War on the Basepaths Read online

  “It is up to Ty Cobb now,” Navin told a sportswriter. “The policy of the Detroit club is to send out no special inducements and I hope Cobb will come to a realization of this fact. Of course, we all hope Cobb will be on hand when we start training, but if matters come to a showdown, an outfield composed of McIntyre, Jones, and Crawford would be the best in the American League, to my way of thinking.”19

  The hardball tact of Navin perturbed Jennings, mostly because he understood the contentious sensibilities of Cobb. A verbal confrontation, combined with threats to easily move forward without the batting champion, worked against the kind of harmony he promoted. Jennings went on record in defense of Cobb, telling Navin to “handle [Cobb] carefully,” and taking blame for Cobb’s holdout. The result was a halt to the decline in relations between the player and club.20 However, the situation continued to evolve, and there were reports that Cobb had received financial offers to jump to the Washington franchise of the Union Baseball League, a new organization headed by A. W. Lawson and the Logan Squares, a semi-pro team in Chicago. Reportedly, the Union Baseball League wanted Cobb so badly that owners were ready to give him the greatest salary ever paid a baseball player, a sum greater than $10,000.21 In The Sporting News, H. G. Merrill had a unique reaction, declaring that Cobb was “in no sense indispensable” and if he departed the majors, “he would be forgotten” within a brief period of time.22

  Confusion reigned as newspapermen ran wild with erroneous information and ridiculous claims. Cobb refused to listen to the propaganda. “I am not making any rash declarations,” he explained, “and am not responsible for a lot of things that have been said. I am only trying to get what I feel I am worth and am not seeking any notoriety.”23 The chaos was amplified after two sportswriters, Tom Hamilton of the Augusta Herald and Malcolm Bingay of the Detroit News, entered the picture, and purportedly brokered a compromise. Hamilton and Bingay, along with the latter’s assistant Anderson, were ready to take credit for brokering Cobb’s new $5,000-a-year contract, minus any additional clause. This was a false report, as Detroit management didn’t agree to those terms. Jennings said the two men had involved themselves in search of “fame.”24 The problem was they had no permission to speak on behalf of the parties, and their work was a waste of time. Cobb was rightfully fed up by the hearsay and ventured to Detroit to see Navin. Cobb arrived in Detroit on March 18, accompanied by attorney Julian McCurry of Hartwell, Georgia, and discussed terms at great length the next morning. He also spoke with former Detroit Mayor George P. Codd, who acted as a middleman in the negotiations.25 On the evening of March 20, 1908, he approved the details laid out in a revamped one-year contract and signed on the bottom line. Neither side would confirm the amount, but it was believed to be for $4,000, plus an $800 bonus if he batted over .300.26

  “I am glad to have the matter settled,” Cobb said. “I would rather play in Detroit than any other city in the country, as I have many friends here and think that I have made good. Of course I will do my best for the club, and expect to play ball from the start. I don’t care to make any predictions as to my work this year, but I think the public may count on me to do my share. The terms of my contract are perfectly satisfactory, and my relations with Mr. Navin are friendly as they have been all through our little discussion.”27

  After signing with Detroit, Cobb returned to Georgia and spent a small amount of time in Royston and Augusta before stopping in Western North Carolina to see extended family en route to meet up with the club.28 Having missed weeks of spring training from spending innumerable days traveling via train, Cobb was haggard, a bit fleshy, and slightly sick when he met the team in Little Rock on March 30. He didn’t pause for a moment and jumped right into the action, fully confident that he’d be ready when the season started. Jennings was undoubtedly thrilled to have Cobb back in the fold, and demonstrated it by ignoring him completely during workouts. Cobb understood why. That wasn’t the case the year prior when he was mystified by Jennings’ actions, and inquired to a sportswriter why the manager spent so much time coaching others, but disregarded him. Jennings finally explained to the young athlete that of all members of the Tigers, he was the one individual who could better teach himself. He assured Cobb to trust and go with his own judgment on the field, and, essentially, act as he pleased.29

  Their system seemed to be working, Jennings believed, and Cobb was thriving at his own pace. Any overly aggressive orders or conflict was sure to derail his mindset, and Jennings, ever the diplomat, figured out the best way to handle his temperamental outfielder. To Cobb, he had the perfect amount of breathing room to study himself and zero in on his weaknesses, and there was no question that he scrutinized his own play harder than any coach ever could. Speed was a constant anxiety, and Cobb went to great lengths to increase his swiftness on the bases. He engaged a shoemaker, and had lead weights imbedded in his soles. The added poundage pushed him harder and served to strengthen his lower body. Once the lead was removed, he felt as nimble as a cat. He applied the same theory to carrying three bats before heading to the plate.

  Cobb was a true competitor, and there was a sustained rivalry on the Tigers about just who was the fastest runner on the team, and it boiled down to Cobb and Davy Jones. Back in 1906, Cobb was arguably at his quickest, and made the home to first base jaunt in just 3.2 seconds.30 Two years later, though, he was doing it in 3.6, while Jones was a tenth of a second faster.31 As far as going around the bases was concerned, Cobb was number one. In fact, he might have set the world record at one point with a time of 13.2 seconds, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t formally logged by pundits.32 During games, he launched himself from the plate and ran with a fierce motion that appeared untamed and certainly unrivaled.

  With the season approaching, the members of the Detroit squad expelled a host of ugly off-season talk including Detroit being ousted from the American League, trade rumors such as McIntyre going to the Highlanders, and nonstop Cobb gossip, and managed to go undefeated in spring exhibitions. They began on a high note at Chicago on April 14, 1908, but couldn’t find a winning groove. The White Sox overpowered them in a 15–8 victory, despite Cobb’s 3-for-5 effort, including a double and home run.33 The Tigers opened up at home on April 17 and lost that game as well, 12–8 to Cleveland. A record attendance of 14,051 packed Bennett Park, which underwent massive upgrades during the winter.34 The Tigers would lose nine of twelve games played in April and culminate the awful month in last place. Personally, Cobb was flourishing. He was batting over .350 and laboring to produce twice as much to cover his struggling teammates. His mood took a downward shift when his favorite bat was stolen from Detroit’s home field.35 Superstitious in nature, he liked to break in a bat and stay with it, and hated to lose something so prized at a pivotal time.

  Detroit rebounded on their eastern road trip, sweeping Boston and taking three of four from Washington, and would end May one game ahead of New York with a 20–16 record. Cobb, playing with extreme passion, momentarily was under the threat of a league suspension—the first of his career—after he was thrown out at the plate going for an inside-the-park home run. He loudly remarked to umpire Silk O’Loughlin and was tossed from the field, but no punishment was handed out.36 Throughout his life, Cobb would long dispute being a full-fledged umpire-baiter. In 1918, he said, “During my league career, I’ve played in something like 1,800 games and been chased out of perhaps a dozen. That means one expulsion in every 150 games. How many players of even the most docile nature can show a cleaner record than that?”37 Notably, his outfield work was probably the best of his career to date. In back-to-back games against Chicago, on May 30–31, he made superhuman catches, preventing a number of runs from scoring. A week later, he nabbed runners headed home twice in two successive days.38

  During his off hours, Cobb was enjoying life and the luxuries of the newly constructed Pontchartrain Hotel in downtown Detroit, where he was residing.39 Early in the afternoon of June 6, 1908, he departed the elegant structure, along with R
ossman, who was also staying there, and headed across Woodward Avenue en route to the park for a game against Boston. A voice then bellowed, “You can’t cross here.” Cobb instantly reacted, his face red with anger, and focused on the speaker, an African American employee of the Detroit United Railway. The latter was a member of an efficient crew striving to improve asphalt conditions for streetcars, and was responsible for cautioning all traffic about the work being done.40

  “What the **** have you got to say about it, nigger?” Cobb shouted.41

  “I didn’t [say] anything more than I tell hundreds of people every day,” the worker, later identified as twenty-seven-year-old Fred Ernest Collins, said, “and, in fact, I wasn’t talking to him. I warned some people in an automobile not to cross the soft asphalt, and he thought I meant him. Then he insulted me. I could see that he was a southerner, and I tried to explain to him, but he kept on insulting me.”42

  Cobb had plenty of opportunity to take a deep breath and walk away from the situation, but instead, in front of an estimated 200 people on the street, he approached Collins and initiated a physical conflict. Throwing punches with a rabid fury, Cobb displayed the same sort of reckless abandon he showed in Augusta the year before, and was unrelenting in his efforts to gain retribution for the so-called slight he perceived Collins to have made. Collins fought back the best he could, but was mainly on the defensive, and the arrival of his coworkers and pedestrians finally put a halt to the several-minute fracas. Rossman pulled his teammate from the scene and the two continued on their way to the park, but Cobb’s face and head showed the obvious signs of participation in an altercation.43

  There was another version of this story that was printed in various newspapers. It claimed that Cobb was on a bus in front of the hotel, preparing to leave for the park, when an African American yelled something derogatory at him. He then proceeded off the vehicle and brawled with the man. It was also said that spectators at Bennett Park ran onto the field in defense of Cobb, when it was thought police were going to arrest him that same day.44

  The behavior of Cobb was unreasonable, and his frenzied actions greatly resembled those he took against the Warren Park groundskeeper. It wasn’t that big of a leap to suspect the color of the man’s skin had something to do with his overzealous reaction. Even a Detroit Free Press reporter mentioned the fact that Collins apparently didn’t show Cobb the same kind of respect African Americans displayed to whites in Georgia.45 And the particular decorum and courtesies shown by blacks toward Caucasians was very important to Cobb, as illustrated by sportswriter Joe S. Jackson in his previously mentioned 1906 article in chapter four.

  The overall sum of evidence paints Cobb to be the kind of man who refused to take anything less than perfect etiquette from people of color. However, he certainly coexisted with African Americans his entire life, and was influenced by several blacks in his hometown of Royston growing up. But in the south, there was a certain expectation by a segment of whites toward their black counterparts. For instance, the prominent Joseph B. Cumming, a Civil War veteran-turned-lawyer in Augusta, Georgia, preached the superiority of the white race and wanted teachers to impress that fact upon young African American students. He believed that blacks were at the “mercy” of whites.46 This wasn’t something he spoke about prior to the war in the 1860s, but in 1900 when Cobb was a boy. There is no telling whether Cobb ever read anything about Cumming or his ilk, but the rancid stain of racism was still prevalent across his state.

  It was, in truth, rampant in Franklin County, Cobb’s part of Georgia. As a youth, Cobb would have been exposed to the story of Bud Jones’s murder in 1896 and the lynching of John Ware just outside Royston in 1904.47 Local newspapers covered regional news of further acts of violence to blacks, such as the lynchings of three individuals in 1899 in Early County, featured on the front page of the Franklin County Press.48 That same paper commented that Carnesville, the county seat, was a “bad town for ‘bad niggers.’”49 The Cobb household, it should be understood, was far from ignorant or intolerant, and W. H. Cobb was a staunch supporter of fair education to blacks. As a state senator, he was firmly against the Bell Bill, which would have limited capital to African American schools to money brought in by black properties.50

  Ty Cobb didn’t naturally hate blacks, but he was aware of a Southern-propagated color boundary and he commanded respect from everyone on both sides of the line. As an already aggressive twenty-one-year-old in 1908, he was keenly alert to the mutterings and scowls of those around him, regardless of their color. But unfortunately, since his perceptions of rudeness were skewed by a general suspicion of nearly everyone, something exceedingly small could trigger an abrasive outburst. For a man so remarkably sensitive about every little thing, he didn’t seem to acknowledge or comprehend even the slightest of sensitivity in others, and there was one route in most instances, straight to anger, and then, in some cases, violence.

  Three days after the Collins incident, Cobb was found by a journalist in the Hotel Pontchartrain lobby and appeared melancholy. He was self-assured that his actions were just, but was obviously distressed about recent events. The writer reiterated the belief that Cobb was “tremendously sensitive to criticism,” adding that he hated to be “misunderstood and misinterpreted.” Cobb proceeded to offer the following insight into his perspective: “Up here, they don’t understand me, see? Course being from Georgia, I think different about Negroes from what they do up here. I don’t say my opinion is worth anything.”51 It seemed he was acutely aware of how this event was going to spawn theories about his racial outlook. In his autobiography, Cobb disavowed any notion he was a “black-hater.”52

  Collins pressed charges against Cobb and the ballplayer was arraigned on an assault and battery charge on June 8. He pled not guilty before Justice Jeffries and the case, after several continuances, was concluded on June 20 when Cobb paid a $75 fine. Cobb said, “I settled not because I thought I was the offending party, but because I thought I did not want to be inconvenienced later on. I would act again in a similar manner under the same conditions. When a man is insulted, it is worth $75 to get satisfaction.”53

  Batting clean-up, Cobb maintained his average over .300, but was exhibiting symptoms of a scatterbrain during the last half of June. On the bases, he made a number of incautious attempts to extend a single into extra bases when he clearly had no chance, didn’t return to a bag to tag up on an outfield fly, and broke up a rally by trying to steal third and being thrown out. He also lost concentration on a towering shot in the wind that he normally would have caught and dashed for a liner into right center, only to dive and miss, causing runs to score. To close out the month of June, he struck out three times against his old nemesis, “Doc” White, in a 2–1 loss at Chicago.54 Joe S. Jackson of the Detroit Free Press called his elongated quarrel with an umpire on June 27 “foolish,” particularly because he was ejected for arguing a strike called on a teammate.55

  Surprisingly, the teammate Cobb was standing up for was Matty McIntyre, and the gesture wasn’t glossed over. Later that night, outside the Michigan Central train station, the perennial rivals found common ground, shook hands, and put an end to their nearly four-year feud. A prominent rooter for the Tigers, Billy Rooks was credited with bringing about the Cobb-McIntyre peace accord. Rooks, a member of the Elks club in Detroit, was close friends with McIntyre, Rube Waddell, and many other ballplayers.56 In his autobiography, however, Cobb claimed that McIntyre passed away in 1920 “without ever shaking my hand” to clear the air between them.57 A sense of peacefulness in the Tigers clubhouse had been building for months and months, and the removal of friction between Cobb and McIntyre eradicated the final element of the old anti-Cobb hazing group. Pitcher Ed Siever had been sent to the minors and troublesome Ed Killian was photographed shaking the hands of a smiling Cobb, indicative of their improved relations.58 Killian had made positive comments about Cobb in the press the September before, essentially extending an olive branch.59 Cobb displayed a personal sen
timent by saying that he was “awfully sorry” to hear that Killian was ill in January 1908.60 Cobb later wrote about corresponding with Killian on friendly terms after the latter retired from the majors, as well.61 B. F. Wright and Paul H. Bruske, expert sportswriters covering all-things Tigers, noticed the lightening of tensions and the greater respect teammates offered Cobb, specifically, because the latter had earned it.62

  Cobb’s rapport with Sam Crawford was utterly unique. At times, they had a mentor-pupil relationship, but as Cobb developed, he fostered a more fiery competitiveness with his fellow outfielder in his mind, similar, but more intense, than that with McIntyre and Jones. He knew in his everlasting pursuit to be the best that he had to contend with the statistical numbers of Crawford, one of baseball’s most potent sluggers. Cobb and Crawford shared a few qualities, but when it came to opinion, attitude, and playing style, they typically differed. For example, the sophomoric Cobb didn’t believe luck played any part in baseball, and it was all up to the ability of the players themselves.63 Crawford, a bit more worldly, disagreed. He felt the Tigers were altogether lucky to win the pennant and said it was always “a big factor.”64

  Crawford was an early riser and the first man in the clubhouse, whereas Cobb liked to sleep a little late and would frequently be the last man to arrive. As far as temperament went, Cobb was insufferable at times, while “Wahoo” was easygoing and likeable. On the field, the Georgia product ran for each base with a nearly unparalleled hustle, and it didn’t matter if it was a soft bunt or a smash to the fence. Crawford was known to drag a bit on shorter hits, even though he had the speed to challenge most throws to first.65 During a batting slump, he rarely, if at all, changed his style, and waited it out, believing that he was bound to regain his stride in due course. Cobb was the opposite. He made adjustments, and went to the park in his spare time to work through it. “Practice makes perfect,” he told a reporter.66