Cobb (57 page)

Shortly before training began at Augusta, Cobb disappeared. In Toronto, the Great White Hunter met Jack Miner, a game guide with whom he had explored the wilderness before and who knew where bighorn sheep and caribou were to be found. They rode horses into the northern mountains, where Miner proceeded to get them lost. After three days of wandering with a defective compass, they were running short of food. The weather grew very cold. “I saw us being discovered frozen stiff,” related Cobb. “We climbed a tree … saw smoke in the distance. Turned out to be a Canadian ranger's station. He put us right and we got out over fifteen tough miles by foot just before a blizzard hit.” On the way back to civilization, Cobb shot a caribou, but not the bighorn ram he wanted.

GOING INTO
his eighteenth season, heavier about the thighs and chest at 205 pounds, he was greeted by a poem whose author's name he soon forgot. The verse would be resurrected or imitated in the next few years, each time to the repeater's regret:

The curtain's going to drop, old chap
For time has taken toll
………………………
You might go on and play and play,
But why go on for folks to say
There's old Ty Cobb, still on the job
But not the Cobb of yesterday.

“They've got me ready for the pipe and shawl,” he observed. “We'll see.” And then he predicted that Detroit would win the pennant.

The overwhelming opinion was that his forecast was a promotional stunt, nothing more. Gamblers saw it as a come-on, an attempt to boost Detroit's preseason ticket sales. Mammoth Yankee Stadium, opening in April, was where a third straight pennant was almost certain to fly. Man for man, the Yanks had as solid a lineup as any assembled since the New York Giants of 1911–13 had swept three straight National League titles. In a new, $2.5 million baseball palace, a chastened, sober Babe Ruth surely would recover from his weak 1922 performance and keep fans busy trying for souvenirs in Ruthville, the park's right- and center-field bleachers, where Babe would be lofting most of his home runs. By comparison, Detroit had added no players more helpful than a few journeymen infielders, such ordinary pitchers as Rip Collins and Dutch Leonard (who had returned), and promising but untested rookie Heinie Manush. Cobb's stiffening legs were another factor. He was expected to drop somewhere around the .330 mark at bat, and probably to two dozen or fewer steals.

Disorderly as ever, Cobb caused the loss of a game one spring day when he was thrown out for using prohibited language with umpires. He refused to leave the field for so long that the officials forfeited the game to St. Louis. On another occasion, league president Ban Johnson received complaints that Cobb, standing in the coaching box, encouraged the home crowd to hurl coins at the visiting Philadelphia A's. His catchers Johnny Bassler and Larry Woodall would wait until a batter was starting to swing and then drop sand into the back of his shoes. In a bunting situation against the Yankees one day, Cobb revived his old maneuver of placing the ball down the first-base line, forcing pitcher Carl Mays to field it. Timing his arrival, Cobb slammed into him, tearing his pants, bruising Mays, and starting a field brawl.

The handicappers were in for a surprise. A determined bunch, the Tigers turned truculent that summer of 1923 and began a steady climb toward the top. They reached the first division, with an outside chance at the pennant. Accusations were made that Cobb had turned the Tiger
players into thugs who freely overused the beanball, ran bases with spikes flaring, and intimidated umpires past the usual limit. Cobb himself was a constant presence, pacing the dugout, talking it up. His bench was an uncomfortable place on which to sit if you had muffed a double play or walked two men in a row. Fred Haney, an infielder, reported, “We could hear him gritting his teeth.” Looking into a man's eyes, Cobb would command, “Fire up! Show me some fire!” Once he slapped second baseman Del Pratt across the mouth. According to Haney, who long afterward would become the general manager of the Los Angeles Angels (later renamed the California Angels), Pratt owned an extraordinarily large male sexual organ. Cobb—said Haney—yelled at Pratt, “You're all prick and no hit!” Wisely Pratt did not strike back. He improved his average to .310 and returned to the old man's good graces. On another day, when Navin brought a party of team stockholders to visit the dugout, Cobb refused to greet the investors. He was busy.

The aroused Tigers played .640 ball in the final third of the race. Scouts from other teams, watching a trick played by the Peach on Ruth in New York in September, called in the best such of the season. Haney reported that it began with Cobb, playing center field, whistling a signal to pitcher Hooks Dauss to give Ruth a base on balls when he came to bat. A walk was an obvious move. But Dauss threw a called strike past Ruth. Cobb raced in to bawl out both Dauss and catcher Bassler for disobeying his order. Ruth grinned, thinking it an oversight.

Back in center field, Cobb whistled another reminder. But again Dauss shot a called strike past Ruth. A furious Cobb ran in, stomped around, removed both Dauss and Bassler from the field, and brought in a new battery. After warming up, reliever Rufe Clarke fired a called third strike past an unprepared Ruth. On three straight pitches, Babe had struck out without moving his bat from his shoulder. Cobb doubled up with laughter, rubbing in the ruse. “A once in a lifetime setup play,” he called it. “I flattered Ruth with that walk-the-man stuff and he fell for it.”

Fred Haney named another Cobb play as the most fiendish he ever saw. In 1920, when Carl Mays of the Yankees had beaned Cleveland's Ray Chapman with a pitch that may or may not have slipped, and Chapman had died of a skull fracture, an outcry against “Killer” Mays had lasted for months. The tragedy marked Mays for life. “We went
into Yankee Stadium, three years after Chapman's death,” testified Haney, “and Cobb called me aside. He instructed me [as the hitter] to crowd real close to the plate. Then I was to fall down and writhe around if Mays's first pitch was close, a duster. I did so and Ty called for time-out and walked out to the mound. I thought he intended to jump all over Mays. But to my surprise he only said, ‘Now, Mr. Mays, you should be more careful where you throw. Remember Chapman?' Cobb walked back to the plate, shaking his head. Mays was actually trembling … he was so unnerved that he couldn't get anybody out. We scored five runs off him to beat New York easily.”

The good-hitting Tigers were acting like a team at last. Cobb directed them with a complicated puppet act, shouting orders in code, flashing signs, and pulling strings from the outfield and dugout. At Shibe Park, Philadelphia, he punched a groundskeeper for using a telephone when Cobb needed it. Since the groundsman was black, his act revived the old issue of his racial bigotry. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
spoke of his “wanton wickedness.” He ridiculed the Indians' pitcher, Guy Morton, until Morton was so nervous that he walked the Peach on four pitches with the bases loaded to force in the tying run; the Tigers won, 4–3. The importance of this game was that while Detroit could not by then catch the mighty Yankees, they could nose out Cleveland for second place, a finish worth about one thousand dollars per man to the Tigers in the coming World Series money division.

Seemingly, late in the schedule, the Tigers were in a hopeless position. They were required by the weird scheduling of the day to play no less than six doubleheaders within six days—108 and possibly more innings, and during a heat wave. Yet they stayed in the race, winning 33 of their last 53 and 11 of their final 14, to edge out Cleveland for the season's runner-up position behind New York. Cobb was limping on the last day but he hit two doubles against St. Louis for a 7–6 victory. The long-shot Detroit club ended with an 83–71 figure.

The 1923 season went into the records as the Georgian's finest managerial accomplishment, the product of his willpower, seizing opportunities, goading his men, and playing dirty tricks. He had no right whatever to second place. His infield's 103 double plays were the fewest of any team in the majors. His pitching staff's earned run average of 4.09 was second worst in the American League. Although Cobb's own batwork slipped to a .340 average—with a strained lower
back he sometimes needed help from a trainer to lace his shoes—he entered two all-time records into the book. On May 25, he scored his 1,741st run, replacing Hans Wagner's career mark for all of modern baseball. Then, on September 20 he passed Wagner's major-league high for cumulative base hits with 3,455. Meanwhile, Heilmann was hitting .403 for his second batting title.

Cobb came out of it exhausted and dejected over not winning. He had played in 145 games, had 189 hits, 40 doubles, 7 triples, 88 runs batted in, 6 homers, 9 stolen bases, 362 putouts, and 12 errors. The daily pressure aged him more than had any season to date. “Couldn't sleep, had a bad stomach,” he spoke of the aftermath. “My old eye trouble came back.” After attending the Yankees-Giants World Series, in which Ruth's three home runs helped win it for the American Leaguers, he visited both an orthopedist and an optometrist.

Given two more skilled pitchers and infield help, Detroit just might have raised a pennant. The public set a Navin Field attendance record of more than 900,000. Only the Yankees, with seventy thousand or so seats and standing room available as against compact Navin Field's thirty-five thousand, sold more tickets. On the road, in drawing power, the Tigers almost matched the Yanks of Ruth, Meusel, Pipp, Herb Pennock, Sad Sam Jones, Waite Hoyt, Bullet Joe Bush, and company. Estimates were that Detroit, in franchise value, now stood among the leading half-dozen operations in the majors. For the moment, Navin, Briggs, and their shareholders had no complaint, and were constrained from considering Bill Donovan as a field-chief replacement for the baddest man in sporting history.

PRESENT-DAY
baseball's free agency and salary arbitration systems were unheard of in the 1920s, but Cobb did not need such bargaining assistance. His stature was so high that for years he had virtually set his own price tag. For his 1924 salary, management suggested $55,000, not much of a raise over the past. “I got well above that,” he said long afterward. “There were those long-term bonuses in my contract. And I bought stock in the club on the quiet. I worked this through a banker friend, who acted as my beard [stand-in]. My name didn't appear on any documents and I doubt that anyone in the organization knew about it. In New York they claimed that Ruth was paid more than me. But that was wrong. In combined ways I was making more than anybody.”
To Cobb's recollection, his pure baseball income for 1924 approached $60,000. His outside investments all but matched that.

At the Pontchartrain Hotel, a favorite hangout of Detroit's moneyed sportsmen and place where a painting of Ty Cobb hung, the betting was that he would not serve as player-manager for a third time. Enough was enough. Handling two responsibilities was hurting his statistics and his health. Another reason for that assumption was the lack of credit given Cobb by Francis Navin. The big-bellied Navin presented himself around town as the main reason for the 1923 surprise success. Navin was not a “baseball man,” and Cobb had come to hold him in all but open contempt. Earlier, Navin had pulled political strings to have old Bennett Field renamed for him. (“Cobb Field” would have sounded better.) President Navin showed little ambition to see his team reach a World Series, but appeared content to sell one-and two-dollar tickets at a near-capacity rate. He was not a builder.

At horse tracks, Navin was a notorious plunger. One afternoon in 1924, Cobb was wagering conservative twenty-dollar amounts per race at the Windsor Jockey Club when writer Fred Lieb informed him, “Navin is here and he just lost twenty thousand dollars. He didn't turn a hair—just looked at his program and said, ‘Let's see what's good in the next race.'” That kind of gambling was a high crime to Cobb.

He and Navin clashed time and again over player needs. A typical instance came midway in the 1924 season, after first baseman Lu Blue hurt a knee and was lost indefinitely—for thirty-eight games, it turned out. No roster replacement was available. But Johnny Neun, a hard-hitting star fielder with St. Paul of the American Association, could be obtained. “I wanted to shoot Navin,” Cobb sketched the story. “He claimed he couldn't afford Neun at a fifty-five-hundred-dollar selling price. At the time we were in a close fight with Washington for first place. I told Navin that if he was so cheap, then he could take the fifty-five hundred out of my salary to buy Neun. He still wouldn't get me a guy who could help us win.” Eventually Detroit signed Neun, but too late. The Cobbmen slid to third place in 1924, while Washington beat out the Yankees for the league title.

Comedy spiced the Cobb-Navin wars of 1924–26. The egos of two millionaires were equally matched. They could come to work at the Cherry Street park, hang their hats on pegs not far apart, and not speak to each other all day. Players told how one afternoon at Detroit, the visiting
Yankees were joshing with Cobb during pregame warm-up about his famous ability to place-hit balls to any chosen field. “Bet you can't put one in our bull pen,” challenged Yankee pitcher Bob Shawkey. Adjusting his bat, the Peach hit three straight pitches into the bull pen, scattering players in all directions. Then Navin walked past, curious about what was happening.

“Jesus Christ!” Shawkey was exclaiming hours afterward, “That Cobb drove one right at Navin, just missing him! Could have bumped him off!”

No one present had ever heard of a player doing anything so vicious. Asked in 1960 if the story were true, Cobb replied, “Could have been.”

Navin hired a private detective to keep track of straying players. Cobb fired the sleuth. At the Grand Ballroom of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, city fathers tendered a banquet honoring Cobb's long reign as Mr. Baseball, attended by two thousand people. The crowd filled two rooms. Navin was given a secondary seat to Connie Mack, Henry Ford, World War I air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, Mayor John W. Smith, and songwriter George M. Cohan. While guests were dining on roast pheasant and lake trout, Navin approached Cobb to speak of a ten-thousand-dollar check he was carrying in his pocket. The check, made out to Cobb, represented a final bonus payment under his season's contract. As Cobb explained the incident in his autobiography, “Navin said, ‘Would you mind if I present this ten thousand dollars to you as a direct gift of the Detroit ownership?' He meant it, too.” Cobb was taken aback by Navin's effrontery. “Of all the brazen, phony acts this man had put on,” Cobb wrote, “this one took the cake. He
owed
me the money, yet wanted it to look like a big, generous present from him.” The audience cheered while Cobb, for once silent in a public situation, allowed Navin to hand him the “gift” check. He always regretted doing it. With recalled bitterness, he said, “I should have exposed the faker on the spot.”