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  COBB

  A Biography

  by Al Stump

  with a foreword by Jimmie Reese

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  1994

  To my wife, Jo

  “The honorable and honest Cobb blood … never will be subjected. It bows to no wrong nor to any man … the Cobbs have their ideals and God help anyone who strives to bend a Cobb away from such.”

  —Ty Cobb, 1927

  “Ty Cobb, the greatest of all ballplayers—and an absolute shit.”

  —Ernest Hemingway, 1948

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  FOREWORD

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  THE LIFETIME RECORD OF TY COBB

  1. EXTRA INNINGS

  2. “FIRE IN MY BELLY”

  3. WALKING THE TIGHTROPE

  4. LOW COMEDY IN THE BUSHES

  5. FOR SALE, ONE REBEL KID, $25

  6. SHOTGUN BLASTS

  7. BITTER TIMES

  8. PILGRIM WITH A PANCAKE GLOVE

  9. “A HANDFUL OF HELL”

  10. MISSING PERSON

  11. INTIMIDATOR

  12. OUTLAW AND PUBLIC ENEMY

  13. THE GREATEST PLAYER WHO EVER LIVED

  14. BATTLE AT HILLTOP PARK

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  15. A NEW LEAGUE

  16. EMERGENCE OF A MILLIONAIRE

  17. UNRECONSTRUCTED OUTLAW

  18. POISON GAS AND THE BABE

  19. “I FIGHT TO KILL”

  20. NEW DECADE—NEW ENEMIES—NEW JOB

  21. “WHY CAN’T THEY DO IT MY WAY?”

  22. SHATTERED DREAMS

  23. A NEAR PENNANT WIN

  24. SLUGGING IN A CAREER TWILIGHT

  25. “REPREHENSIBLE—BUT NOT CRIMINAL”

  26. FINAL INNINGS

  27. PAYBACK TIME

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX: TY COBB’S UNBROKEN RECORD OF HOME-PLATE STEALS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  TWO EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS OF COBB

  COBB IN EARLY YEARS WITH DETROIT TIGERS

  THE TIGER OUTFIELD, 1907–1912: DAVY JONES, COBB, SAM CRAWFORD

  HUGH JENNINGS

  COBB AND NAP LAJOIE IN 1910 CHALMERS AUTO

  COBB SLIDES INTO THIRD AGAINST JIMMY AUSTIN

  SLIDE INTO HOME RUN BAKER THAT TOUCHED OFF NEAR-RIOT

  COBB AT BAT IN 1915

  CHRISTY MATHEWSON AND COBB IN ARMY UNIFORM, 1918

  PORTRAIT SHOT OF COBB

  COBB AND YOUTHFUL FANS

  TY COBB, HERSCHEL COBB, BOBBY JONES, AND BIRD DOG

  COBB AT 1925 WORLD SERIES, PITTSBURGH

  WITH PHILADELPHIA ATHLETICS

  COBB AND O. B. KEELER

  EDDIE COLLINS, COBB, TRIS SPEAKER ON 1928 A’S

  BABE RUTH AND COBB WITH YOUTH BASEBALLERS

  COBB AND TED WILLIAMS, 1961

  FOREWORD

  BY JIMMIE REESE

  Babe Ruth had it right about his greatest rival, Ty Cobb, when he told me, “Cobb’s the meanest, toughest———who ever walked onto a field. He gave everybody hell—me included—because he couldn’t stand to lose. All he wanted was to beat you on Saturday and twice on Sunday. Otherwise he was miserable.”

  I’m a former New York Yankee infielder and, at age ninety-three, the oldest surviving major-leaguer in the Association of Professional Ballplayers. I serve now as a coach with the California Angels. Not many are left who saw Ty Cobb on the rampage in the years 1905–28. None of us can ever forget him. At bat, his eyes blazed at pitchers. He was the only ballplayer I can remember who started each game with a snarl and ended it the same way. What a wildcat he was. Cobb was so shrewd and talented in every aspect of the game that he didn’t need to make baseball a war, but he was always in a battle. In a day when the game was already a tough enough fight, Cobb added a new dimension. He’d force errors time and again by his wild offensive play, such as stealing home base against a veteran battery. We called him “Jack Dempsey in spikes.” The story is quite true that Cobb filed his spikes to razor sharpness to first intimidate opponents and then gore them. I don’t know how he stood twenty-four years of punishment from the players who retaliated. Call it another Cobb “incredible.”

  Here’s a typical story about him: One day a Yankee rookie pitcher threw a beanball at Cobb and it nicked his ear. Big Ty didn’t say a thing then, but next time up he drag-bunted down the first-base line. The pitcher went to handle the bunt, and the next thing he knew he was flying through the air, halfway knocked out. Cobb’s spikes had actually cut the pants and part of the shirt right off him. The man was left bloody, ragged, and permanently scarred. Lou Gehrig of the Yankees, a sweet guy, became angry enough to say, “Cobb is about as welcome in American League parks as a rattlesnake.” Another true fact was that far fewer beaners and dusters were aimed at Cobb than at any other hitter, because of fear. I can’t tell you where he studied psychology, but he was a master at it.

  Babe Ruth, my roommate on the Yankees, once went on a hunting trip with Cobb, and Ty wouldn’t share the same tent with Babe. He refused to get friendly with anyone on another club even while relaxing in the off-season.

  Babe, of course, became baseball’s biggest box-office figure; Cobb was growing old when Ruth’s home-run output had the country going crazy. Ruth was all power and Cobb was mostly science, with some power added. They broke fairly even in statistics. Ty Cobb’s .367 lifetime batting average is still the best ever recorded, whereas Babe averaged .342. Cobb remains tops today in runs scored, with 2,244 to Babe’s 2,174. Ruth edged over Cobb in slugging average, runs batted in, and by far in homers. So the spoils were fairly even. Which of them was the greatest player of all time? Who contributed most to his team? They’ll be arguing that one well into the next century. I guess you know whom I favor—the one they never called a “rattlesnake” in the dugouts, the one with a big belly. But what a wonderful player was the Detroit Tiger, as you’ll learn in reading this book by a savvy baseball writer, Al Stump, who knew Ty Cobb well.

  Editor’s Note: Jimmie Reese, who wrote this foreword early in 1994, died while this book was in the final stages of production in July 1994.

  PREFACE

  Ty Cobb always was a taciturn man; he grew more and more reclusive with advancing age, and upon reaching seventy-three in 1960 he was holed up in a pair of dreary homes worth $5 million in Atherton, California, and at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Baseball’s greatest, most thoroughly disliked player of this century lived without electric lights (candles only in one of his hideouts) and without telephone service (in both). The multimillionaire had been estranged from his five children decades earlier. Two wives had charged extreme cruelty in divorces, each deposing that the Georgia Peach was uncontrollable when crossed or drunk, or whenever he was reminded of how he had regularly bloodied opponents with his spikes—“Cobb’s kiss,” as one victim, Frank “Home Run” Baker, called his slashing.

  Cobb chose me to ghostwrite his memoirs early in 1960 largely on the recommendation of New York editor, biographer, and Hollywood screenwriter Gene Fowler, and of Grantland Rice, dean of sportswriters. He had fired several previous ghosts who had displeased him in one way or another. Various other autobiographical projects had fallen through.

  As a U.S. Navy combat correspondent in World War II, I had met General Douglas MacArthur. “Take the writing job,” counseled MacArthur, an old West Point shortstop, who was Cobb’s number-one fan and close friend. “The world has known only one like him.”

  So began a turbulent period of close to one year with the most brilliant player who ever lived. Cobb’s competitiveness and truculence remain unmatched in American sport. His compulsion to win was awesome. As Paul Gallico wrote, “There was a burning rage in Ty Cobb
never far from the surface. He brought a fury, cruelty and a viciousness heretofore unencountered even in the roughest kind of play.” Gallico, a longtime sports editor at the New York Daily News who closely studied Cobb in his late career, felt that Cobb’s weird conduct, both on and off the field, could have been signs of significant mental illness.

  It was to be expected that a man as abidingly competitive as Cobb, as emotionally wrapped up in what his career was and wasn’t, would not be able to maintain a detached objectivity about that career. Too, the memories of elderly men are notoriously fallible. Therefore his version of long-ago events is not to be taken as unvarnished fact—although his recall was often striking—so much as an index of the way he saw things as having happened.

  What resulted from our collaboration was My Life in Baseball: The True Record, which was finished and at the publishers before Cobb died in July of 1961. We first conceived the book in January of 1960, traveling together to various parts of the country, including New York, Detroit, Georgia, Arizona, his home in Atherton, California, his lodge at Lake Tahoe, and my beach house in Santa Barbara, California.

  It was the Georgia Peach’s combination of acute intelligence and powerful, sometimes uncontrollable passions, placed in the service of his remarkable physical abilities, that made him the embodiment of baseball excellence as the game was played in his day. Precisely that personality is demonstrated in the way that he could shape his recall of what actually took place into something closer to his heart’s desire.

  One reason for the tediously slow going on the first book was that the records of his 24 seasons, 3,033 games, and 11,429 at-bats were badly jumbled, out of sequence, and fading in clarity. He had set more than ninety major-league records at various points in his incredible, unequalled run from 1905 through 1928. He was the original baseball Hall of Famer, the first named to the shrine, and we were enmeshed in yellowing game descriptions, photos by the hundreds, statistics, correspondence, old contract copies, and sporting journals published before the turn of the twentieth century.

  That 1961 autobiography was very self-serving. Cobb had the final say in its contents, accorded him by the publisher. And when we did not agree, which was often, it was his word that was accepted by Doubleday. The book sold moderately well and was called by some one of the finest books of its kind. But it was a subsequent article I wrote for True Magazine, which Bob Considine called “possibly the best sports story I have ever read,” that won sports awards and, finally, a contract for a movie based on the relationship between Cobb and myself, which is scheduled for release in late 1994.

  During the long stretches of time we spent together, my feelings for Ty Cobb were often in flux. My respect for his greatness, my contempt for his vile temper and mistreatment of others, my pity for his deteriorating health, and my admiration for his stubbornness and persistence produced a frustrating mix of emotions. With so much material left over, there was need for another manuscript, but it wasn’t until three decades later that I finally felt compelled to put the real Ty Cobb to rest. Since much of the material is presented in the first person, as Cobb told it to me, the reader is invited to watch not merely Ty Cobb in action on the diamond, but his memory at work as well.

  —Al Stump

  Southern California

  July 4, 1994

  PROLOGUE

  “I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even close to him as the greatest all-time ballplayer. That guy was superhuman, amazing.”

  Casey Stengel, 1975

  “Few names have left a firmer imprint upon the pages of the history of American times than has that of Ty Cobb. For a quarter of a century his aggressive exploits on the diamond, while inviting opposition as well as acclaim, brought high drama … This great athlete seems to have understood from early in his professional career that in the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.”

  General Douglas MacArthur, 1961

  “Fans and the sporting press are always trying to compare Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. This is absurd since they are incomparable, like trying to draw a comparison between an elephant and a wolf. Beloved Babe was a man of simple makeup, savage Cobb was a mass of paradoxes with a life that reads like a Gothic horror tale.”

  Paul Gallico, 1975

  “Crowds jeered Cobb and stoned him, but they came in great numbers to see him. He was undoubtedly the greatest competitor any sport has ever known. For his brilliant hour, a Napoleon, he dominated his world.”

  The Sporting News, 1951

  “A Columbia University professor, lecturing on Ty Cobb, said that if he’d entered banking he’d have been a leading American banker; if he’d gone into politics he’d have become president … He’d have been number one at whatever field he chose.”

  Harry Golden, 1959

  “He threw me more curves in money negotiations than a whole tribe of Arabs. He’d hold out until hell froze over until he got what he demanded.”

  Frank Navin, President, Detroit Tigers, 1926

  “The great trouble with baseball today is that most players are in the game for the money that’s in it—not for the love of it, the excitement and thrill of it.”

  Ty Cobb, 1960

  “After World War I, there were more than 20 newspapers published in New York—and not one of them knew Ty Cobb’s terrible personal secret.”

  Marshall Hunt, New York Daily News, 1973

  “Cobb’s first wife, a charming Augusta girl, started divorce proceedings against Cobb three times and went through with it on the fourth attempt, saying, ‘I simply can’t live with the man any longer.’”

  Fred Lieb, 1977

  “Once, on a golf course, I was about to putt on the fifth green when I heard a voice yelling, ‘Get out of my way, I’m coming through!’ Then came the demand again. So I made way and Ty Cobb played right through me without apology. I guess nobody but the great Cobb would dare to do that to a president.”

  Dwight Eisenhower, 1964

  “Every time I hear of this guy again—I wonder how he was possible.”

  Joe DiMaggio, 1990

  THE LIFETIME RECORD OF TY COBB

  No small part of the charm of our National Game consists of the validity of its statistical record as an index of comparative performance across the years. Research by baseball statisticians in recent years has produced extensive and often valuable revision in the lifetime records compiled by Ty Cobb and other early diamond stars. Depending upon which revision one consults, the totals can vary considerably. The narrative that follows, however, is a biography centered on Cobb’s own memories, and Cobb’s assumptions about his career were based on records as they were posted and credited to him for more than a half-dozen decades of baseball history. It has seemed appropriate, therefore, to use those figures throughout as they were published and generally accepted by baseball fans prior to the appearance of recent revisions. The following is the remarkable lifetime record of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, as drawn from the Baseball Register for 1942:

  CHAPTER ONE

  EXTRA INNINGS

  “To get along with me—don’t increase my tension.”

  —Ty Cobb

  Ever since sundown in the Sierra range, Nevada intermountain radio had been crackling warnings: “Route 50 now highly dangerous. Motorists stay off. Repeat: AVOID ROUTE 50.”

  By 1:00 A.M. the twenty-one-mile, steep-pitched passage from Lake Tahoe’s sixty-eight-hundred-foot altitude into Carson City, a snaky grade most of the way, was snow-struck, ice-sheeted, thick with rock slides, and declared unfit for all transport vehicles by the State Highway Patrol.

  It was right down Ty Cobb’s alley. Anything that smacked of the apparently impossible brought an unholy gleam to his eye. The gleam had been there in 1959 when a series of lawyers advised Cobb that he stood no chance in court against the Sovereign State of California in a dispute over income taxes, whereupon he bellowed defiance and sued the state for sixty thousand dollars plus damages. It had b
een there more recently when doctors warned that liquor would kill him. From a pint of whiskey per day he upped his consumption to a quart and more.

  Sticking out his grizzled chin, he had told me, “I think we’ll take a little run into town tonight.”

  A blizzard rattled the windows of Cobb’s luxurious hunting lodge on the eastern crest of Lake Tahoe, but to forbid him anything—even at the age of seventy-three—was to tell an ancient tiger not to snarl. Cobb was both the greatest of all ballplayers and a multimillionaire whose monthly income from stock dividends, rents, and interest ran to twelve thousand dollars. And he was a man contemptuous of any law other than his own.

  “We’ll drive in,” he announced, “and shoot some craps, see a show, and say hello to Joe DiMaggio—he’s in Reno at the Riverside Hotel.”

  I looked at him and felt a chill. Cobb, sitting there haggard and unshaven in his pajamas and a fuzzy old green bathrobe at one o’clock in the morning, wasn’t fooling.

  “Let’s not,” I said. “You shouldn’t be anywhere but in bed.”

  “Don’t argue with me!” he barked. “There are fee-simple sons of bitches all over the country who’ve tried it and wished they hadn’t.” He glared at me, flaring the whites of his eyes the way he’d done for twenty-four years at quaking pitchers, basemen, umpires, fans, and sportswriters.

  “If you and I are going to get along,” he went on ominously, “don’t increase my tension.”

  It was the winter of 1960. We were alone in his isolated, ten-room lakeside lodge—bearskin floor rugs, mounted game trophies on walls—with a lot of work to do. We’d arrived six days earlier, loaded with a large smoked ham, a twenty-pound turkey, a case of scotch, and another of champagne, for the purpose of collaborating on Ty’s autobiography, a book that he’d refused to write for more than thirty years but had suddenly decided to publish before he died. In almost a week’s time we hadn’t accomplished thirty minutes’ worth of work.