Episode Two: Detroit Drinks Baseball History Part 1

In 1880s America, in the pages of newspapers from New York to St. Louis, a war was being fought. On one side, the eastern elite Protestant blue bloods. On the other, the working-class, largely immigrant city-dwellers of the Midwest. The war was for the soul of American baseball.

And the argument was about? drinking, of course.

 Long before ball players were multi-million dollar professional athletes, they were just working class dudes with a strong arm and a mean swing. In the early days of baseball, players were amateurs, some of them rank amateurs in more ways than one. Base ball was something they did in their spare time to pick up some going-out money, or, in the case of the rare teetotaller, some money to send back home to Mama. Ball players were, for the most part, sweating, cussing, brawling, hard-drinking louts who often enough showed up late and drunk to games.

 In Gilded Age America, baseball was just another pastime that got caught up in the tug-of-war between the classes. And one way to enforce the Puritanical moral codes of the elites was to ban Sunday recreation. The Lord’s Day was supposed to be a day of somber reflection for good Christians. Playing games, drinking and carousing was an abomination.

But for many of America’s newest inhabitants, Sunday was their only day off from work. And what better way to celebrate that than playing games, and, yes, drinking and mild carousing?

The debate raged for decades but ran hottest in the 1880s and 90s. The upstart (and short-lived) American Association pitted itself against the ownership of the National League. The American Association lasted from 1882 to 1891 and was run mostly by immigrant brewers and catered to the working class, with its cheaper admission and advocacy of Sunday games. Chris Von Der Ahe, a German immigrant grocer and saloon keeper in St. Louis, headed the league with his over-the-top grandstanding and tall tales. The league faced fierce opposition from the press and from teetotallers and preachers too.

Here’s an excerpt from the Detroit Free Press in April 1890

About the time that the American Association takes its final journey up Saline Creek, it will probably realize that Sunday base ball isn’t wanted in the United States. That evil, coupled with other laxities, has brought the association to its present humble condition. The association at one time had an excellent opportunity to put itself on a footing where it could divide honors with the National League. Its cities were populous and enthusiastic, its teams strong and prospects bright. But it would have Sunday ball, beer in the stands, and permitted the players to conduct themselves on the field about as they pleased. The organization soon became known as the “rowdy association,” and its downfall soon came. To-day it is but a shadow of what it formerly was, but still clings to the evils on which it was wrecked, and which will eventually batter it to shreds.

The outlook for the association is very blue. Already the members of the Toledo club have been placed under arrest for Sunday playing, and a like course will be pursued in Syracuse, Rochester and other cities of the circuit. A large proportion of the brotherhood players are in favor of Sunday base ball, and it seems probable they will carry their point. The National League has always set its face against Sunday ball, and insisted on discipline on and off the field. This is the reason the National League possesses the respect and confidence of the public.

Detroit Free Press, 1890

Spoiler: They were wrong. Beer and Baseball have gone hand in hand, from the very beginning. And in Detroit, that was certainly true. Detroiters have loved their baseball, from the beginning days of the sport all the way through the Tigers’ latest travails. The first formal baseball park in the city was Recreation Park, which stands where Children’s Hospital is now. It hosted the Detroit Wolverines, which was actually a National League team, from 1881-1888; many of these same players would later found the AL Detroit Tigers.

Other large-scale ball fields in the area were at Jefferson near the Belle Isle Bridge, in Southwest Detroit, and on the Detroit-Hamtramck border, where brothel and saloon owner Paddy McGraw took advantage of lax zoning laws and bribery to host baseball games with his own McGraw Tigers. Some games didn’t quite finish, on account of the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by players, coaches, staff and spectators. Brawls were not infrequent.

McGraw’s Tigers were no relation to the team we know of. That organization was founded in 1894 by George Vanderbeck. They began as part of the short-lived Western League, which later morphed into the American League, and played at Recreation Park. But drinking was illegal on Sundays in Detroit, when many players wanted to play and spectators wanted to spectate (and drink).

James D. Burns bought the team from Vanderbeck. And Burns had some ideas about baseball and drinking and Sunday blue laws: he loved the former, hated the latter. So he hosted games on his own property in Springwells Township for a few years at what is now Waterman and Vernor Highway. Especially on Sunday, this mattered, because Springwells was its own township and didn’t fall under Detroit strict blue laws. Even after the Tigers moved to the new Bennett Field (they plaed their first game on April 25, 1901), Burns Park hosted Sunday games with rowdy crowds and loads of beer and whiskey. Not that Bennett Park was what we’d call sedate. The surrounding private property was lined with “wildcat bleachers”: rickety, dangerous, but cheaper, homemade stands of a sort. Some of them towered as high as 50 feet above the field and, I imagine, swayed rather a lot even when their inhabitants were sober.

 Into the middle of this wild, hard-hitting and hard-drinking game strutted a hard-hitting and hard-drinking 18-year-old kid from Georgia. On August 30, 1905, Tyrus Raymond Cobb, fresh from the country and just three weeks after his mother had shot his father to death, made his major league debut by hitting a double at his first at-bat at Bennett Field.

Cobb was born in the small rural town of Narrows, Georgia, in the Northeast of the state.  The eldest son of a state senator, Cobb grew up with a demanding and stern father. An early and clever self-promoter, during his semi-pro days Cobb would send postcards he’d written about himself, under different aliases, to alert sports journalists of the remarkable young talent from Georgia. From the beginning, Ty Cobb was driven, competitive and hyper-focused. He was determined to be a successful ball player.

Two major events occurred in Cobb’s life in August of 1905: He was sold by the Augusta Tourists to the Detroit Tigers for $750 (around $21,000 in today’s money) and his mother shot his father to death.

 The circumstances of his death are shrouded in mystery, but the court case against Amanda Cobb, Ty Cobb’s mother, reveals a few details. William Herschel Cobb, former senator, school board commissioner and owner and editor of the Royston Record, suspected his wife of infidelity. In an attempt to catch her in the act, he was sneaking around the house and peering into windows late one night. Amanda, seeing nothing but an intruder, fired twice and killed her husband in a case of mistaken identity. After a lengthy trial, Amanda was acquitted, but she was never able to fully silence the town gossips (some of whom claimed that her lover had pulled the trigger and fled the scene) and she had to fight tooth and nail to receive her husband’s estate.

His mother killing his father just as he’s shipping off to a major league team in a city vastly different than his rural Georgia upbringing must have weighed heavily on Cobb. Still, that doesn’t seem to have hampered his game. He later admitted that in fact his father’s absence only drove him further: "I never could stand losing,” he said. “Second place didn't interest me. I had a fire in my belly.”

 How good was Cobb? A contemporary said of him, “He was the best ballplayer I ever saw. I always said if there was a league higher than the Majors, Ty Cobb would be the only fellow in it. Just as you’d be thinking about doing something, Ty would be doing it. He was always one stop ahead of you.” Casey Stengel, Hall of Fame manager, called him “superhuman, amazing.” In one game, on May 5, 1925, Cobb racked up 16 total bases: three home runs, a double and two singles. He set more than 90 baseball records in his career, which spanned 22 years in Detroit and a couple in Philadelphia tacked on at the end. Incredibly, some of his most impressive records still stand after a hundred plus years, including his career batting average — an astonishing .366.

 Cobb never cared much for the company of other players, and wasn’t really interested in being part of the boys’ club. Easy camaraderie was not his style. Brainy, driven, competitive to a fault, Cobb played his heart out every time he was on the field. Hall of Famer Branch Rickey said that "Cobb lived off the field as though he wished to live forever. He lived on the field as though it was his last day." And who could blame him.

So Cobb was definitely not interested in making small talk — or friends. He burned his way through two wives and alienated loads of fellow players. But some of our worst stories about him are straight-up fabrications: and by his own biographer of all people. Near the end of his life, Cobb chose freelance sports writer (I won’t grace him with the title of “journalist”) Al Stump to collaborate on Cobbs’s autobiographer.

And Stump just made shit up. He fabricated stories from rumors, confirmed rumors that hadn’t ever happened, and in the process painted Cobb as a vicious, over-the-top Mephistophelian villain who might as well have a dramatic black cape and a twirly mustache. He wrote about how Cobb beat a man to death in a Detroit alley in 1912: simply not true. Cobb and his wife were the victims of an attempted car-jacking on their way to the train station in Corktown, and he fought the attackers, but newspaper accounts of the event would have told us if one of them died.

 Listen, Cobb was no saint. He got into fist-fights all the time — including, yes, against a fan at a Tigers game who had no hands. But Stump tarnished Cobbs’s reputation in order to make money selling wild stories about Cobbs’s final days, and to sell “memorabilia” that Stump supposedly gained from Cobb while they collaborated. Stump sold a forged diary, loads of bats and balls with wild stories, and he even auctioned off the shotgun that Amanda Cobb used to kill her husband. Too bad for the buyers that she’d used a revolver.

Many of the most scurrilous stories — but not all of them — came from Stump’s pen, and his only. Here’s a passage from the vitriolic account Stump cobbled together, this bit talking about Cobbs’s later years in Nevada: 

Yes, Ty Cobb was a disturbed personality. It is not hard to understand why he spent his entire life in deep conflict. Nor why a member of his family, in the winter of 1960, told me, “I’ve spent a lot of time terrified of him. . . . I think he was psychotic from the time that he left Georgia to play in the big leagues.”

He’d been warned by experts from Johns Hopkins to California’s Scripps Clinic--that liquor was deadly. Tyrus snorted and began each day with several gin-and-orange juices, then switched to Old Rarity Scotch, which held him until night hours, when sleep was impossible, and he tossed down cognac, champagne or “Cobb Cocktails"--Southern Comfort stirred into hot water and honey.

By now, sadly, there’s no separating fact from Stump’s fiction. How much Cobb fought, or drank, for that matter, can’t be accurately deduced from Stump’s biography, or the subsequent sensationalized movies and articles that used Stump’s work as a reference. Nor was he a hero, by any definition of the term. Ty Cobb was a complicated man and a troubling and troubled one, there’s not getting around that.

He’s been a Detroit legend — and a Major League enigma — ever since he rode into town. Cobb drank, he fought, he cussed, he drank more, he might have (but definitely didn’t) killed a man for looking at him wrong, he greased his spikes (no, actually, he didn’t). He was such a cussed, cantankerous son of a bitch that the press anointed him, ironically, as “the Georgia Peach.” One recent biographer calls him the first baseball celebrity. He remains one of the most mysterious — and talented — sports figures in history.

I spoke with Anna Clark, an author and journalist who’s written on many subjects for such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Detroit Free Press and, currently, ProPublica. She’s written several articles about Cobb and his mystique, and how it evidences our hopes and anxieties for Detroit. Anna has been working on — well, not rehabilitating Cobbs’s legacy, but on re-contextualizing it. We tell stories about Cobb after more than a hundred years, she says, because he’s a stand-in for our troubled, troubling but fascinating city.

Non-sequiter time! I just have to share this. I discovered while researching this episode, and making sure that I could use this song, that the man who penned “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” wrote the song with a specific person in mind: Trixie Friganza, a suffragist and actress. She also happened to be his girlfriend at the time.

 George Boziwick, historian and former chief of the music division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, discovered the glorious origins of the song, which includes two more verses than the one that we sing. They’re all about Katie Casey, who doesn’t want to go to a show, or stay home, she wants to go to the baseball game because she loves the sport and knows everything about it, and wants to heckle the umps and players and watch some ball.

So next time you belt out your verse, think about Katie Casey and Trixie Friganza and women’s rights and ball games and fandom. Here’s the link to the Smithsonian article.

The heady, rough-and-tumble, days of the 19th century game gave way to more organized baseball. They also ushered in a new wave of Temperance advocates who saw the mixing of sport, spectating and tippling as a deadly sin, a plague on the morals of a nation. One of the most fiery and successful Prohibitionists of the early 20th century was himself a former baseball player. Billy Sunday left a decent career with Chicago and other teams to become a Christian minister. He loved baseball. He hated alcohol. Sunday spent several months in Detroit in 1916 hosting a mobile tabernacle, revival tent and entertainment scheme. It could hold 10,000 people and the collection plate alone measured two feet across and ten inches deep. He claimed to have hosted over 2 million people and raised $50,000 or more in Detroit. I don’t doubt it. While Sunday was in town, he stayed at the home of KMart founder S.S. Kresge and drove a car donated by Cadillac founder Henry Leland.

Sunday preached a brawny, manly Temperance, in direct opposition to his image of the weak, effeminate supposed Christians who drank, or the ones who didn’t have the manly strength to manhandle wayward drinkers into temperance. At one of his Detroit rallies, he attacked the:

hog-jawed, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mushy-fisted, jelly-spined, pussy-footing, four-flushing, charlotte russe Christians. Lord Save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, ossified, three-karat Christianity…Help me, Jesus, to lasso and corral the young man on his way to hell. Help me save the young girl merchandising her womanhood. Help me, Jesus. Help me save all in Detroit who are rushing to hell so fast that you can’t see them for the dust.

Sunday, like other Temperance and Prohibition advocates, saw an Edenic society if only alcohol were abolished. Celebrating Prohibition’s enactment, which happened in May 1918 in Michigan and January 1920 nationwide, Sunday rejoiced that “the reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent.”

 Obviously that’s EXACTLY what happened. While plenty of folks pre-gamed, post-gamed and utterly disregarded the spirit and the letter of the law during the 15 years of Michigan’s Prohibition, they mostly kept it off the record and so out of this record. If you’re itching for Prohibition history in Detroit, check out my other project, ProhibitionDetroit.com.

We’ll leave off Detroit Drinks Baseball History here, and pick it up again in Part 2. Part Two will cover Opening Day 1933, just days after beer became legal. Oh, and speaking of beer, how about all those beer-sponsored teams, and those great beer/baseball jingles of the 50s, 60s and 70s? We’re also taking a deep dive into the Lindell AC, Hoot Robinsons and some other storied dives of Detroit baseball history.

Further resources and references:
Bak, Richard. “Before they were Tigers: A primer on early Detroit baseball.” June 11, 2012. Vintage Detroit. Online. https://www.vintagedetroit.com/blog/2012/06/11/before-they-were-tigers-a-primer-on-early-detroit-baseball/

Clark, Anna. “Ty Cobb as Detroit: the darkest man in baseball and the city that still loves him.” Grantland. July 27, 2011. Online. https://grantland.com/features/ty-cobb-detroit/

Layman, Anna. “The Feminist History of ‘Take me out to the Ball Game."‘“ Smithsonian Magazine. October 10, 2019. Print and online. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/feminist-history-take-me-out-ball-game-180973307/

Livacari, Gary. “The tragic death of Ty Cobb’s father.” Baseball History Comes Alive. August 9, 2017. Online. https://www.baseballhistorycomesalive.com/the-tragic-death-of-ty-cobbs-father/

Stump, Al. “The last days of Ty Cobb.” August 5, 1985. True Magazine. Reprinted in LA Times August 5, 1985. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-05-sp-3589-story.html