Detroit Tigers (1905–1926) Early years Three weeks after his mother killed his father, Cobb debuted in
center field for the Detroit Tigers. On August 30, 1905, in his first major league at bat, he doubled off
Jack Chesbro of the
New York Highlanders. Chesbro had won 41 games the previous season. Cobb was 18 years old at the time, the youngest player in the league by almost a year. Although he hit only .240 in 41 games, he signed a $1,500 contract to play for the Tigers in 1906. As a rookie, Cobb was subject to severe hazing by his veteran teammates, who were jealous of the young prospect. The players smashed his homemade bats, nailed his cleats in the clubhouse, doused his clothes before tying knots in them, and verbally abused him. Cobb later attributed his hostile temperament to this experience: "These old-timers turned me into a snarling wildcat." Tigers manager
Hughie Jennings, who took the helm in 1907, later acknowledged that Cobb was targeted for abuse by veteran players, some of whom sought to force him off the team. "I let this go for a while because I wanted to satisfy myself that Cobb has as much guts as I thought in the very beginning," Jennings recalled. "Well, he proved it to me, and I told the other players to let him alone. He is going to be a great baseball player and I won't allow him to be driven off this club." Within a year, Cobb emerged as the Tigers' regular center fielder and hit .316 in 98 games in 1906, setting a record for the highest batting average (minimum 310 plate appearances) for a 19-year-old (later bested by
Mel Ott's .322 average in 124 games for the 1928
New York Giants). He never hit below that mark again. After being moved to right field, he would lead the Tigers to three consecutive
American League pennants in 1907, 1908 and 1909. Detroit would lose each
World Series (to the Cubs twice and then the Pirates), however, and Cobb's
postseason numbers were in sum notably below his career standard. It was his later contention that his youth at the time played a factor in this. In his remaining nineteen seasons, Cobb did not get another opportunity to play on a pennant-winner and thus in a World Series. In a game in 1907, Cobb reached first and then stole second, third and home. a feat he accomplished four times during his career, still an MLB record. He finished the 1907 season with a league-leading .350 batting average, 212 hits, 49 steals and 119
runs batted in (RBI). Reflecting on his career in 1930, two years after retiring, he told
Grantland Rice, "The biggest thrill I ever got came in a game against the Athletics in 1907 [on September 30]... The Athletics had us beaten, with
Rube Waddell pitching. They were two runs ahead in the 9th inning, when I happened to hit a home run that tied the score. This game went 17 innings to a tie, and a few days later, we clinched our first pennant. You can understand what it meant for a 20-year-old country boy to hit a home run off the great Rube, in a pennant-winning game with two outs in the ninth." In the 1907 World Series, after a suspended tie in Game One, the Tigers were outclassed and swept by the Chicago Cubs, with Cobb battling a lackluster .200. , his National League rival for greatest position player in the game, during the 1909 Detroit-Pittsburgh World Series Despite great success on the field, Cobb was no stranger to controversy off it. As described in
Smithsonian, "In 1907 during spring training in Augusta, Georgia, a black groundskeeper named Bungy Cummings, whom Cobb had known for years, attempted to shake Cobb's hand or pat him on the shoulder." However, aside from Schmidt's statement to the press, no other corroborating witnesses to the assault on Cummings ever came forward and Cummings himself never made a public comment about it. Author Charles Leerhsen speculates that the assault on Cummings and his wife never occurred and that it was a total fabrication by Schmidt. Cobb had spent the previous year defending himself on several occasions from assaults by Schmidt, with Schmidt often coming out of nowhere to blindside Cobb. On that day, several reporters did see Cummings, who appeared to be "partially under the influence of liquor," approach Cobb and shout "Hello, Carrie!" (the meaning of which is unknown) and go in for a hug. Cobb then pushed him away, which was the last interaction that anyone saw between Cobb and Cummings. Shortly thereafter, hearing a fight, several reporters came running and found Cobb and Schmidt wrestling on the ground. When the fight was broken up and Cobb had walked away, Schmidt remained behind and told the reporters that he saw Cobb assaulting Cummings and his wife and had intervened. Leerhsen speculates that this was just another one of Schmidt's assaults on Cobb and that once discovered, Schmidt made up a story that made him sound like he had assaulted Cobb for a noble purpose. In 1908, Cobb attacked a black laborer in Detroit who complained when Cobb stepped into freshly poured asphalt; Cobb was found guilty of battery, but the sentence was suspended. In the offseason between 1907 and 1908, Cobb negotiated with
Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina, offering to coach baseball there "for $250 a month, provided that he did not sign with Detroit that season." This did not come to pass, however. The following season, the Tigers finished one game ahead of the
Chicago White Sox for the pennant. Cobb again won the batting title with a .324 average. In the World Series, he performed well, batting a team-high .368 and starring in a Game 3 win. Nonetheless, Detroit suffered another lopsided loss to the Cubs. In August 1908, Cobb married Charlotte ("Charlie") Marion Lombard, the daughter of prominent
Augustan Roswell Lombard. In the offseason, the couple lived on her father's Augusta estate,
The Oaks, until they moved into their own house on Williams Street in November 1913. 's famed picture of Cobb stealing third base during the 1909 season The Tigers won the AL pennant again in 1909. During the World Series, Cobb's last, he stole home in the second game, igniting a three-run rally, and also plated a team-high five RBIs for the series. Despite those highlights, he finished with a subpar .231 batting average, as the Tigers fell to Honus Wagner and the powerful Pittsburgh Pirates in seven games. Although the postseason was marred by another setback, he won the [Major League Baseball] Triple Crown that year by hitting .377 with 107 RBI and nine home runs, all
inside the park, thus becoming the only player of the modern era to lead his league in home runs in a season without hitting a ball over the fence. In the same season,
Charles M. Conlon snapped the famous photograph of a grimacing Cobb sliding into third base amid a cloud of dirt, which visually captured the grit and ferocity of his playing style.
1910: Chalmers Award controversy Going into the final days of the 1910 season, Cobb had a .004 lead on
Nap Lajoie for the American League batting title. The prize for the winner of the title was a
Chalmers automobile. Cobb sat out the final two games to preserve his average. Lajoie hit safely eight times in a
doubleheader, but six of those hits were
bunt singles. Later it was rumored that the opposing manager had instructed his third baseman to play extra deep to allow Lajoie to win the batting race over the generally disliked Cobb. Still, at the end Cobb was credited with a barely higher average. In the resulting controversy, AL president
Ban Johnson was forced to
arbitrate the situation. He declared Cobb the rightful owner of the title, but car company president Hugh Chalmers chose to award one to both Cobb and Lajoie. (It was later claimed by a researcher in the 1970s that one Detroit game had apparently been counted twice, in which case if corrected Cobb actually finished behind Lajoie. Major League Baseball nevertheless recognizes Cobb as the winner, with the original stats having been grandfathered in.)
1911–1914 , a top American League rival, in Cleveland (1913) Cobb regarded baseball as "something like a war," future Tiger second baseman
Charlie Gehringer said. "Every time at bat for him was a crusade." Baseball historian
John Thorn said in the book
Legends of the Fall, "He is testament to how far you can get simply through will. ... Cobb was pursued by demons." Cobb was having a tremendous year in 1911, which included a 40-game
hitting streak. Still,
"Shoeless" Joe Jackson led him by .009 points in the batting race late in the season. It happened then that Cobb's Tigers squared off in a long series against Jackson's
Cleveland Naps. Fellow Southerners Cobb and Jackson were personally friendly on and off the field. Cobb sought to use that friendship to his advantage. He ignored Jackson whenever he went to speak to him. When Jackson persisted, Cobb snapped angrily back at him, making the impressionable Jackson puzzle over what he could have done to enrage Cobb. Anecdotally, at least, these mind games contributed to a slump that dropped Jackson down to a final average of .408, twelve points lower than the .420 Cobb posted to set a modern era record until
George Sisler tied it in 1922 and
Rogers Hornsby surpassed it two years later with a.424 mark, the record since then (until 2024) except for Hugh Duffy's .438 in the 19th century. Describing his gameplay strategy in 1930, he said, "My system was all offense. I believed in putting up a mental hazard for the other fellow. If we were five or six runs ahead, I'd try some wild play, such as going from first to home on a single. This helped to make the other side hurry the play in a close game later on. I worked out all the angles I could think of, to keep them guessing and hurrying." In this game, the two traded insults through the first couple of innings. Cobb at one point went to the Highlander dugout to look for the Highlanders' owner to try to have Lucker ejected from the game, but his search was in vain. He also asked for the police to intervene, but they refused. Cobb, in his discussion of the incident in the Holmes biography, avoided such explicit words but alluded to Lucker's epithet by saying he was "reflecting on my mother's color and morals." He went on to state that he warned Highlander manager
Harry Wolverton that if something was not done about that man, there would be trouble. No action was taken. At the end of the sixth inning, after being challenged by teammates
Sam Crawford and
Jim Delahanty to do something about it, Cobb climbed into the stands and attacked Lucker, who it turned out was handicapped (he had lost all of one hand and three fingers on his other hand in an industrial accident). Some onlookers shouted at him to stop because the man had no hands, to which Cobb reportedly retorted, "I don't care if he's got no feet!" According to Russo, the crowd cheered Cobb on in the fight. The league
summarily suspended him. His teammates, backing him, however, went on strike to protest the suspension and the lack of protection for players from abusive fans, prior to the May 18 game in Philadelphia. For that single game, Detroit fielded a roster of Major League Baseball replacement players#1912 Detroit Tigers strike|replacement team made up of hastily recruited college and sandlot players plus two Tiger coaches and lost 24–2, thereby setting some of Major League Baseball's modern-era (post-1900) negative records, notably the 26 hits in a nine-inning game allowed by [pitcher [Allan Travers, who lasted the distance for one of the sport's most unlikely
complete games ever. The pre-1901 record for the most hits and runs given up in a game is held by the
Cleveland Blues'
Dave Rowe. Primarily an outfielder, Rowe pitched a complete game on July 24, 1882, giving up 35 runs on 29 hits. The current post-1900 record for most hits in a nine-inning game is 31, set in 1992 by the Milwaukee Brewers against Toronto; however, the Blue Jays used six pitchers. The strike ended when Cobb urged his teammates to return to the field. According to him, this incident led to the formation of a players' union, the "Ballplayers' Fraternity" (formally, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America), an early precursor of what is now called the
Major League Baseball Players Association, which garnered some concessions from the owners. During his career, Cobb was involved in numerous other fights, both on and off the field, and several profanity-laced shouting matches. For example, Cobb and umpire
Billy Evans once arranged to settle their in-game differences through fisticuffs under the grandstand afterward. Members of both teams were spectators, and broke up the scuffle after Cobb had knocked Evans down, pinned him and began choking him. In 1909, Cobb was arrested for assault for an incident that occurred in a Cleveland hotel. Cobb got into an argument with the elevator operator around 2 a.m. when the man refused to take him to the floor where some of his teammates were having a card game. The elevator operator stated that he could only take Cobb to the floor where his room was. As the argument escalated, a night watchman approached and he and Cobb eventually got into a physical confrontation. During the fight, Cobb produced a penknife and slashed the watchman across the hand. Cobb later claimed that the watchman, who had the upper hand in the fight, had his finger in Cobb's left eye and that Cobb was worried he was going to have his sight ruined. The fight finally ended when the watchman produced a gun and struck Cobb several times in the head, knocking him out. Cobb would later plead guilty to simple assault and pay a $100 fine. This incident has often been retold with the elevator operator and the watchman both being black. However, recent scholarship has shown that all parties involved were white. On August 13, 1912, the Tigers were once again to play the
New York Highlanders at
Hilltop Park, Cobb reported that he and his wife were driving to a train station in
Syracuse that was to transport him to the game when three intoxicated men had stopped him on the way. When Cobb got out of the car to confront the men, they demanded money and instigated a physical fight, with Cobb defending himself from one of the men by punching him in the chin as another fled the scene. After being grabbed by the neck by the third man, the man had pulled a knife and stabbed him in the back before he forced him away and returned to his car and continued driving to the station for the game. Cobb refused to speak further of the incident. He would go on to hit 2–3 with two singles and a run scored in the game, which the Tigers lost 2–3. For the 1912 season, Cobb again batted over .400 at .409, but Detroit sank to sixth place in the American League standings, by far a new low in the years following their pennant wins. In 1913, Cobb signed a contract worth $12,000 for the six-month season (), making him likely the first baseball player in history to be paid a five-figure salary. This occurred in the same year where Cobb had allegedly grown pessimistic and was quoted as saying: "It seems I am a burden to the Detroit club, as a trespasser of its rules. If that be the case, let
Mr. Navin put a price on me and I'll take a chance on being able to negotiate my own release. I don't think I shall ever play ball again. This is positively my last statement in this matter." This attributed statement was first published on an April 19, 1913, edition of the
Los Angeles Herald. (Cobb did not play that day as the Tigers won 4–0 against the
St. Louis Browns.) A second straight sixth-place campaign by Detroit probably contributed to his negativity. In another off-field incident in June 1914, Cobb pled guilty to disturbing the peace for pulling a revolver during an argument at a Detroit butcher shop. He was fined $50 ().
1915–1921 In 1915, Cobb set the single-season record for stolen bases with 96, which stood until Dodger
Maury Wills broke it in 1962. That year, he also won his record ninth consecutive batting title, hitting .369. The Tigers surged back to win 100 games in 1915, the most during Cobb's career, but finished second behind the Boston Red Sox. During 1917 spring training, Cobb showed up late for a
Dallas spring training doubleheader against the New York Giants because of a golf outing. Several of the Giants, including
Buck Herzog, called him names from the bench. Cobb retaliated by
spiking Herzog during the second game, prompting a
bench-clearing brawl in which Cobb ground Herzog's face in the dirt. The Dallas Police Department had to help stop the brawl, and Cobb was thrown out of the game. Both teams were staying at the Oriental Hotel, and at dinner that evening, Herzog walked up to Cobb and challenged him to a fight. The two met an hour later in Cobb's room, where the Tiger outfielder had prepared for the fight by moving furniture out of the way and pouring water on the floor. Cobb's leather-soled shoes enabled him to get better footing than Herzog, who wore tennis shoes. The fight lasted for thirty minutes, over the course of which Cobb knocked down Herzog about six times while Herzog only knocked Cobb down once. The scuffle left Herzog's face bloodied and his eyes nearly shut. With Herzog vowing revenge, Cobb skipped the rest of the exhibition series against the Giants, heading to Cincinnati to train with the Reds, who were managed by Cobb's friend
Christy Mathewson. However, Cobb later expressed the deepest respect for Herzog because of the way the infielder had conducted himself in the fight. He had six hitting streaks of at least 20 games in his career, second only to
Pete Rose's eight. Also in 1917, Cobb starred in the motion picture
Somewhere in Georgia for a sum of $25,000 plus expenses (equivalent to approximately $ today). Based on a story by sports columnist
Grantland Rice, the film casts Cobb as "himself," a small-town Georgia bank clerk with a talent for baseball.
Broadway critic
Ward Morehouse called the movie "absolutely the worst flicker I ever saw, pure hokum." In October 1918, Cobb enlisted in the
Chemical Corps branch of the
United States Army and was sent to the
Allied Expeditionary Forces headquarters in
Chaumont, France. He served approximately 67 days overseas before being
honorably discharged and returning to the United States. By 1920,
Babe Ruth, sold to the renamed
New York Yankees from the
Boston Red Sox, had established himself as a power hitter, something Cobb was not considered to be. When his Tigers showed up in New York to play the Yankees for the first time that season, writers billed it as a showdown between two stars of competing styles of play. Ruth hit two homers, a triple, and two singles during the series, compared to Cobb's two hits of a double and a single. As Ruth's popularity grew, Cobb became increasingly hostile toward him. He saw the Babe not only as a threat to his style of play, but also to his style of life. Perhaps what angered him the most about Ruth was that despite Babe's total disregard for his physical condition and traditional baseball, he was still an overwhelming success and brought fans to the ballparks in record numbers to see him challenge his own slugging records. On May 5, 1925, Cobb told a reporter that, for the first time in his career, he was going to try to hit home runs, saying he wanted to show that he could hit home runs but simply chose not to. That day, he went 6 for 6, with two singles, a double and three homers. The 16 total bases set a new AL record, which stood until May 8, 2012, when
Josh Hamilton of the
Texas Rangers hit four home runs and a double for a total of 18 bases. The next day Cobb had three more hits, two of which were home runs. The single his first time up gave him nine consecutive hits over three games, while his five homers in two games tied the record set by
Cap Anson of the old Chicago NL team in 1884. By the end of the series Cobb had gone 12 for 19 with 29 total bases, and afterwards reverted to his old playing style. Even so, when asked in 1930 by
Grantland Rice to name the best hitter he'd ever seen, Cobb answered, "You can't beat the Babe. Ruth is one of the few who can take a terrific swing and still meet the ball solidly. His timing is perfect. [No one has] the combined power and eye of Ruth." ==Player-manager career==