Book Review: Ty and the Babe by Tom Stanton

I’ve been padding my retirement by reading about the so-called “dead ball era,” back before the age of the home run, the juiced ball, the digital scoreboard and the curse of designatedhitterball. It was a time when ballplayers radiated joi de vivre instead of showing orf ugly tattooes, garish jewelry and overpriced Guccis; when they were genuine eccentrics and characters instead of terminally vapid public relations mannequins, and when they visited children’s hospitals and orphanages out of compassion and joy instead of being sent there by their marketing departments.

But most of all it was a time of daring at the plate, on the basepaths and afield. Doubles and triples were as much a product of psychological warfare against the opposing pitcher and fielders as of focused batsmanship even though plate discipline was recognized as an essential quality if you were going to succeed. Speed on the bases meant everything. It was a hardscrabble game dominated by giants. You didn’t make the disabled list without a compound fracture.

Ty and the Babe tells the story of two of the most imposing figures to bestride the narrow world of white man’s baseball just as that antique world was shading into the modern. Ty Cobb had the throne all to himself between 1904 and 1914 when the Babe first manifested on the Boston rubber as a promising lefthander; he was years away from his conversion to an outfielder and his scandalous sale to the Borg to rescue Beanbag owner Harry Frazee’s sinking financial fortunes.

And yet, as Stanton tells us, the Peach seemed to sniff the advent of a major rival right from the beginning. Cobb didn’t face the young lefty during his debut year, but he had begun pooh-poohing the stories of mound mastery already emanating from Clamular Heaven before ever the twain had met. Inevitably the spinner of the years said “Now!” and consummation came and mauled the horsehide spheres. Cobb in his prime handled the Babe about as roughly as any other pitcher. The book abounds with wonderful accounts of the Peach’s at-bats against the young star, beginning in May 1915, and statheads will be particularly delighted with this book’s 200-plus entry long index cataloging every game in which Ty and the Babe played against each other.

Eventually, though, Ruth began to figure out not so much Ty’s weaknesses as a hitter—he didn’t really have any yet—as much as how to shake orf the Master’s mind games and batting japes and keep his concentration on the mound. A master storyteller, Stanton draws on a wealth of firsthand and newspaper accounts to trace the budding rivalry. Beneath his pen the two personalities flesh out until a reader feels like he or she is looking over their shoulders as their antagonism intensifies. By the 1916 season the tables hadn’t turned as much as stabilized. Cobb versus Ruth had already become one of the classic confrontations of the game. It would remain that way until the Angelus wheeled over its axis during the 1919-1920 orfseason.

It was after Frazee sold the Babe to the Borg that their professional rivalry turned personal and nasty. Beanbag manager Ed Barrow had converted Ruth to a full time outfielder early in the 1919 season and the big guy immediately began pouring on the power. Stanton tracks the way Ruth’s slugging gradually pushed Cobb’s ferocious hitting and, especially, baserunning from the front pages of the sports sections of America’s newspapers, and the way Cobb’s slow burn about it threatened to turn volcanic. It’s a joy to read his detailed accounts of how the two superstars—the older one, passing his prime, and the emerging Polyphemus of the Plate—turned whole seasons into verbal brawls that peaked just prior to and during every Borg-Tigers series. The Bronx Bullies, with the Sultan at the helm, began their long string of postseason dominance while the Detroit club, saddled with an alcoholic manager and an aging Cobb, failed sometimes by a whisker, sometimes by wider margins, to make it into October. Cobb’s slow burn grew hotter.

Baseball had entered the modern world, more or less, on the magic wand of Babe Ruth’s swing. Great ballplayers of the Wagner-Sisler-Speaker-Cobb ethos were being overshadowed by the slugging young Turks like Jimmy Foxx, Hank Greenberg, and Mel Ott. Fans wanted distance more than chipping and scampering. Again, Stanton’s narration of this transitional period is an insightful pleasure to read. In 1927, the year that Ruth crushed his Olympian 60 home runs, the Tigers didn’t re-sign the superstar who had carried them for 22 years and a 39-year-old Cobb signed with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics for a publicity conscious $75,000 and a horrible horsemeat and Velveeta™ Sandwich. Even though the Peach had one terrific and one decent season in Feely, by this time the Babe and the new generation of sluggers had completely overshadowed him.

If you haven’t been entirely enthralled by the foregoing, incredibly, Stanton really deploys his narrator chops to describe Cobb’s retirement and the Babe’s own slow downhill roll into superfluity. This section is a treat but it’s merely a setup for what’s ahead. You watch as Cobb comes to a grudging admiration and even affection for the Babe, from a good natured meeting set up by George Sisler, the Henry Clay of the diamond. Eventually the Peach was overcome by his successor’s ebullience and warmth. A new friendship, salted with gentle put-downs, good natured ribbing and expressions of mutual admiration ensues but Stanton never lets you forget that underneath it all still simmers Cobb’s anxieties about being eclipsed and Ruth’s frustration at not being hired for a managerial or front office job.

Meanwhile, both of these giants had become avid recreational golfers. I have to stop here to confess that for the most part I track the immortal (though dead) George Carlin’s take on golf: “It is time to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless!” And of course, it’s “A nice walk ruined” as Oscar Wild chimes in. I fell asleep fifteen minutes into Tin Cup. Just so. But even if you’re as bored with golf as I am, this is the golf book for you.

So what kind of writerly magic, I ask you, would it take to charm me—me—into rapt absorption in the spectacle of Cobb and Ruth’s great three-match 1941 “Has Beens Golf Championship” tournament? Well, it helps to have antagonists like the two greatest ballplayers of their respective (and overlapping) eras dominating the foreground. I was hooked. Sorry George. Sorry Oscar. The wondrous friendship that sprang up between these two aged titans sweetens the tale, but Stanton as usual unfurls a wonderworld of background detail that brings the weeks-long golf match, with two players whose greens approaches niftily mirror their ballplaying styles, so energetically to life. I don’t want to spoil it except to say that even if you know how it all ended (and please, if you don’t, don’t ruin it for yourselves by looking it up before you read Stanton’s account) you can’t help being enthralled by Stanton’s narrative.

The emotional payoff to this entire experience—and believe me, this book is an experience—is when, months after Ruth’s death in 1948 from throat cancer, Cobb, visiting New York, impulsively decides to drive past the Bambino’s former upper West Side apartment and exclaims, “God, how I miss him.” Ty and the Babe is another recent work that, like Charles Leerhsen’s definitive biography, Ty Cobb: a Terrible Beauty, debunks the malignant image of Cobb fabricated by yellow journalists and Cobb’s execrable “biographer” Al Stump in the name of sensational profits. Well, Cobb was surely no saint. He was, like his hulking adversary and friend, a talented and complex human being. Stanton has done a fine job here of bringing both men vitally to life. Put this one at the top of your summer reading list.