The Fight

It happened on May 15, 1912.

The once-mighty Detroit Tigers were off to a slow start.  It was to be a long season, their first losing one in six years.  Far from mollifying the pain of defeat, their past success only served to heighten the tension they felt—the old veterans had nearly forgotten what it was to lose, and the youthful among them had not known to begin with.  By contrast, their current situation, while not objectively hopeless, only felt that much more dire.

Needless to say, when the Tigers rolled into New York on their steam locomotive from Boston, where they’d just dropped another two out of three, and cozied up to Hilltop Park, they were a cohort on edge.

Hilltop Park, as it happened, seemed at first the perfect destination for such a group of men.  The Highlanders, not yet the storied franchise they would later become, were one of the few teams in the American League still worse than they were, and their boys were ripe for the beating.  Over the next three days, Detroit began to feel their season reforming beneath their cleats.  They took two of the first three and were nearly back to .500.  Once-shattered men began again to believe.

And so they took the field for the fourth and final game of the series.  Things began inauspiciously, with the teams trading blows for the first two innings and Detroit emerging from the proverbial fracas with a one-run lead.  As it were, such acts of violence were not to remain figurative.

Detroit’s star centerfielder, Tyrus Raymond Cobb, was so known for his gentle disposition that his teammates, half-mockingly but not without a hint of affection, referred to him as “the Georgia Peach”.  However, as Detroit’s standout performer, it was Cobb who found himself the target of the local malcontents who had made it their duty to suffer Highlander seasons firsthand.

Loudest among these was one Claude Lueker, a man whose brazenness had been honed in the fiery confines of Tammany Hall, and he spoke in ways of which only a man entrenched in politics could even conceive.  Such foul narratives poured from his mouth as would turn an oak tree barren just from the stench of their connotations.

For four innings this continued.  Cobb tried to escape the abuse by staying in centerfield for both turns at bat, sitting quietly against the outfield scoreboard and only speaking up to help direct the New York outfielders to avoid collisions.  However, Cobb was accustomed to reading between innings, and had in fact been looking forward to the New York trip where the country’s leading literary critics resided and published, and had that very day picked up a new analysis of MacBeth from just such a scholar before the game.  Only Cobb had left his reading glasses in the dugout, and was unable to study his text from the outfield.

And so, after four innings of careful isolation, Cobb finally felt it safe to brave the trek back to the dugout to retrieve his spectacles.  He knew at once he had been mistaken.  The heckler was on him again, this time saying things Cobb was certain could turn even the most ardent of free speech advocates into anti-seditionists.

Once in the dugout, Cobb was immediately accosted for his inaction.

“Dammit, Cobb!” cried Sam Crawford.  “This has gone on long enough!  There are children here, for crying out loud!”

Ed Willett soon chimed in.  “You can escape this nonsense out there in centerfield, but I’ve got to stand on the mound and listen to it!  You think Donie Bush would let this kind of thing go?  Sometimes I wish he were our future Hall of Famer.”

Cobb protested.  “Look, I’m sorry you all have to put up with this, but there’s nothing we can do.  We’ll be out of New York tomorrow, and we can put the whole thing behind us then.”

Wanting nothing more than to go back to the outfield where the fans were much more docile and many were willing to debate the merits of Mark Twain’s lesser novels (which was one of Cobb’s pet subjects), Cobb hoped he could leave it at that.  It was at this moment that an insult so offensive crept over the lip of the dugout and into the ears of the Detroit men that there was no longer anything Cobb could do for the hurler.

Hughie Jennings walked over and put his arm on Cobb’s shoulder.  “Look, son, I know you don’t like this any more than the rest of us.  Probably less than the rest of us.  But you’ve got to do something to shut that man up.”  Jennings' eyes glowed with a warm fierceness Cobb knew from experience he could not allay.  With a final pat on Cobb's shoulder, Jennings bored into him with those eyes and tried to reassure him:  “We’ll have your back.”  Cobb turned reluctantly toward the dugout steps.

After a tentative step into the stands, Cobb quickly retreated.  Jennings began to protest, but Cobb cut him off.  “Look, I know what you’re going to say, but the man is an invalid!  He’s got no hands!”

“I don’t care if he doesn’t have any feet!” Jennings bellowed.  “What must be done will be done, if not by you then by someone else!”

From the corner of his eye, Cobb saw Bill Burns reaching for his lumber.  Burns had long since washed out as an effective pitcher and had never been able to hit a lick, but he remained a towering hulk of a man, and Cobb knew it would not end pleasantly were he commissioned for the task.  So, even more reluctantly than before, Cobb slunk back up the dugout steps and into the stands, trailed behind by his fellow Tigers.

“Look,” Cobb said as he approached the man, “I wish you wouldn’t create such a ruckus, but also know that I haven’t any ill intent toward you.”  With that, Cobb raised his fist half-heartedly, when suddenly the man heaved his entire weight in the direction of Cobb.  Like two anteaters on the savanna they tumbled.  Cobb’s teammates jumped at the sight, storming into the stands with bats in hand.  Mayhem was upon the lower grandstand like flies on a heap of corpses and was not to be driven away.

At this point, the Highlanders, who had been surveying the local architecture beyond left field using Hal Chase’s new engineering sextant, heard the commotion and were made aware of the delay in the game.  They rushed to the aid of their fellow professionals, leaping unaware into the middle of the fray.  For the next forty-five minutes, fans and players were at each other in a most uncivilized manner before the umpires managed to get through to the telegraph office in the press box to wire the police.

By the time it was over, more than two dozen fans were injured, and several players received stern warnings for their behavior.  Ban Johnson, who happened to be in attendance and witnessed the second half of the brawl after returning from the concession stand, suspended the entire Detroit roster, and they had to play three days later against Philadelphia with a replacement nine.

And that, to this day, remains without a doubt the greatest fight in baseball history. Continue Reading...