Failures Can't Come Home

By Stefan Kanfer

On Aug. 30, 1905, his first day in the majors, the centerfielder walked, then took off for second base. Eighty years later, players are still trying to catch Ty Cobb. Maury Wills first did it in 1962 when he ran by the old mark of 96 stolen bases in a season. Now Pete Rose, barring calamity, will exceed the hallowed record of 4,191 hits. But, like Wills, he will surpass only the man, not the icon.

Even in his playing years Cobb assumed a mythic stature. The garrulous Casey Stengel summed up his contemporary in a lone sentence: "It was like he was superhuman." Others would say subhuman. On his most courteous afternoons, Cobb slid in, spikes high and sharpened to maim. He wrangled with teammates, two wives, five children and innumerable ticket holders. When a New York fan taunted him, Cobb climbed into the stands and stomped the offender. It was later pointed out that the stompee had been missing all of one hand and three fingers of the other. Cobb replied tenderly, "I don't care if he has no feet."

For 33 years it was difficult to decide whether the man they called the Georgia Peach belonged on the base paths or with the sociopaths. Yet there is no one who more clearly deserved a place in the Hall of Fame, and he was the first player voted in at the 1936 start. The battle of self-destruction and will began back in rural Georgia, when the teenage hunter accidentally shot himself with a .22 rifle. The bullet lodged in the vicinity of his clavicle and remained there for the rest of his life. Tyrus Raymond Cobb's father, W.H., a school commissioner, thought of his son as a potential doctor or lawyer. As Professor Cobb saw it, baseball players were drunken, wenching, low-salaried louts. He relented when Ty refused to go to college, but the old man warned him, "Don't come home a failure."

Cobb was to come home successfully 2,245 times in the big leagues, but his father saw none of those achievements. W.H. was shotgunned twice on the evening of Aug. 8, 1905. His wife pulled the trigger. She had mistaken him, she claimed, for an intruder. Three weeks later, amid rumors about his parents' marital squabbles, infidelity and murder, the red-haired 18-year-old fought his way into the Detroit Tigers' lineup. But he saw no reason to rejoice. "I only thought," he recalled, "father won't know it."

Perhaps to prove himself to a ghost, perhaps because of the hazing his teammates gave him, the rookie became an animal. "I was just a mild-mannered Sunday-school boy," Cobb liked to reminisce 40 years later. "But those old-timers turned me into a snarling wild-cat." They snubbed him, sawed his bats in half, locked him out of hotel rooms. He responded with his mouth, his fists and his average. In Cobb's first full year he hit .320, and that was to be his worst mark ever. In the era of the spitball he led the league in hitting a dozen seasons, and went over .400 three times. His lifetime batting average was .367. No one has ever equaled his bat control: in 1926, when he hit .339, he struck out twice.

Cobb's patented hands-apart grip made him a nonpareil singles and doubles hitter, but furnished him with little power. Or so it seemed. In the Babe Ruth epoch, when Cobb was criticized for failing to hit the long ball, he went on record: "I'm going for home runs for the first time in my career." That day he went six for six: two singles, a double and three home runs. The following game he hit two more homers. The Peach had made his point; he hit just seven more home runs that season, and only 118 in a career of 3,034 games. Rose has hit 159 homers, though only one in the last three years.

All along, it was the inner game of baseball that truly interested Cobb: theft of a base, the hit and run, advancing from first to third on a bunt and unbounded psyching of the opponent. He knew, for example, that Walter Johnson had a lethal fastball but that he never threw at the batter. So Cobb crowded the plate and worked the fireballer for walks and opposite-field hits. Cobb often drooped listlessly at the plate, then ran the bases furiously, colliding with infielders and leaving their blood in the dust. All along, he bench-jockeyed with the worst of them. More than the changed quality of travel or gloves, the widening of the country or the times of the games, the exclusion of black players in Cobb's day may be the best point on Rose's side of the comparative arguments. But Cobb would not have had it any other way. Racist remarks, particularly about Negro ancestry, were his favorites. Even the affamble Babe chided him, "I don't mind being called a son of a bitch or a bastard, but ... none of that personal stuff."

Long after his career ended at 42 in 1928, Cobb complained about the decline of his sport. "The fabric of baseball is crumbling, "he warned. "I'd want players less interested hi a bonus, a business manager and a bowling alley than in fighting to win." But he was surprisingly modern in his self-interest. Like Rose he became a player-manager with a mouthful of statistics, mostly about his own achievements. Like Rose he was a headlong competitor whose determination made him exceed more gifted men. And like Rose he grew wealthy with shrewd investments, a high salary and the willingness to endorse a variety store of products: cigars, cigarettes, overcoats, underwear, suspenders and a pepper-upper called Nuxated Iron.

There is one essential difference between the legend and his successor. Rose can always laugh at himself. Cobb preferred to smile when the opposition blew a big lead. He was not much on irony; that his base-stealing records were surpassed by three black men, Wills, Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson, would not have amused him. Nor did he appreciate a generous anecdote told about him by a batting pupil. In 1960 Lefty O'Doul was asked, "What do you think Cobb would hit today?" The old outfielder guessed, "Oh, maybe .340." Then why do you say Cobb was so great when he could only hit .340 with this lively ball? O'Doul thought about it. "Well, you have to take into consideration that the man is now 74 years old." --By Stefan Kanfer