Monday Mystery: How did baseball great Ty Cobb almost die in World War I?

Christy Mathewson (left) and Ty Cobb, two future baseball Hall of Famers during wartime.
Photo: Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
Christy Mathewson (left) and Ty Cobb, two future baseball Hall of Famers during wartime. Photo: Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
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Augusta's Ty Cobb was known as one of baseball fiercest competitors, and no doubt many of his opponents would have liked to do him in. The closest that came to happening, however, was not on a baseball field, or back alley, but the battlefields of World War I France.

Exactly what happened, depends on whose memory we believe.

Most biographers let Cobb, one of baseball's first Hall-of-Famers, tell the story.

The close of the 1918 baseball season found the "Georgia Peach" an Army captain in the Chemical Warfare Service. There he joined other baseball notables – Christy Mathewson, Branch Rickey and George Sisler – in training recruits on handling poisonous gas, one of the war's more insidious innovations.

It was terrible.

At the first sign or scent of "the sweet smell of death," soldiers were expected to strap on the yellow, begoggled masks and begin breathing through a hose attached to a charcoal filter.

To teach this procedure, the Army would march the men into an airtight chamber, give a hand signal, then pump the room full of poisonous gas as the soldiers rushed to put on their masks.

Most of these recruits were not the cream of the military crop. Cobb would later call them "culls," rejects from other units. But it was thought they would pay attention if their instructors happened to be among the biggest stars in professional sport. It should be noted the celebrity instructors had received their own training just a week before.

Things did not go well on a fall day in 1918 at the Hanlon Air Base in Chaumont, France. Eighty men had entered the sealed chamber, but almost none of them saw the hand signal signifying that poisonous gas was being pumped into the room.

When the recruits suddenly smelled the gas, pandemonium broke out.

"I'll never be able to forget that day when some of the men – myself included – missed the signal," Cobb later wrote in his autobiography "My Life In Baseball."

"Men screamed to be let out when they got a sudden whiff of the sweet death in the air. They went crazy with fear and in a fight to get out jammed up in a hopeless tangle," Cobb wrote.

"I fixed my mask, groped my way to the wall and worked through the thrashing bodies to the door. Trying to lead the men out was hopeless. It was each of us in there for himself."

Sixteen men were laid out afterward and eight of them died, Cobb would write. It was a detail repeated by subsequent authors Al Stump and Charles Alexander.

Cobb said he was sick for a week, coughing and discharging liquid from his lungs.

Ty Cobb (left) shakes hands with fellow baseball star Honus Wagner.
Ty Cobb (left) shakes hands with fellow baseball star Honus Wagner.

Mathewson never recovered, Cobb would insist, and the lethal poison "Matty" had gulped that day would hasten his death from tuberculosis seven years later.

It was the story Cobb would tell the rest of his life, but it was not the story Mathewson biographer Ray Robinson told.

Tuberculosis, a common affliction in the Mathewson family, is what led to his death, not the accident Cobb so vividly described, Robinson wrote.

He also quoted Branch Rickey, the baseball exec who broke the sport's racial ban by playing Jackie Robinson, saying Mathewson didn't suffer as Cobb described.

"I was with him immediately afterward," Rickey said. "and to my knowledge Matty had no mishap." In fact, Rickey said he watched as Mathewson won a field training broad jump contest soon after.

There was, however, a later incident, Robinson wrote, in which Mathewson could have sustained a more serious gas exposure. It was also known that he suffered from a bout of the Spanish Flu that struck thousands in military service.

The most recent Cobb biographer, Charles Leerhsen, offers the old star's recollection, but also reports there is no evidence to corroborate the fatal mishap, just Cobb's account.

The war, itself, ended soon after the accident and Cobb went back home to Augusta, where he marked his 32nd birthday a week before Christmas and told reporters he might be ready to retire.

He didn't.

In 1919 he would return to the Detroit Tigers and win the American League batting title.

Bill Kirby has reported, photographed and commented on life in Augusta and Georgia for 45 years.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Trapped in a room with poison gas, baseball great Ty Cobb almost died