Cobb (66 page)

That sweeping victory, coming at a time of displacement and frustration, delighted the Peach more than any event of his professional life except for his $100,000 season at Philadelphia in 1927 and his lifetime .367 batting average. He seemed to foresee that fifty or more years from now he would remain recognized as the best ever to wear spikes, because the Hall of Fame said so.

A little more than three years after the voting, in June of 1939, the red-brick National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame Building was dedicated at Cooperstown, a rustic town set among the lakes and green mountains of central New York State. Ten thousand fans packed the place. At first Cobb did not appear. The centerpiece of the show was missing. Group photographs shot before he appeared showed one empty space. He blamed his late arrival on crowded roads leading to Cooperstown and a flat tire. In 1956, at a dinner honoring him at the San Francisco Press Club, Cobb declared that he had been late at Cooperstown to avoid having his photograph taken with Kenesaw Landis. Landis was on his “shit list,” he said, for taking so long to clear him in the Cobb-Speaker-Leonard case of years earlier. “Landis has been dead for a dozen years and he's still a rotten bastard,” Tyrus assured the Press Clubbers. “He made me look guilty.”

COBB'S MARRIAGE
bounced up and down. After Charlie withdrew her divorce suit of 1931 in Georgia and set up housekeeping in Atherton, she filed again within two years. That action, too, was dropped. Then within months she was back in court with a third divorce request. Upon each occasion Charlie had gone through expensive preliminary procedures aimed at a permanent division of their assets. Each time she was either talked out of it or changed her mind.

No one in Atherton or nearby Palo Alto evidently knew what went on behind the doors at Cobb's Hall. Gossip supposedly obtained from household staff had it that Cobb blew up about small things, drank a quart of milk—mixed with a quart of scotch—almost every day, and
flew into a rage each time his wife took him to court. Charlie was believed to be asking, under California law, for a substantial part of his millions. “Nobody ever threw so many changes-of-pace at Ty,” cracked Lefty O'Doul at the Geary Street pub he ran in San Francisco.

By the late 1940s, Charlie meant what she said, and in 1947, on the fourth time around, actually divorced Cobb. It was town talk that he had hit her across the back with the handle end of a baseball bat—not a crippling blow, but painful and terrifying.

Atherton neighbors filed other reports of violence. According to the local San Mateo County Sheriff's office, on one occasion Cobb played host at Cobb's Hall to his neighbors. Throughout the evening he drank heavily and during dinner used foul language. One of the ladies objected. He called her an “old whore.” She broke into tears. Her husband, a former football player and a husky fellow, invited Cobb outside. The host attacked with fists, at which the guest seized a chair, shattered it over Cobb's bald head, and opened a gash. Blood poured down his face. While Cobb lay on the floor, unconscious, the husband called the sheriff.

“I think I just killed a man here,” he reported by phone to a deputy.

“What's his name?” asked the deputy.

“Ty Cobb. He lives at this address.”

The officer was not surprised. “Yes, we know all about that son of a bitch. It's a wonder somebody hasn't killed him a long time ago.”

No charges were pressed by anyone in the case.

Sedate Atherton was scandalized by its celebrity resident on other occasions. Someone remarked at a pool party that Cobb hadn't bothered to mow the lawn around his pool. Cobb shoved him into the water. The Domino Club, a night spot, asked him not to return after he punched a former Pacific Coast League player over a disagreement. The player sued and collected $2,500.

Charlotte “Charlie” Cobb's delayed divorce of 1947 was messy and complicated. At the age of fifty-five she accused her husband, sixty, of treating her with “extreme cruelty” from their marriage day onward, a thirty-nine year period. She asked for $7 million in settlement, or about one-half of what she claimed was his overall wealth in bank deposits, stock and bond shares, rents, autos, jewelry, real estate, and other holdings. In addition Charlie wanted five thousand dollars per month in alimony and sixty thousand dollars in legal fees. Cobb and
his lawyers avoided revealing in court the facts behind her cruelty charges.

The case was dropped in California and switched to Nevada with its advantageous both-party divorce and tax laws. Fortunately, Cobb had bought a fishing lodge at Lake Tahoe, near the hamlet of Glen-brook, Nevada, and he qualified as a Nevada resident. “He went on mainly living in Atherton and for a long time got away with claiming Glenbrook as home,” explained Elmer Griffin. The amount awarded Charlie was never disclosed. Insurance-bonds expert Griffin's estimate was $6 million outright to Charlie, plus thirty-five hundred dollars monthly in alimony.

Griffin himself doubted that his client was entirely sane. Yet he regarded him as extremely shrewd in financial matters. Despite poor eyesight from age sixty on, Cobb could still scan the small type of the
Wall Street Journal
by using special high-magnification glasses. His “feel” for how a stock or bond issue would fare in the future was extraordinary, and sometimes phenomenal. A Wells Fargo bank official revealed that Cobb made a $385,000 profit in one six-week period of trading. “I know good stuff when I see it,” said Cobb. “Also sucker investments.”

The elderly Cobb became expert at tax loopholes, while also aiding hard-up ballplayers. Each month he mailed support checks to some three dozen men who had once faced his spikes and not backed away. Johnny———had been admired in the American League for planting a ball in Cobb's face in a sliding situation, loosening some of his teeth. Johnny was one of “my boys” who received support checks. Their names were kept confidential. Another beneficiary was Mickey “Black Mike” Cochrane, a future Hall of Fame catcher. Near-fatally beaned by a pitch in 1937, Cochrane afterward could not function. The Cobb fund helped support him for the rest of his life.

In zany contrast to this thoughtful generosity, the Georgian had telephone service cut off at his Lake Tahoe lodge, suspecting that the lines were tapped by Internal Revenue spies or divorce lawyers. When leaving his Atherton property for the day, he hung bedsheets on the backyard line with an attached note: “
JOE—WILL BE BACK IN 15 MINUTES.
” His presumption was that thieves were thereby deterred from breaking in.

Socially, he could be brutal. At a Hall of Fame banquet, Cobb
brought as his guest a well-known writer, John D. McCallum. Cobb was seated at the head table; McCallum was seated with the working press. Suddenly rising, Cobb snapped at McCallum, “When you go somewhere with me, you sit where I sit!” Then he dumped the writer's roast beef dinner into his lap. Observers were speechless.

The act reminded sports editor Harry Grayson of the day at the Detroit Athletic Club when he and Grantland Rice hosted Cobb and one-time Cleveland catcher Jay “Nig” Clarke at dinner. Clarke, laughing, mentioned how he had tricked umpires by “fast-swiping” at a runner coming in, missing him, but then tossing his mitt into the air and trotting away, thereby convincing umpires that he had made the inning's third out. That included some outs on Cobb of twenty-five or so years earlier. Grayson and Rice found it funny. Cobb arose from his chair, his face darkening. Fuming, he called Clarke a “dirty SOB” and struck him. “You cost me runs!” he yelled. Clarke escaped, while Grayson and Rice restrained a man gone out of his head.

The ranks of ballplayers he had competed against were narrowing. Every few months he was made aware of the threat of advancing age. In the 1950s came the deaths of Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Honus Wagner, Harry Heilmann, Connie Mack, and Grover Cleveland Alexander; in the 1940s it had been Babe Ruth, Joe Tinker, Walter Johnson, Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, and Lou Gehrig. He sent flowers, but rarely attended a funeral. He was afraid, thought Lefty O'Doul, that he might be seen weeping in public.

Within the Cobb family, son Herschel died in 1951 at age thirty-four of a sudden heart attack. He had been a good schoolboy athlete, to his father's pleasure. Less than two years later, Tyrus Junior had died at forty-two. After clashes with his father over his poor academic showing, he had obtained an M.D. in obstetrics from the Medical College of South Carolina. Ty junior had been in practice for only a few years when an inoperable brain tumor killed him.

Partially because of the high cost of divorcing Charlie in 1947, Cobb had intended never to marry again. Two years later, however, he took as his bride an attractive divorcée of Buffalo, New York, named Frances Fairburn. “I'm just a lonely old man, sitting around a big, empty house,” he had been telling reporters. “And my wife is a real sportswoman. We may go hunting in Africa.”

Instead of going on safari, he went to divorce court again, once
more charged with extreme cruelty. As associate of Cobb reportedly was told by Frances Fairburn Cobb that she felt physically threatened when her husband was hitting the bottle, a steady occurrence. Often she locked her bedroom door. Their split in 1956 had comic-opera touches. He showed visiting journalists where he had installed electrified fences at his Atherton home to foil private agents seeking access to his financial records for divorce purposes. Two of his guard dogs had been accidentally shocked. Tyrus himself, went the story, had forgotten to switch off the current upon returning home one night and took a jolt.

Muddy Ruel, a faithful attendant at 48 Spencer Lane in Atherton, the man who had caught Walter Johnson's lightning fastballs for the Washington Senators, asked him, “Have the bastards found anything in the house?”

“No,” replied Cobb. “I take my bank records with me even when I go to the toilet.”

IN THE
twenty-third season of his retirement, 1951, two connected events returned Ty Cobb to national attention. He enjoyed the publicity; he had missed it. As it happened, both events enabled Cobb to hit back at the club-owners' consortium that had denied him a league franchise or franchise interest. In July, the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power resumed hearings held in the past and invited him to testify on baseball's possible violations of federal antitrust laws. Forty-six years after a raw left-handed rookie from Royston, Georgia, had arrived in the big league with a pancake glove and uniform roll, the U.S. Congress continued to argue over whether or not the reserve clause of the standard baseball contract violated the individual player's right to bargain freely for his services.

Cobb's opinion hadn't changed: “Hell, yes!” The reserve bound a player to one team, season after season, in perpetuity. The restrictive practice could be helpful to a career, but only—argued Cobb—if it included the compromise that if a player had spent five seasons with one team and wished to move elsewhere, he could apply for and receive free agency. Even in 1951 this was decades ahead of baseball's mood. What he suggested would come true as part of the overall reformation of the 1970s, when free agency did arrive and created a class of entertainment millionaires.

His congressional testimony led to a 1952 offer from
Life
magazine.
Life
offered him $25,000 to write under his byline two articles exposing the alleged sorry state into which baseball had fallen. For a long time, Cobb had been saying that the game's quality since the late 1920s and onset of home-run mania had been poor. August Busch of St. Louis and Phil Wrigley of Chicago urged that he not lend his name to such an accusation. Coming from him and with
Life
's huge circulation, it could be bad for business. Cobb signed with
Life
.

His long essay—titled “They Don't Play Baseball Any More”—was powerful stuff. In his opinion:

• The game had declined so far that “only two players today can be mentioned in the same breath with the old-time greats.” These two were not Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio. They were Phil Rizzuto, Yankee shortstop, and Stan Musial, then St. Louis Cardinal's versatile outfielder. Rizzuto and Musial were the last of the smart, scientific players. Men who could beat you many ways were vanishing.

• The game had degenerated into a home-run slugging match: “it's as if two golfers decide to forget all about the course, with its many traps, dog-legs, roughs and greens—and instead just went out to see who could hit the ball the farthest at a driving range.”

• If a base runner of Cobb's day could return, he would “run wild against today's inept pitchers and catchers.”

• “There are too many joke teams … who fall behind 12–2 around the fourth inning.” They rob the paying public.

• Players were vastly overpaid, robbed of their incentive, and deprived of spirit before their time.

To knock Ted “Splendid Splinter” Williams, who would retire with a lifetime .344 batting average, and DiMaggio, three-time most valuable player of the American League, was heresy. Cobb didn't care. “It has been a crime the way Williams let managers neutralize his power with odd defensive shifts,” he wrote. DiMaggio was an “outstanding example” of how stars stupidly neglected to keep in shape and play to their full ability. His commentary ended with the suggestion: “I think we should throw them all [modern big-leaguers] a bag of peanuts.”

Life
promoted the diatribe heavily. Most reviewers found Cobb
guilty of comparing the streamlined baseball of the moment with a deadball, low-scoring era long phased out. Everything had changed with the arrival of booming bats, relief pitching, development of night play, the impact of television, and the end of the racial barrier. And yet some critics agreed with Cobb that pro football and golf for the masses were catching up with baseball as a draw. Behind all this, they held, was the failure of the 1950s big leagues to produce players in a class with Tyrus Raymond Cobb.