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Train the 5 Tools | Hard 90 Baseball | El Dorado Hills Professional baseball scouts evaluate players on a 20-80 scale on the 5 tools of baseball - hit, hit for power, throw, run and field. When MLB evaluators give ...

On August 30, 1905, Ty Cobb took his first Major League at bat.

When Cobb reported for duty at Detroit's Bennett Field manager Bill Armour told him to “go get a glove and go out there,” pointing toward the Detroit Tribune billboard in center. He’d be batting fifth.

Scheduled to pitch for the New York Highlanders was the formidable righty Jack Chesbro, a specialist in the spitball, which was legal then and would remain so for another 14 years.

The future Hall of Famer never claimed to be a showman. With no need to be secretive about his “saliva pitch,” Chesbro would stand on the mound and lick his fingers, then apply his “tobacco juice” to the ball.

The brownness made his pitches difficult to see; the moisture lent them a maddeningly unpredictability. Chesbro called the spitter “the greatest invention of the baseball age.”

For catchers, whose mitts were mitten-sized, it was difficult to handle, and of course disgusting to touch. Highlanders backstop James “Deacon” McGuire objected to it on sanitary grounds, but his opinion didn’t matter in light of Chesbro’s phenomenal results. In 1904, using the spitter in combination with a mysterious “slowball,” “Happy Jack,” as the grumpy Chesbro was ironically known, had gone 41-12, still the best pitching record ever compiled. As the Detroit Free Press said of Cobb the next day, “For a young man anxious to get along in the world it was not an auspicious occasion.”

About 1,200 turned out for the Tigers-Highlanders matchup. When it was time for the Tigers to hit they likely surprised themselves by getting to Chesbro early. No sooner had Silk O’Loughlin, the sole umpire on duty, shouted “Baa-a-rup!” than leadoff man Matty McIntyre was on with a line-drive double to left. Then light-hitting first baseman Pinky Lindsay knocked in the runner with a single, and Germany Schaefer got Lindsay over to second with a sacrifice bunt.

Sam Crawford was next up, to be followed by Cobb. Before handing him the big homemade bat he’d use in his first major league plate appearance, Tigers batboy Frank Brady kissed it for good luck.

As strange as that may sound, it was no big deal at the time. Baseball in 1905 was already rife with superstitions and weird rites. No peanuts in the clubhouse, never walk between the pitcher and the umpire, don’t let the ump toss his little whisk broom onto your side of the field and for God’s sake don’t step on the foul line.

Tigers pitcher Bill Donovan believed it bad luck to strike out the first batter, so he went out of his way not to. Connie Mack, often thought of as the game’s greatest sage, carried the right hind foot of a rabbit that had been killed in a graveyard at midnight by a hunchbacked Negro, and so on. If kissing a bat sounds odd, consider that Jack Fournier, when he played for the 1912 Chicago White Sox, kissed teammate Russell Blackburne before each plate appearance. What batboy Brady did on the Tiger bench would not have turned many heads in 1905.

Crawford gently knocked one back to the box. Cobb came to the plate, then, with two outs and Lindsay on third.

Chesbro’s first pitch was a high spitter that Ty lunged at amateurishly. The next pitch he took—a curve that dropped straight down over the plate. “Stee-rike Tuh!” said O’Loughlin. Then came another fastball, this one not so fast and waist high, which Cobb, letting both hands slide down toward the k**b of his bat, drove smoothly into the gap in left center. “Believe me,” he said many years later, “it was some proud kid who sped around to second amidst the cheers of the crowd.”

--from TY COBB: A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

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