Free Cobb by Al Stump

Official Base Ball Guide.
He read that northern metropolises were “going wild in an unprecedented way about the sport” and that “there are five seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—and baseball season.” Tyrus hadn’t been aware that the game he and local lads played with a flat board and homemade twine ball could be such a big thing. That you might be able to play for good money hadn’t crossed his mind.

C HAPTER T HREE
W ALKING T HE T IGHTROPE
    As the big battalions marched in the War Between the States, traveling with them went shaved-down farm rails, ax handles, and wagon tongues—makeshift bats—along with horsehide-covered yarn balls. During time-outs from battle, both Confederate and Union troops chose up sides for the growing sport of town ball. On open spaces, the sound of base hits rang out. Sheet music was named the “Union Ball Club March,” the “Home-Run Quickstep.”
    These Americans were looking for a good game to play. In even earlier form, a ball-bat-base type of contest could be traced to 1778 and Valley Forge in the Revolution, probably the first organized, reliably recorded such match staged in the country.
    The adolescent Tyrus Cobb, just short years after the Civil War, knew little about town ball. All he had seen of it had come while he acted as batboy for the “first nine” of his hometown of Royston, the hard-drinking, semipro Royston Reds. You could hear the rambunctious Reds coming. They toured northeast Georgia, playing any opponent available. Wearing crimson uniforms jolting to the eye, the Nosebleed Reds had an average age of twenty or twenty-one. Below them stood the Royston Rompers, a ragtag group of boys aged twelveto about sixteen. Late in his life Cobb recorded: “As a kid, I didn’t see a chance to ever reach the Reds. Maybe the Rompers. I was undersized … still had a runny nose … didn’t know what a hard-on was. Didn’t expect much.”
    Originally he did not even own a bat. Using a flat-sided board, Tyrus got along on sandlots. To ask his father for the money to buy one of the advertised models from a mail-order house was out of the question. To the Professor, unathletic and a bookworm, ball games were a waste of time.
    Help finally came in the spring of 1899 from Elmer Cunningham, the town’s supplier of waterwheels and coffins. Orders for burial boxes of pine were stacked up at Cunningham’s shop after a Franklin County influenza epidemic killed dozens, and he told his son Joe and Tyrus that if they would haul in raw lumber from the woods, he would give them the leftover pieces. When the two were through whittling, they had semiround billets of wood intended for burial boxes. They were clumsy but gave off an impressive
crack!
in action. Tyrus called his best stick, one with prominent knots in it, “Big Yellow.” He would take it to bed with him.
    Along with his bats, Cobb always credited his Aunt Norah Chitwood for his start as a ballplayer. “Wonderful woman,” he said of her. Auntie was on his side. Well aware of Professor Cobb’s lack of sympathy with anything that didn’t improve the mind, she drove Tyrus by buggy from Squire Cobb’s farm to the down-mountain settlements of Murphy and Andrews to play baseball. There Tyrus found the early going too tough for him. One of the rules held over from the game’s pioneer forms was “soaking.” In “soaking,” base runners could be put out not only by throws to a bag and by hand, but by throwing to hit them anywhere on the body. Conking the skull was preferable, because it might take a star opponent out of the lineup until his senses returned. In one game, Tyrus hit a shallow single. Taking off with a “yaaaaah!” scream to unnerve the fielder, he headed for second base. Came a blackout. He had been hit hard by a soaker to the ear. The next thing he knew, Aunt Norah was helping