Cobb (59 page)

Yet not everything was depressing that summer. After the Tigers blew a fifteen-inning game to Cleveland, and after Cobb singled twice and doubled in a St. Louis defeat, he made history by putting together the most astonishing number of long hits of the century, setting marks that are still in the 1994 record books. Furthermore, he did it after calling his shots in advance, before some dozen witnesses.

It had begun on May 5 during batting practice at St. Louis when Sid Keener of the
St. Louis Star
and Harry Salsinger of the
Detroit News
approached him for an interview. Cobb was cold. He frowned at the reporters. “I'm surprised you boys want to talk to me,” he said, “since you're so impressed by the home run.”

“Now, Ty,” said Keener. “We know things are rough right now. But we just want to ask about how you're feeling.”

Cobb had just come off the sick list—influenza—and it showed. He replied for everyone within earshot to hear, “Gentlemen, pay close attention today. I'll show you something new. For the first time in my life, I will be deliberately going for home runs. For years I've been reading comparisons about how others hit, as against my style. So I'm going to give you a demonstration.”

His challenge was as explicit as one could get. In the first inning against St. Louis, dropping and closing his hands from the Cobb spread grip to use the whole bat, the Peach hit a Bullet Joe Bush fast-ball (and none were faster) into the right-field pavilion. In the second inning, he drove a slow curve by Elam Vangilder completely over the pavilion and onto Grand Avenue. In the eighth inning, he homered for the third time against reliever Milt Gaston. Mixed in with the four-basers were a double and two singles. His 6 for 6 set a major-league record for total bases of 16 in one game. That remains the American League record today; through sixty-nine years it has not been beaten, only tied.

All of this came on that May 5 in a “warm-up” way. His home-run eruption had given Detroit a 14–8 win. The next day he singled his first time up, running his string of consecutive base hits to nine. Then he homered twice, off two left-handers, Dave Danforth and Chet Falk, while Detroit pounded the Browns, 11–4. Five home runs in two straight games has not been surpassed since then, through more than six decades, whether by Ruth or any other batsman. It remains a modern-day record, equaled by only five other hitters. In the third game of the St. Louis series he missed a sixth home run by a matter of inches. In accumulating 25 total bases in two successive games, he set another still-existing mark. Years later, historians would peer at the old typeset and whistle at what they read.

Coming at the dusk of his career, this may have been Cobb's most resplendent hour. For impact, it stood in company with his season averages of .420, .410, and .390, bunched between 1911 and 1913. In forty-eight hours of 1925 he made his point, massively, that home runs
were not difficult to accumulate, that he could wallop for long distances with anyone when inclined to do so, but that superior, inside ways to play the game existed.

After his “Big Five,” he returned to spraying his hits, and at the 1925 season's conclusion, had but 12 homers in all, but his average was a soaring .378. His message went: It could have been five times that many round-trippers if he had so determined. “There's no doubt in my mind that Ty is the best all-around hitter who ever lived,” reiterated Tris Speaker. “He can bunt, chop-hit, deliver long drives, or put balls out of sight.”

COBB HAD
not been immune to boos from a minority of fans at Navin Field since the Tigers' third-place ranking in 1924. Even after his awesome 1925 outburst at St. Louis, he drew a sprinkling of jeers in June and July, a reminder that Detroit had yet to win a pennant. Conditioned for a fight, he got into more trouble when a customer dressed in tiger stripes ran onto the grass and spit at him. Cobb kicked the fan in the pants. Park guards pulled him away.

At Cleveland in July his leg was wrenched and he was carried off the field when second baseman Joe Klugman fell atop him while avoiding a sliding Peach's high spikes. In mid-July, in a leg bandage, he came near to repeating his forty-five-minute fistfight with Billy Evans of 1921, which had bloodied that umpire. Against the Indians, Cobb badgered umpire Clarence “Pants” Rowland over a third-strike call. Bumping Rowland around the home-plate area, he almost knocked him down. Ejected, Cobb was handed a five-day league suspension. In Washington he drew the anger of the Nationals' president, Clark Griffith, for his overt stalling tactics. Old Fox Griffith, a prominent league executive who prided himself on being a leader since the 1890s in reducing rowdyism at parks, was fed up with Cobb's constant, obnoxious turning of games into brawls, and with his extensive delays while playing to the stands. The Old Fox issued a long list of complaints. In return, Cobb called the Nationals' president a liar. He publicly charged Griffith with encouraging the East Coast press to slander him and force him out of the league. The Georgian further took the opportunity to repeat his stand against team owners for their monopolistic grip on the industry.

Walter “Big Train” Johnson, of the Nationals, a peacemaker in controversies,
asked Cobb why he caused so many disturbances when he came into Washington. The national capital incited the worst in him. He gave Johnson two reasons: “Griffith is one of the main men behind the reserve clause.” And, “People like him have blocked me from leaving Detroit.”

IT WAS
in September 1925, with the Tigers in fourth place, that a man who would have much to do with Cobb's remaining baseball career was heard from in north-central California. Hubert Benjamin “Dutch” Leonard, a temperamental, in-and-out left-handed pitcher, had walked out on the Tigers after a dispute. Leonard was also a well-to-do farmer, owner of Fresno, California, citrus, melon, and vegetable acreage, who could afford independence when he quit the team. He accused his manager of overworking him to the point that his arm would be ruined. Although he did such things as keeping the thirty-three-year-old Leonard in a Boston game to take a 12–4 beating, Cobb disagreed. In a confrontation, Cobb called him “another of my goddamn cowards and Bolsheviks.” Leonard then refused to pitch at all. He was placed on waivers, no team claimed him, and Cobb arranged his sale to Vernon, California, of the Pacific Coast League. Out there, rumor circulated that an enraged Leonard was claiming that he “had something” on his former boss and might make it public, to Cobb's great detriment. What Leonard had to reveal that could hurt the Peach was not specified. It remained vague—supposedly it had something to do with gambling. Nothing developed just then, but Cobb's enemies were titillated and remained curious. Muddy Ruel warned his friend, “Look out for this Leonard guy.”

IN AUGUST
and September, the Tigers pepped up enough to win ten straight and finished in fourth place, sixteen games behind a champion Washington club for which Johnson, Stan Coveleski, and Dutch Reuther won 58 games, and down the track from second-place Philadelphia and third-place St. Louis. In a closing-out doubleheader at St. Louis, Cobb staged another offensive show. He went 6 for 10, stole two bases and even pitched one shutout inning, just for the fun of what was left of another dull season. His .378 average was up with the circuit's leaders—this was his sixteenth campaign at .350 or better—but fatigue was evident, in that Cobb played in just 121 games.

At the ensuing World Series between Washington and Pittsburgh,
when the Pirates became the first participant in history to come back from a 3–1 game deficit and win, he encountered a depressed George Herman Ruth in the press box. Ruth did not bristle, nor did Cobb. Neither felt well. They were photographed shaking hands unsmilingly.

“Had a hell of an off year, Cobb,” said Ruth. “Got sick, couldn't hit my hat.” (The reference was to his notorious “bellyache heard around the world” of the past April, rumored to have been caused by a venereal disease, but more likely to have been an intestinal abscess, for which he was operated upon. Whatever the dismal truth, Babe had batted a low .290, with 25 home runs, by far his worst production as a Yankee.)

“You're no kid anymore,” said Cobb. “Got to take care of yourself.”

“They pinch-hit for me a couple of times,” said Ruth.

Cobb shrugged. “That's happened to me.” (It had not—not yet—but for some reason Cobb felt empathetic toward Babe.)

“I'll take the hot tubs, get in shape. See you next season,” ended Ruth.

“Next season,” said Cobb. “I'll be there.”

ON THE
morning of March 2, 1926, two weeks before spring camp opened in Augusta, Cobb was wheeled into surgery at the Wilmer Clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Dr. William H. Wilmer had finally prevailed upon him to have his vision trouble pinpointed and treated. Wilmer, a fellow Georgian, was known as one of the country's foremost doctors of ophthalmology. Operations would be performed on both eyes. After tests, Wilmer explained, “This would be serious if you had let it go much longer. As it is, you should make a full recovery.”

“How soon is that?” asked a jittery Cobb.

“Within a month, probably. But you'll need to wear smoked glasses for a while,” replied Wilmer. “And do no batting for the time being.”

Cobb's ailment was caused by a filmy substance, termed pterygium, brought on by an accumulation of fine dust particles over the eyes, which had formed through more than 2,700 games. The surgical procedure would be to slit the growth, bury its terminals with tiny sutures, and allow the “cloud” to grow away from the pupils.

When he awakened from the anesthetic, Cobb discovered his head
swathed in a full mask. He was left blind for four days and ordered to make no abrupt movement of his head. It was tormenting. The immobility was the second-hardest part of it. Cobb: “I lay there waiting for the decision … tried to think of something other than the coming season … and failed. I diagrammed plays in my head … that didn't work, either. All I could think of was that one word—
blind
.”

When the bandages were removed, everything looked blurry to him; as he began panicking, his vision slowly cleared. Wilmer declared the surgery to be a complete success. Wilmer then left on other business, assigning a nurse to medicate his patient. Foolishly, Cobb got out of bed and insisted on leaving the clinic. His nurse protested, “You can't do that! Your eyes need to be treated for several days.”

“Lady, I've got a ball club in training!” snapped Cobb. “I'm leaving. Get me my clothes.”

Nurses were hunting for Wilmer when Cobb felt “a small twinge at the back of my eyes.” It worsened. Within minutes, he was in agony. The pain was head-splitting, intolerable. He ran down a hall to the head nurse's station, screaming that his head was on fire: “Get me that medicine fast!”

Rushed to first aid and medicated, he was relieved of the worst of it. “From then on, I was the most cooperative customer Johns Hopkins ever had,” he said to me in his sixtieth year.

He arrived, shakily, in Augusta on March 13, two weeks late. An unsympathetic Navin asked why the operation couldn't have been performed over the past winter, and not left the Tigers temporarily without leadership. “Because I make my own schedule!” returned Cobb. And that was that.

His recovery was slow. Wilmer had warned him not to take batting practice for at least one month. Any accidental beaning or abrupt swiveling of the eyes was to be avoided. Wearing smoked glasses, the patient began hitting line drives within two days of his arrival. Photographers crowded around, eager to record his ability to hit in the same way—or not. He took a dozen or so swings and quit. He gave no explanation, but that night he left camp, was driven to his Augusta residence by Charlie Cobb, and stayed in bed for several days. Any exposure to bright light or even smoke from a cigarette or cigar caused a sharp stinging of his eyes. Wilmer, meanwhile, had wired him: “
STOP AT ONCE. USE PRESCRIBED TREATMENT.
”

Years later, in Nevada, Cobb wrote to me of this time: “How I dreaded the first fastball I'd have to face on a sunny day when regular play began.” What he should have dreaded even more was Dutch Leonard, a man with information that seemingly revived 1920 and the perfidious Black Sox of Chicago.

For someone as calculating, opportunistic, and well known as Cobb, it figured that he would form advantageous friendships with sports-minded politicians. During the short but marred Harding administration he had developed a strong, profitable White House connection. Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty-ninth president of the nation, had been a first baseman–outfielder with the Marion (Ohio) Base Ball Club. Later he owned the Marion minor-league franchise. Harding loved the sights and sounds of a ballpark. He treated Cobb as the most honored of guests. In March of 1921, Harding had invited the “Great Agitator” to attend his inauguration; thereafter, when the Tigers were scheduled in Washington, Cobb became a poker-playing insider at the White House. “I saw as much as ten thousand dollars on the table in one stud game,” he recorded in his retirement. “Harding was popular enough, but he was surrounded by crooks. I sat back in card games, and went easy on the drinking … His pals hit the bourbon hard, so I had a good payday for myself about a dozen times a year.”

By 1926, Harding was long dead, but T.C.'s continued clubbiness with national political leaders would now stand him in good stead. Events began to build around him, off and on the field, that cast Cobb
in such a bad light that he was to need all of the support he could get in top Washington circles. Without these defenders his career might end in the most shocking form of disgrace known to a ballplayer.