by John Sexton
Nor do records do complete justice to his astonishing hitting skills. In 1925, toward the end of his playing career, Cobb told a newspaperman that for the next two games he was going to “swing for the fences” to prove his argument that hitting home runs was nothing special. He had nine hits and five homers. Indeed, during one season early in his career (1909) he actually won the American League’s Triple Crown, leading in batting average, runs batted in, and even home runs (nine, every one of them inside-the-park, a league record). But that was also the third consecutive year in which Cobb had played a desultory World Series for his unsuccessful team (in those three Series he batted only.262); he never got another chance.
On a plaque outside of Detroit’s Comerica Park, the Tigers’ current home, Cobb is called a “genius in spikes.” What it doesn’t mention is that Cobb was notorious for using those same spikes, regularly and meticulously sharpened, as a weapon when sliding into a base. It was this vicious practice and his wretched treatment of teammates, opponents, and ordinary people that permanently stained Cobb’s reputation; he snarled, he fought, and he attacked.
And his vile behavior permeated his life. He once slugged an African-American elevator operator and then stabbed the security guard who tried to intervene. During spring training in Georgia in 1907, he fought a groundskeeper and then choked the man’s wife when she tried to stop his assault.
The most infamous incident occurred during the 1912 season against the New York Highlanders (now Yankees), when, after enduring a torrent of abuse from a heckler, he jumped into the stands the moment he heard the term “half nigger.” As he pummeled the heckler, Cobb refused to stop hitting him after other fans yelled that the man had only one hand, famously snarling back, “I don’t care if he got no feet.”
For this behavior, the American League fined him fifty dollars and suspended him for ten days, prompting a brief sympathy strike by Cobb’s entire team in a rare example of solidarity with him. Playing with young men recruited off street corners as replacements, the makeshift Tiger team lost 24–2 in Philadelphia behind the complete-game pitching of a fellow from St. Joseph’s College who had never pitched a day in his life (he gave up twenty-nine hits and never pitched again).
Cobb often spoke bitterly of the chip on his shoulder, his most notable comment reeking of bitterness: “Sure I fought. I had to fight all my life just to survive. They were all against me. Tried every dirty trick to cut me down, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.”
The result was widespread unpopularity among players. Cobb’s glaring absence among the group of mystical ballplayers that assembled at the Field of Dreams is explained succinctly in the film by Shoeless Joe: “None of us could stand the son of a bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it!”
An indifferent and occasionally violent parent and husband (twice), Cobb was in the end sorry after a fashion, but the toll on his bitter legacy could not be erased by occasional late-life acts of generosity, made possible by the great riches he derived from his sizable investments. Shakespeare’s Mark Antony said that “the evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Or as Saint Paul put it in First Corinthians: “If I have a faith that can move mountains but have not love, I am nothing.” By these measures, Cobb was a sinner. Still, Tyrus Raymond Cobb is enshrined in Cooperstown, a saint among baseball saints. And when judged for what he did “between the lines,” he should be (I guess).
Though at a different position, Christy Mathewson, like Cobb, was a dominating superstar on the field; off the field he was Cobb’s polar opposite. When he died at forty-five in 1925 after nearly seven years of severe health problems flowing from injuries suffered in World War I, headlines cried: BASEBALL WORLD MOURNS and CHRISTY MATHEWSON IS DEAD. The word idol was used five times in the New York Times obituary, which declared him “the most consummate and brilliant artist of all time.”
By the numbers, he was most likely the second best pitcher in an era of great pitchers early in the last century. His victories (373) were fewer than Walter Johnson’s, as were his strikeouts (2,502) and shutouts (80). His New York Giants teams were better, winning five pennants compared with two for Johnson’s Washington Senators; but what caused Hall of Fame manager Connie Mack to say he was better than Johnson was his command of games, especially big ones. Mathewson’s career year was 1905. He won thirty-one games, had a remarkable 1.27 earned run average, threw eight shutouts including his second no-hitter, and struck out 206 batters. Still more, he proceeded to win three games in the World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics—each a complete-game shutout, a feat not yet equaled.
And everybody loved him. Everybody. He had come from very little in the northeastern Pennsylvania village of Factoryville, named in the 1820s after a cotton mill took root there (the mill closed soon thereafter and there has never been another factory in Factoryville). Unusual for a ballplayer at the time, Mathewson was a college man. He attended Bucknell, where he was a football as well as baseball star and also his class president and a devout, observant Christian for good measure.
In The Celebrant, a terrific novel woven around the tale of this engaging, learned man, Eric Rolfe Greenberg wrote of Mathewson: “He was no less at ease in black tie than in his playing togs or the formal dress…. He did not so much fit into his surroundings as define them; he seemed innately, magnetically right in every circumstance.”
In one scene, Mathewson conversed with ease about the rules that established baseball’s foundation in the nineteenth century, balancing, as he put it, “the arithmetic of the game against its geometry.”
“What a success he had! Don’t you agree?” says Mathewson, speaking of the architect of baseball’s rules. “All those balances—so exact, so demanding and tantalizing. Nothing in the game is easy, yet nothing is impossible. It’s a game of intricate simplicity.”
Baseball had not experienced anything quite like him in the new century. Most players were hard-living off the field. But Mathewson’s refreshing wholesomeness gave the game new appeal at just the moment its sponsors had decided they wanted families, not rowdies, at their games.
Like Cobb, Mathewson answered his country’s call the instant the United States entered World War I. Also like Cobb, he served in a special unit helping train soldiers for the new horrors of gas warfare (he was a captain). But during a training exercise in France, he was accidentally dosed with mustard gas, whereupon his health almost immediately deteriorated. He returned as a manager and executive, but tuberculosis eventually claimed him.
The day he died, October 7, 1925, was opening day for that year’s World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Walter Johnson’s Senators. Baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis decreed that every player would appear wearing a black armband, the first time that had happened. Even today, Bucknell plays its football in Mathewson Stadium, and the Saturday closest to his August birthday is still an official holiday in Factoryville. As it turned out, the good was not interred with his bones.
Mathewson, of course, was a huge celebrity in his day; on the strengths of his ability and character, he deserved to be. Interestingly, however, he was not the only player on those special New York Giants teams at the turn of the twentieth century about whom a novel has been written; indeed, he wasn’t even the only pitcher.
Like The Celebrant, Havana Heat is both a tale of baseball and an allegory. It is a reminder of baseball’s power to teach, inspire, and transport us. Darryl Brock’s novel is built around the life and career of one of the handful of deaf people to make it in the major leagues. Luther Taylor was one of the mainstays on the Giants’ pitching staff in those years. In the cruel vernacular of those days, he was called Dummy, to his face. He didn’t care; if anything he was motivated by it. In less than a decade, he won 116 games before arm troubles slowed and eventually ended his career.
Brock’s novel traces and imagines Taylor’s remarkable life from a farm in Kansas to the fame and modest fortune of
the big leagues to later fulfillment as a teacher and coach. But some of its most powerful and magical passages take place during a 1911 off-season trip the Giants made to Cuba. There, Taylor feels a spiritual tug—much more from the African-born religious world of Santeria than from conventional clerical forces. It is a specific call, directed toward a young Cuban pitcher, also deaf, whom Taylor mentors and who actually beats the Giants in an exhibition game; and it has broad implications, shaping the rest of his life.
As Allen E. Hye put it in his interpretive book The Great God Baseball: Religion in Modern Baseball Fiction, “The richness of [Havana Heat] lies in the many threads of Dummy Taylor’s story that weave a bittersweet tapestry of life and draw us into the lives of people we grow to care about.”
Among the threads is the 1905 World Series. Taylor was scheduled to start the third game. But rain postponed it; Mathewson pitched instead on the following day, threw the second of his three shutouts that Series, and Taylor never had another chance to play in the World Series. Havana Heat helps us understand why that doesn’t matter ultimately. Mathewson’s renown was national; but Taylor remains an iconic figure in the deaf community. The gymnasium at the Kansas School for the Deaf, where he was a long-ago valedictorian, was named in his honor shortly after he died in 1958.
Veneration is a universal phenomenon; but because it is done by human beings, the criteria, the process, and thus the decisions that elevate some to special reverence are varied and complicated. The record number of Catholic canonizations in recent years underscores the point, more a statement about the goals and methods of today’s church than about the worthiness of human beings through history.
In worldly affairs, official veneration has evolved like so much of modern life into a series of processes with rules and, inevitably, bureaucracies, and therefore—again, because humans are involved—equally inevitable inconsistency and even hypocrisy. Today, there are halls of fame for scores of endeavors, from salesmen to craftsmen. The nation’s first “Hall of Fame” was at my very own NYU, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, begun in 1901, which after a vote taken at the 1900 World’s Fair included among its first members George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Morse (telegraph and code pioneer, NYU’s first full professor, and painter). But the National Baseball Hall of Fame was the first for sports and it remains that rare combination of the specific and the generic.
Controversy has not surprisingly surrounded baseball’s Hall of Fame almost from the initial selection of five magnificent ballplayers in 1936: Cobb, Ruth, Wagner, Mathewson, and Johnson. The arguments, however, have ranged far beyond accomplishment to character. Most of us want our heroes to be good people, but without ever saying so explicitly, the baseball establishment has ruled that criterion irrelevant. Ty Cobb was a wretched human being, but his volcanic, violent persona had no impact whatsoever on his enshrinement.
Within a decade, moreover, the Hall of Fame had welcomed two enormously significant figures—Cap Anson and Kennesaw Mountain Landis—who were key participants in the most damning black mark against baseball: the monstrous injustice of segregation, lasting from the professional game’s infancy in the 1880s until Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey (two baseball saints for sure) finally changed everything in 1947. Anson was one of the game’s first superstars and used the power of his fame to agitate publicly for what came to be called the “color line” just after the professional leagues were formed. And no figure was more important in maintaining segregation than the commissioner of both major leagues himself, former federal judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. But Anson was also one of the first truly great hitters, and Landis helped restore faith in the game’s on-field integrity after the World Series of 1919 was fixed by gangsters.
Like many institutions, baseball tends to ignore moral dilemmas until forced to confront them, whether they be gambling at the dawn of the twentieth century or steroids at the dawn of the twenty-first. And like many institutions, baseball has offered a form of atonement, though not official acknowledgment of its failings: witness the veneration of Robinson today and the diligent efforts to mine the records of the old Negro Leagues to find stars (more than thirty so far) to anoint as Hall of Famers.
But there are limits to baseball’s willingness to tolerate malfeasance; and two cases illustrate them. The first, very real, is the best known of the eight Chicago White Sox players banned for life due to the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, Shoeless Joe Jackson (himself the title figure in a W. P. Kinsella novel that eventually became Field of Dreams). The other is entirely fictitious, the complex Roy Hobbs, whom novelist Bernard Malamud christened The Natural.
Ty Cobb himself said Joe Jackson was the best hitter he ever saw and advocated his reinstatement. Babe Ruth said he based his own famous swing on Jackson’s. After eleven amazing seasons, he was hitting .382 in 1920 when the final suspension happened; his lifetime batting average of .356 remains the third highest in baseball history. He was fast, fielded his outfield position magnificently, and had achieved hero status at the time he was suspended.
Jackson came from abject poverty, a sharecropping family in western South Carolina that was too busy surviving to permit any education whatsoever; but he was one of those special players in the early twentieth century who was beloved as well as admired, on a par with Wagner and Mathewson.
And then he lost it all. Sticking strictly to the uncontroverted facts about the scandal, the 1919 World Series was in fact fixed so that the extreme underdog Cincinnati Reds defeated Jackson’s White Sox, five games to three. Something like one hundred thousand dollars changed hands, and Jackson kept five thousand of a promised twenty while staying silent about the shenanigans he knew were occurring. On the other hand, he never attended any meetings of the offending players and never agreed to do anything on the field during the Series. Quite the contrary, he was the Series hitting star, batting .375, getting a record-tying twelve hits, including a home run. Not a single one of the numerous questionable plays at bat or in the field was attributed to any action or inaction on his part.
The third highest batting average of the Series (.324) belonged to White Sox third baseman Buck Weaver, who also ended up getting banned from the game for life by Landis. Weaver never took a dime, played his heart out offensively and defensively, but was aware that a fix was in and also remained silent.
All eight players were acquitted of criminal charges associated with the scandal, but upon taking office Landis simply banned everybody and ignored appeals to reexamine the issue as the years passed. Jackson lived an honorable life as best he could. After a few stabs at semipro ball, he and his wife ran a dry-cleaning business in Savannah in the twenties and then a liquor store near where he grew up in Greenville until a heart attack claimed him in 1951.
In the law Landis once enforced, distinctions are critical to judgment, morally as well as legally. But in baseball, there are only “the best interests” of the game as viewed by one person alone. The power is arbitrary, which means it can be abused, sacrificing the very moral underpinnings of the judgments made. Joe Jackson was a fabulous ballplayer and by all accounts a fabulous person who made one, hideous moral blunder. Today he is often viewed as a victim rather than a perpetrator. From exile, Pete Rose understands baseball’s need to keep the game free of gambling, but as one who claims he never let his compulsion affect his team’s games, Rose would second the lament of Buck Weaver later in life: “There are murderers who serve a sentence and then get out. I got life.” Joe Jackson could have said those words.
Baseball also is one of the best settings for metaphorical tales of the human spirit and character. If Shoeless Joe presents a complex case, then Malamud’s character Roy Hobbs belongs to the philosophers. At nineteen, he is a star pitcher in the making, on his way by train for a tryout with (who else?) the Chicago Cubs. Among his fellow travelers is the Ruthian slugging champion Walter “the Whammer” Wambold, along with a mysterious, alluring woman, Harriet Bird—in fact a lu
natic. During an impromptu stop at a carnival, Hobbs answers a dare, and from a makeshift mound strikes out the Whammer dramatically. In Chicago, though, Hobbs impulsively answers a call from Harriet, goes to her hotel room, and is shot; she had originally targeted the Whammer but settles for Hobbs in her quest to remake the world by getting rid of arrogant athletes.
The novel resumes sixteen years later, with Hobbs a walk-on outfielder for the struggling New York Knights, led by a kindly veteran manager (Pop Fisher) and an evil owner (a judge named Banner) who is scheming to see his Knights lose the pennant so he can get rid of Fisher.
In his second try at baseball life, Hobbs encounters two women: Memo Paris, Fisher’s femme fatale niece, who leads him on shamelessly; and Iris Lemon, a hardworking, wholesome woman.
Obsessed with Memo and needing money, Hobbs negotiates a thirty-five-thousand-dollar payoff from the judge to throw the Knights’ final game. But Iris is there, and her presence inspires Hobbs to reverse course and make a last lunge toward greatness. With a chance to win, however, he is struck out by another young pitching sensation. Later that night, he punches out the judge and his bookie friend, dodges a real bullet from Memo, and throws the bribe money in her face. At the novel’s end, he breaks down after seeing a late newspaper headline accusing him of throwing the game.
The novel, very different from the movie version starring Robert Redford, was at least partially inspired by a real event—the shooting of promising Phillie first baseman Eddie Waitkus in 1949 by a deranged young woman. Waitkus recovered from his chest wound and was baseball’s comeback player of the year during the team’s successful pennant drive (as the famous Whiz Kids) in 1950.
