Tag Archives: Babe Ruth
Rivalry Renewed: Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth on the golf course
Under a warm summer sun, fans strained to catch a glimpse of two of baseball’s greatest stars battling each other. Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, once tough competitors on the baseball field, were at it again.
But this competition did not take place on a diamond – the battle occured instead on the rolling hills of a golf course. It was the rubber match of an amazing golf tournament between the “Georgia Peach” and the “Sultan of Swat.” It was the final chapter in their sometimes bitter rivalry.
Cobb and Ruth each made his fame playing baseball, displaying remarkable talents that earned them countless records, accolades, money and election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. But they were two very different personalities, which fueled their rivalry.
“He was much more adjusted to life than Cobb was,” said Ruth biographer Robert Creamer. “Ruth had a lot more fun playing ball than Cobb.”
By contrast, Cobb was tightly wound. As author Tristram Coffin wrote, “Cobb both fascinated people and made them uneasy.”
Cobb channeled that uneasiness and used it to his advantage, turning each 90-foot stretch between bases into a war zone. He had no time for making friends. Ruth, however, approached life with a child-like obsession. His approach to the game of baseball was markedly different from Cobb’s:
“I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball,” Ruth once boasted. “The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.” Cobb, the master of baseball’s “inside game” scoffed at Ruth’s methods. To Cobb, the game was a mental struggle in which each man had to out-think, out-fight and out-maneuver his opponent. Ruth’s raw power game was an abomination to him.
Ruth defended his game: “I could have had a lifetime .600 average, but I would have had to hit them singles. The people were paying to see me hit home runs.”
Ruth hit home runs in bunches and he hit them higher and farther than any other player ever had. As the game changed around Cobb, he bristled.
In addition, Cobb had no respect for Ruth’s brazen disregard for training. Despite Ruth’s mammoth indulgences of food, drink and party, he continued to swat home runs. This fact irritated Cobb, who took precious care of his body during his playing days.
These factors fueled the tumultuous relationship between Cobb and Ruth. Their rivalry was punctuated by several colorful episodes.
In a four-game series between Ruth’s New York Yankees and Cobb’s Detroit Tigers in June 1921 at the Polo Grounds, the Babe belted six homers and hurled a complete-game victory. Frequently, Cobb ducked and dodged out of the way of pitches aimed at his skull by Yankees pitchers. Consequently, games between the “Ty-gers” and Ruth’s Yankees were often the sport’s biggest draw during the 1920s.
To prove that it was much easier to hit homers than play his brand of baseball, prior to a series against the St. Louis Browns in 1925, Cobb declared that he would try to hit the ball out of the park for the first time in his career. In the first game, Cobb hit three homers and went 6-for-6. The following day he added two more home runs, tying a record with five homers in two consecutive games – something even Ruth had never accomplished. The next day, Cobb went back to slapping the ball.
In 1924, the Tigers were forced to forfeit a game to the visiting Yankees when a brawl ensued after Yankees pitchers retaliated for pitches thrown over Ruth’s head the previous afternoon. Ruth insisted he had seen Cobb signal the brushback pitches from centerfield. The two nearly came to blows, but Yankees manager Miller Huggins and other players separated them.
Through years of competition, both had their share of success. Cobb batted .326 against Ruth, while Ruth belted more homers in Detroit than he did in any ballpark besides Yankee Stadium.
But after years of animosity, a thaw finally occurred. As spectators at the 1924 World Series, Cobb and Ruth posed shaking hands, and later sat together. During the course of the game, the two mended their differences. Never again did they exchange a bad word on the diamond.
In 1941, golf promoter Fred Corcoran decided to dust off the old rivalry, and suggested a series of golf matches between Cobb and Ruth to benefit charity. But the 54-year-old Cobb, six years older than Ruth, declined. Cobb belonged to eight golf clubs at one time – including Augusta National, where he played with golf legend Bobby Jones – but didn’t feel his game was at its best. Then Corcoran sent a telegram to Cobb: “If you want to come here and get your brains knocked out, come on.” He signed it “Babe Ruth.”
That was enough to coax Cobb into the match. He replied, “I could always lick (Ruth) on a ballfield and I can lick him on a golf course now.”
As the victor, Cobb earned a trophy, presented by actress Bette Davis. He was so proud of the prize that he placed it on his mantel, next to the replica of his bronze Hall of Fame plaque.
For the rest of their years, Cobb and Ruth enjoyed a good relationship, often seeing each other at old-timers games. “I can’t honestly say that I appreciate the way in which he changed baseball,” Cobb said. “But he was the most natural and unaffected man I ever knew.”
When a girl struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig
When Babe Ruth went down on strikes in an exhibition game in Chattanooga in 1931, it was at the hand of a pitcher described as having “a swell change of pace,” as well as a “mean lipstick.”
That pitcher was teenage left-hander Jackie Mitchell, one of the most talented female hurlers ever to take the mound, and a pioneer for women in the sport, despite being run out of professional baseball just as her career was starting.
A talented athlete from an early age, Virnett Mitchell answered to “Jackie,” and at the age of seven or eight, received pitching pointers from future Hall of Fame right-hander Dazzy Vance. Encouraged by her father, Mitchell participated in many sports, excelling at tennis, basketball, boxing, and running, as well as shooting. Being left-handed made her a commodity on the pitcher’s mound, where reportedly she once struck out nine men consecutively as a teenager in a sandlot game.
It was the “Barnum of Baseball,” Chattanooga Lookouts owner Joe Engel, who made Mitchell a professional ballplayer. Engel, a former big league player who scouted for the Washington Senators after his playing days, was known for his innovative, entertaining, and often zany promotional stunts. He once traded his shortstop for a 25-pound turkey, and then invited sportswriters to his house to eat the turkey for dinner.
Engel inked Mitchell to a minor-league contract in 1931, after spotting her in a baseball camp in Georgia. With the 17-year old Mitchell under contract, Engel promoted his Lookouts as the only club with a female pitcher. An exhibition game was scheduled between the Lookouts and the New York Yankees for April Fool’s Day. However, rain forced the game to be played on April 2, and Mitchell would make her debut against professional competition one day later than planned.
In the first inning, after starter Clyde Barfoot surrendered hits to the Yankees’ first two batters, Mitchell was called upon to face the heart of “Murderers’ Row,” Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
The Chattanooga News provided a scouting report on Mitchell: “She uses an odd, side-armed delivery, and puts both speed and curve on the ball. Her greatest asset, however, is control. She can place the ball where she pleases, and her knack at guessing the weakness of a batter is uncanny.”
That uncanny knack came in handy when Mitchell faced Ruth, who watched her first sinker dart low for ball one. Mitchell followed with a sinker on the outside corner, which the Babe swung through and missed. Grinning, the “Sultan of Swat” swung at the next offering and missed for strike two. The next pitch was another sinker on the corner of the plate, which Ruth watched sail by for called strike three. At that point, according to The Baseball Chronology, the Babe “kicked the dirt” and “gave his bat a wild heave” as he stormed unhappily to the dugout.
“After I threw the second strike, I settled down a little. I figured then that it wasn’t going to be so hard for me to get the ball over the plate,” Mitchell said years later in an interview.
Next up was Gehrig, who promptly missed three straight dipping sinkers, swinging early each time. On seven pitches, Mitchell had struck out Ruth and Gehrig, two of the game’s greatest sluggers. The Chattanooga crowd responded with a rousing standing ovation. Mitchell faced the next Yankees’ batter, second baseman Tony Lazzeri, who tried to bunt the first pitch but failed. Lazzeri eventually walked and Mitchell was removed from the game. Engel had maximized her gate appeal by using her to face the heart of baseball’s greatest lineup. The 17-year old had squared off against three future Hall of Famers, striking out two of them. The next day, one newspaper would speculate that “maybe her curves were too much for them.”
Unfortunately for Mitchell, her game against the Yankees turned out to be her last as a professional in organized baseball. Within days, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided her contract and declared that baseball was too strenuous for women. But her fame was not voided. She was “The Girl Who Struck Out Babe Ruth,” a fact that Engel capitalized on. Mitchell landed a contract with the Engelettes, an all-female team in Chattanooga. In subsequent years, Mitchell played in the outlaw Piedmont League, toured with female golfer/athlete Babe Didrikson, and pitched for the famous “House of David” barnstorming teams of the 1930s. In 1937, at the age of 23, Mitchell retired from baseball and exited the spotlight. When the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League debuted less than a decade later, Mitchell resisted offers to get back into the game. Forty-five years later, in 1982, the 68-year-old Jackie threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the Chattanooga Lookouts on opening day. She died in 1987.
Various sources disagree as to whether Mitchell’s strikeout performance against Ruth and Gehrig was legitimate or part of an orchestrated ruse. Lazzeri was on record as saying: “I had no intention of striking out, I planned to hit the ball.” According to the Hall of Fame’s Amanda Pinney, a Mitchell expert who has researched the incident, Jackie maintained to her dying day that the strikeouts were real. “They [Ruth and Gehrig] had no intention of striking out,” Pinney said. “The game was an exhibition, but the only instructions the players got were to not hit the ball back up the middle against Jackie.”
Ruth and Gehrig never had to worry about hitting the ball up the middle. They never even made contact.
