Most of the American League figured he'd eat and fuck himself right out,” said Cobb in later years. It was an admission of poor judgment that he would heartily regret.

Within a few seasons Cobb tempered his view with an observation: “After Ruth had been around awhile and no longer was pitching, I could see what made him so different.
His pitching days made him a hitter
[of home runs]. As mostly a pitcher, he didn't have to protect the plate as I did and other regular hitters had to do. He could try this and that. Experiment. Learn timing. As a pitcher, if he flopped [at bat], nobody gave a damn. Pitchers always had been lousy hitters. Now and then over those six years at Boston one of his big swings was good for four bases.” (Between 1914 and 1918 at Boston, Babe hit 0, 4, 3, 2, and 11 home runs.) “Once he got smart and grooved his cut, he had a whole new career.” He averaged 45 homers a year for the next ten years.

John McGraw, not known for his extensive silence on issues, and whose word was considered gospel truth by multitudes, agreed that Babe Ruth was a perishable commodity. Early in 1920 the Giants manager was quoted as telling New York writers, “Ruth is a bum. He can't play the inside game. Can't hit and run. If the Yanks use him every day the bum will hit into a hundred double plays before the season is over.” Like Cobb, the Little Napoleon was confronting a phenomenon who was threatening to change the way things were done on offense.

A NEW
, uninhibited breed of ball fans showed no such reservations. “Built like a spinning top” or “a bale of hay,” Ruth had arrived at the ideal moment, the saturnalian 1920s. Not even Jack Dempsey with his knockouts, or touchdown-running Red Grange, better suited the decade. After the war the U.S. adopted Prohibition and then defied it, drove fast cars, speculated wildly in a bull market, erected skyscrapers, made sexual freedom commonplace, and let crime lords run loose. Prosperity, and the need in urban centers for thrills, created $2-million boxing gates and filled such cavernous arenas as sixty-five-thousand-capacity, $2.5 million Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923 and soon to showcase Ruth at $2.20 per grandstand seat. As of that year, fifteen of the sixteen parks housing major-league teams had an average capacity of thirty-five thousand. The Giants could accommodate fifty-four thousand. Brooklyn's updated Ebbets Field held thirty-five thousand.
The size of parks brought new touches: electric scoreboards began to replace rickety wooden ball-and-strike indicators. Hot showers for players came along. Teams were required to provide canvas infield coverings in event of rain.

Babe, now paid twenty thousand dollars per season, hit balls “into the next county,” and there was a wonderful go-for-it defiance of gravity in his act. Yankee attendance in 1920, 1,289,472, broke the record by a 380,000 margin. With Ruth, Bob Meusel, Wally Pipp, Ping Bodie, Carl Mays, and Bob Shawkey in the lineup, the perennial also-ran Yankees were edging toward becoming a pennant winner, a goal they would reach in 1921. Detroit, meanwhile, sputtered along in fourth place, purportedly up for sale by Navin.

Not overnight, but very rapidly, Ruth popularized the new focus and form of attack. His connect-or-bust style, so wholly opposed to the Cobb school of finessing runs, advancing base runners by pre-plotted degrees, and using his spikes freely, changed the central object of the game, the official ball. Three hundred to 400 home runs were registered in the majors in prewar seasons; by 1930 the figure would be 1,565. Ruth in 1919 was only one year away from smashing more homers in a season than any entire American League
team
other than the Yankees. He and other young power specialists were a main factor in the 1920 introduction of a more tightly wound “rabbit,” “kangaroo,” or “cannon” ball of Australian wool. At least, that's where the leagues said it came from; apparently nobody traveled down under to verify it.

Announcing the end of the deadball of past years, the Wilson Base Ball Equipment Company came out with an advertisement on its version of the new baseball:

THE ACE OF DIAMONDS

Conforms to specifications of the National and American Leagues. Due to a special winding process the balls are
ABSOLUTELY SPHERICAL
and guaranteed
NOT TO BECOME LOPSIDED FOR 200 GAMES.

For fifteen years of the deadball period, Cobb had faced balls more befitting the sandlots than the majors—dented and “soft,” blackened from overuse and by original poor quality, causing “twilight blindness” in some games starting at 3:00 or 4:00
P.M.
in unlit parks.
Cobb to date had been painfully beaned three times, and on each occasion he had completely lost sight of the ball as it neared the plate. Now, at long last, umpires were instructed to discard balls every few innings and throw in glossy new ones to replace the “mushy potatoes.” As the lively ball took preeminence, several club owners, as an aid to higher scoring, pulled in their fences. Consumption of baseballs was convincing proof of what was transpiring. In 1919 the National League alone used 22,095 balls; by 1924 the total went to 54,030. Another indicator: the World Series had been replete with 1–0, 2–1, and 3–2 total scoring; from 1920–30 the Series produced twenty games with nine or more runs tallied by the sides, even with such superior pitchers on hand as Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Sad Sam Jones, Rube Marquard, Stan Coveleski, Lefty Grove, Waite Hoyt, and Herb Pennock.

COBB WAS
truly trapped by the arrival of the Big Bang epoch. It went against everything he practiced and believed, opposing his conception of knitting together team offense. “The home run could wreck baseball,” he warned. “It throws out a lot of the strategy and makes it fence-ball.” Originally he had believed that the craze epitomized by Ruth would go away as fans regained their senses. But when the Tigers traveled to the Polo Grounds one summer day, he met more evidence that he had miscalculated Ruth's influence on the man on the street. Like the battleship admirals after World War I who lobbied for bigger hulls and eighteen-inch firepower, the customers wanted noise. Babe homered, his twenty-sixth of the season. But Cobb homered, too. He also cleverly maneuvered as the runner at second base to be hit by a pick-off attempt, allowing Heilmann to score the winning run. In the outfield, racing far back, he leaped and robbed Ruth of another homer. It was inspired play. Yet it was Ruth whom the crowd cheered all day.

Detroiters knew that, in 1919 and at times thereafter, their man was playing at a distinct handicap. At Chicago he cut his toe upon colliding with an outfield fence, and the toe swelled up. Later on, also at Chicago, he was carried off the field, all but unconscious, after colliding with teammate Ira Flagstead in the field. A knee ligament was ruptured, and for a while the Peach was out of it and on a cane. Just as throughout the pre-1920s era, he continued to be in one sort of physical distress or another. The knee, reinjured while sliding, caused hospitalization,
costing him twenty-seven days on the sideline. What he feared was happening: his resilience was diminishing. In his “memory book,” Cobb describes his ordeal as “the worst I ever went through. I thought for a while that this was it. Surgeons couldn't help me I was so bad off.”

He came back, as always. As a boy he had accidentally shot himself in the upper chest with a rifle. In Canada he had fallen down a steep slope while hunting and been on crutches. He had, by count, in 1919, two dozen stitches in his lower legs. From all these injuries Cobb had recovered with a swiftness that greatly impressed his doctors. “Mind over matter, I guess,” he said. Somehow, after a serious setback he always regained good form.

In August of 1920, while he was still limping, the Yankees came to Navin Field. His competitiveness and rare recuperative power led T.C. to insist on playing in the four-game series. He managed eight hits in the set before sellout crowds, and no man could say how he did it. “I was just getting it along … hoping to come back,” he spoke of his distress. Ruth, however, upstaged him with three home runs in two games to reach number 46 on the season. When the Babe next appeared at the plate, Detroit gave the enemy player a standing ovation lasting several minutes. The Tigers' honorary captain had to wait in the outfield in his home ballpark and endure hearing the cheers of thirty thousand being accorded a man who had yet to win a league batting title.

Ty Cobb's emotion at that moment was revealed to me in 1960 at his California retirement mansion: “Well, I had to stand there and take it. That was it. In Detroit or anywhere the fans were treacherous bastards. I knew Ruth couldn't hit with me—that is,
real
hitting—or run bases with me—or [play] outfield with me. As long as the guys in the league knew that, I didn't care very much.”

That last assertion is, to say the least, questionable. In repeated ways over the years he displayed his distaste for and jealousy of Ruth's flamboyant rise. In the 1924 off-season, Ruth was invited to Dover Hall in Brunswick, Georgia, a rich man's hunting spa long patronized by Cobb. The mistake of housing the two in the same tent was made. Cobb openly objected to the campmaster. “I'm not living with any nigger,” he announced. Cobb left camp and did not return for several years. Ruth stayed on, possibly unaware of the intended insult. Ballplayers who had seen the Babe's pale body in the showers knew
that despite his flattish nose and rather thick lips, he was German-American. Still, rumor circulated among white supremacists, and Cobb's words were quoted. During Tiger-Yankee matches, T.C. would call Ruth “nigger,” “ape,” “polecat,” and so on, as he sauntered past the New York dugout, holding his nose. A fight between them was shaping up. T.C.'s bench-jockeying was as crude as he could get, and by 1924 the two would come to blows.

Jimmie Reese, who had been a coach with the California Angels and once Ruth's roommate on the Yankees, said of the Dover Hall affair, “It was just like Cobb to call Ruth a black man. Because back then it hurt a fellow. Cobb was no good in the opinion of almost everyone in the league.”

THERE WAS
no bending to him, no mellowing with age. Perhaps pressure from Ruth made him only the more Draconian. Yankee outfielder Ping Bodie told of an incident showing Cobb as incurably out of control as ever. During the warm-up before a Detroit game, Bodie left his bat on the sideline. Cobb tripped over it. He grabbed the bat in a rage and threw it into the stands, which, luckily, were not occupied. Bodie had witnesses who heard Cobb call him “a dirty damned wop.”

In one of his worst flareups he made the notorious statement of “I fight to kill.” In every dugout it was known that the Georgian did not like Billy Evans, a respected American League umpire since 1906. Feelings heated up in 1919 and thereafter when Cobb questioned many of Evans's ball-strike counts. He jawed away until Evans drew a line in the dirt; if his critic stepped over it, he would be “run,” or ejected. Along came a late-season game with the Washington Nationals in which Cobb twice was called out on close base-stealing attempts. Evans, a former semipro boxer and Cornell University athlete, made the second of these decisions. He left after the final out for the umpires' dressing room. Close behind him came Cobb, his face mottled. He banged on the door, cursing and yelling, “Come out of there or I'll come it and get you!”

Evans, emerging, was heard to say, “Take it easy.” His hands were out in a peacemaking gesture. But Cobb demanded a fight and Evans obliged him. They met under the stands and players stopped dressing to watch. Walter Johnson of the Nationals tried to stop it and failed. As reported by Rogers Hornsby in his autobiographical
My War with
Baseball
, Evans asked Cobb how he wanted to fight. “No rules,” was the reply. “I fight to kill.”

For forty-five minutes the two punched and gouged it out. Evans was badly cut at the outset and had his nose broken. An orthodox fighter, he found himself up against blows below the belt, rabbit punches, and knee kicks. Evans had Cobb down at one point. They rolled in the dirt, both bleeding. Cobb's eleven-year-old son, Tyrus Junior, allowed to watch, danced about, crying, “Hit him harder, Daddy! Hit him harder!”