This Day in Baseball History (Cobb Attacks Disabled Heckler)

May 15, 1912—Baseball’s first players’ strike was spurred not by desire to enhance earnings or protect privileges but on behalf of an outfielder admired for his skills on the diamond but despised for his temperament: the Detroit Tigers’ Ty Cobb.

The “Georgia Peach” possessed a quick bat, quick feet—and even quicker temper, demonstrated in an away game at the home of the New York Highlanders  (the future New York Yankees), when he left the field, jumped over the left-field fence, and pummeled a disabled fan who had heckled him.

Thirty years ago, when the Yankees slipped into divisional irrelevance midday through the George Steinbrenner era, a relative and I were watching at Yankee Stadium one of the principal owner’s recent brainstorms, John Mayberry, stride to the plate. The first baseman might have been a threat to the Bronx Bombers when he was with the Kansas City Royals a half-dozen years before, but by now he was on an irreversible downward slide—a situation fully recognized at year-end, when he completed his final season with a .209 batting average, derived in no small part to lack of conditioning.

“Hey Mayberry!” the relative and I heard a voice cry out near us in the stands. “You suck!”

We continued to watch the game. Similar insults, by virtue of repetition, were unexceptional.

“Hey, Mayberry!” the voice cried out again. “You couldn’t hit the side of a barn!”

It was getting a bit harder to concentrate on the at-bat, such was the heckler’s sense of aggrievement.

“Hey, Mayberry!” came the voice yet again, this time loud enough to be heard in every corner of the cathedral of sports. “If your average was as high as your weight, you’d be the biggest thing since Ty Cobb!”

My relative and I laughed, stunned at the audacity and acumen of this last insult. “I’ve got to find out who this guy is,” my relative said, and turned around to notice,  several rows up, the onetime sports editor of our high-school newspaper. We couldn’t believe that we had met again under these circumstances.

Cobb, had he been still alive, would have been pleased to know that his batting average (.367) was still instantly recognizable to the average stat-obsessed fan such as the guy we knew. On the other hand, if he had been razzed as Mayberry was, there’s no doubt that our friend would have been lucky to make it out of Yankee Stadium alive. Cobb's own experience proved it.

The headline in this post, as is common in such things, loses in nuance what it gains in concision. How would you have reacted if I had written instead, “Cobb Attacks Disabled Racist Fan”? Or, better yet: “Cobb Attacks Disabled, Racist Tammany Hack”?

Heckler Claude Lucker (also spelled Lueker or Leuker, depending on the paper) worked as a page in the office of “Big Tom” Foley, the saloon keeper and Tammany Hall boss for whom New York courthouse Foley Square is named. From the start of the game at Hilltop Park, home of the Highlanders, he had been taunting Cobb something royal. The Tigers star had repeatedly warned Lucker (with whom he had exchanged insults at prior games) to stop, to no avail.

In the fourth inning, Cobb struck back with an insult of his own. At this point, Lucker came up with what the outfielder must have felt to be a verbal spitball: the epithet “half-nigger.”

Cobb’s subsequent over-the-top reaction derived from the equivalent of a perfect storm: frustration over the 10-13 record his team brought to the stadium; his previous run-ins with Lucker; distaste for any association whatsoever with African-Americans, and even assaults on three different ones; an unstable temperament to begin with (no doubt worsened by shame over his father’s shooting by his wife’s lover); and, to top it all, teammate Sam Crawford’s question about what he would do about Lucker’s latest remark.

Cobb’s response was to scale the left-field fence, kick his tormenter till he fell down, then punch him mercilessly. None of the accounts I have read are clear about whether the star knew beforehand about Lucker’s significant handicaps (loss of one hand through a printing-press accident, as well as a couple of fingers on the other), but he certainly was aware by the time he was done flailing at him. An additional cry from a shocked onlooker (“that man has no hands!”) only seemed to heighten Cobb’s anger: “I don’t care if he has no feet!” he shot back.

While Cobb’s teammates allowed him to continue, a few nearby spectators tried to protect Lucker. It took a cop and an umpire to pull away Cobb, who was immediately ejected from the game.

American League President Ban Johnson, who happened to be observing the game, wasted no time in suspending the outfielder. Amazingly, Cobb’s teammates announced that they would support him by not playing until his ban was lifted immediately. “If the players cannot have protection, we must protect ourselves,” they wrote him.

From the perspective of a century, this support, from a group that generally loathed the talented but perpetually angry player, makes little sense, unless these factors are kept in mind:

*Cobb might have been an SOB, but at least he was their SOB. At 24 years of age, he had already developed into a world-class player. Their hopes for future success depended on him.

*Other players exhibited similar racist tendencies. Cobb’s extreme reaction, they felt—and a significant portion of the public and media, unfortunately, agreed with them—was fully justified by what was perceived as an insult.

*Johnson’s move struck many—especially Cobb, of course—as high-handed and dictatorial. The AL President, Cobb protested, had suspended him without even getting his side of the story first. That last charge might have resonated with players who could easily see themselves, for one reason or another, running afoul of league management in the future.

Rather than forfeit any games and have the team incur a $5,000 fine, the Tigers owner insisted that manager Hughie Jennings field. The result was, in the words of Cobb biographer Al Stump, “the most farcical lineup the majors ever had known,” including:

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*    * A 20-year-old Jesuit seminarian who, after recruiting the other eight, decided to pitch when he had he would earn more money;

·         * A 48-year-old Tigers coach, Deacon McGuire, catching;

·        * A 41-year-old first baseman; 

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·         * Assorted semipro players;

·         * A boxer later implicated as a bagman in the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal.

This motley crew’s opponent was Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s, winners of the previous two World Series. Jennings took a look at its lineup—which included future Hall of Famers Eddie Collins, Frank Baker and Herb Pennock—and warned his young pitcher not to throw any fastballs because the resulting hit balls might get somebody killed. 

As it was, the A’s dumped the soft curves on every corner of the field. The final score was more like a football than a baseball game: 24-2.

Still, the Tigers refused to yield. By this time, they were asking members of other teams to join them in the protest by enlisting in a barnstorming tour. 

Johnson, angered as much by this attempt at baseball’s first labor agitation as by games that were making the national pastime a laughingstock, told the Tigers that they, too, would be banned and fined $50 for each game they missed.

Eventually, at Cobb’s urging, the Tigers took the field again, and their star re-joined them after serving out his suspension on May 26. He went 1-for-4 and the Tigers won. They finished the season, however, 69-84-1 (a September game against the Chicago White Sox was ruled a tie).

Lucker last appeared in print in accounts of Foley’s 1926 requiem mass. As for Cobb, only three old players, a representative from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and some family members showed up at his funeral. He had gained all the fame and money (an estimated $11 million in his will) he could want, but little in the way of human warmth to show for it in the end. It was just what you would expect from a player who once noted: "I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me... but I beat them and left them in the ditch."