https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Mickey-Cochrane/
Original article written by Charlie Bevis
Researched and compiled by Carrie Birdsong
Cochrane wasn’t just a great baseball player,
though. He was a hero and role model to
millions of people during the Great Depression of the 1930s when as a
player-manager of the Detroit Tigers he led the downtrodden Tigers to their
first pennant in 25 years. The
combination of Cochrane’s fierce competitiveness on the filed and his likable
personality off the field, mixed with his successful rise from humble
beginnings, helped Americans take their minds off the widespread unemployment
during the Great Depression and encouraged them that they too could weather the
economic times. Many parents named their
children after Cochrane, including one Oklahoma family named Mantle.
Playing for the Philadelphia Athletics and Detroit
Tigers, Cochrane led five teams to American League pennants during the seven years from 1929 through 1935, an era most fans remember as being
dominated by Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees. Three of these five teams went on to win
World Series titles. Cochrane was the
catcher on Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics team that won three
consecutive pennants from 1929 to 1931.
It was as player-manager of the Detroit Tigers, however, that Cochrane
achieved national fame and adulation, leading the Tigers to pennants in 1934
and 1935, and to Detroit’s first World Series title in 1935.
Cochrane was born on April 6, 1903, in Bridgewater,
Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children of immigrants John and Sadie
Cochrane. His parents were both of
Scottish descent. John Cochrane was born
near Omagh, Northern Ireland, where his family had moved from Scotland, while
Sadie Campbell was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, where her family had
emigrated from Scotland.
This Scottish heritage made it rather ironic that
Cochrane would eventually be tagged with his nickname “Mickey,” based on the
belief that he was just another Irish “mick,” when Tom Turner signed Cochrane
in the fall of 1923 to play for Portland in the Pacific Coast League. Understandably, then, no one in the family or
anyone who knew Cochrane well ever called him Mickey. Instead, he was known as Mike in his private
life while the public called him Mickey.
As for his given name Gordon, only his parents called him that when
Cochrane was an adult.
On the sandlots of Bridgewater and the playing fields
of Boston University, where he matriculated after graduating from Bridgewater
High School in June 1920, Cochrane was known by the nickname “Kid” before he
acquired the Mickey moniker. By his own
admission and the observation of others, Kid Cochrane was a much better
football and basketball player than he was a baseball player during his high
school and college years. On the
baseball diamond, Cochrane also rarely played catcher, but rather mostly played
shortstop or the outfield.
While football may have been Cochrane’s passion,
baseball was to be his meal ticket. He
couldn’t support a family by playing in the fledgling days of professional
football in the 1920s, but he could make enough money by playing baseball for a
living. In 1923 while still in college,
he played under the assumed name of Frank King for Dover in the Class D Eastern
Shore League, filling a spot on the team that Dover was lacking: catcher. After battling .327 for first-place Dover,
Cochrane signed to play in 1924 or Portland in the PCL. Cochrane dropped out of BU, batted .333 at
Portland, and then joined the Philadelphia Athletics for the 1925 season.
“I didn’t want to be a catcher. It was thrust upon me, as they say in the
classics,” Cochrane told New York Times writer John Kieran in
1931. “I was in a fever to get out from
behind the plate. Oh boy, I was terrible
back there.”
An unsung cast helped Cochrane learn the catching
trade and shaped him into a great catcher.
His benefactors included Jiggs Donahue (manager at Dover), Tom
Daly (catcher at Portland), and Cy Perkins (Athletics catcher),
whose job Cochrane eventually took over before 1925 concluded. In his waning years playing for the Athletics in 1927-28, Ty Cobb also had a hand in refining the tenacity that
became a Cochrane hallmark.
Cochrane was one of the cogs in Connie Mack’s dynamite
team that copped three consecutive American League pennants from 1929 to
1931. The Athletics won the World Series
in 1929 and 1930 but were stymied by Pepper Martin and the St. Louis
Cardinals in 1931. Unfortunately, the
Great Depression forced Mack to sell off his star-studded lineup in 1932 and
1933 to pay the bills. Cochrane was
sold to Detroit and became player-manager of the Detroit Tigers.
Without that transaction, Cochrane likely would have
retired from the game simply as a very good catcher. The Detroit job propelled Cochrane into
greatness, a role for which he was unprepared and, in many respects, ill-suited. While Cochrane won two straight
pennants in Detroit in his first two years there, 1934 and 1935, the success
cost him his health and nearly his life in the process. Cochrane never liked the limelight in Detroit
and was even burdened by it.
“When I was a player, I worried only about
myself. Good money and easy work,”
Cochrane once said, according to a 1960 profile in Sport magazine. “Now I have to worry about everybody. I have to see that they’re not in shape and
stay in shape. If one of them eats
something that makes them sick, I get sick too.”
Cochrane was perceived as such a civic savior that his
picture graced the cover of Time magazine on October 7, 1935. Inside that issue was a story that noted,
“Cochrane’s arrival in Detroit coincided roughly with the revival of the
automobile industry and the first signs of revived prosperity. His determined jolly face soon came to
represent the picture of what a dynamic Detroiter ought to look like.”
It was too much for Cochrane. Following the World Series victory in 1935,
he suffered a breakdown in 1936 after being elevated to general manager in
addition to his player-manager duties.
On May 25, 1937, soon after his recovery from the breakdown, he was hit
in the head by a pitch from Yankee pitcher Bump Hadley in those
helmetless days and was nearly killed, ending his major league playing
career. Cochrane came back as bench
manager in 1938 but was ineffective outside his playing-field leadership and
was fired on August 6, 1938. He was a
great leader on the field but cast as a “caged lion” bench manager, he never
managed again in the major leagues.
His last managerial role was at the Great Lakes Naval
Training Center outside Chicago, where Cochrane ran a baseball team for the
Navy during World War II, from 1942 to 1944.
Except for a brief stint as general manager of the Athletics in 1950
during Mack’s final days in Philadelphia, and a brief outing as a scout with the
New York Yankees in the mid-1950s, Cochrane never again worked in major league
baseball.
Cochrane had all the attributes expected of a great
catcher – mastery of calling pitches, good arm, and defensive capabilities –
which he supplemented with a mastery of human nature. his psychological knack for handling
pitchers, treating each one differently according to perceived needs, helped to
maximize pitching efforts on the mound.
He also had the attributes expected of any great ballplayer. He hit for average, drew walks, had
above-average speed on the basepaths, and could hit for power when needed.
Over his 13-season playing career, Cochrane compiled a
.320 lifetime batting average, the best among all retired major league catchers
(but not current-day receiver Mike Piazza) to rank among the top 50 of
all players. His best season at bat was
1930 when he hit .357, good for fifth-best in the American League after having
led the league in hitting at the end of June that year with a .404 average.
His exceptional batting eye was also reflected in his
patience at waiting out pitchers, piling up 857 career walks and a top 60
ranking in walk percentage. Cochrane
also struck out less than once in every 24 plate appearances – topped by just 8
whiffs in 514 at-bats in 1929 – to rank among the top 35 in at-bats per
strikeout.
Cochrane’s exceptional .419 career on-base average
ranks in the top 20 among all players.
While OBP has historically been an overlooked measure of baseball
success, recent research now shows how valuable the frequency of getting on
base is to team-run production, and so how OBP relates to team victories. Demonstrating how valuable he was to his
teams, Cochrane ranks in the top 50 of Total Player Rating Per 150 Games with
3.22 additional team victories per season above the average player (compared to
#1 Babe Ruth with a 6.53 TPR).
While hitting just 119 home runs in his career,
Cochrane had 654 triples, the most among Hall of Fame catchers that played in
the 20th century. His ability
to launch doubles and triples lands him just outside the game’s top 100 in
slugging percentage with his .475 average.
Cochrane’s lack of home run production over his career – which wasn’t
required because he batted in front of such sluggers as Al Simmons, Jimmie
Foxx, and Hank Greenberg – has somewhat unfairly diminished the
luster of his contribution to the game.
In his first 11 years in the majors, Cochrane never
caught fewer than 110 games in the then 154-game season. He perfected the one-hand catching style to
help protect the fingers on his throwing hand from getting overly banged
up. Cochrane assisted two pitchers to
establish 16-game winning streaks, still the American League record, when Lefty
Grove accomplished the feat with the A’s in 1931 and Schoolboy Rowe with the
Tigers in 1934.
Cochrane was selected as American League MVP twice, in
1928 and 1934, primarily on his leadership abilities rather than his
statistical accomplishments. On the
field, Cochrane had a certain inspiration that encouraged other players to do
their best. Cochrane never played on a
team that finished worse than third place.
His happiest post-playing days were at his Montana
ranch in the late 1940s, where he operated a dude ranch with his wife Mary and
daughters Joan and Sara. His only son,
Gordon Jr., died on a battlefield in Europe in World War II. At the ranch, Cochrane could be just plain
“Mike,” his preferred nickname and what anyone close to him called him, rather
than “Mickey” which was his baseball persona.
Joining Cochrane in Montana were his father and two brothers Archie and
Bert (his mother died in 1942), who lived there full-time while Cochrane
divided his time between the 4K ranch in the foothills of the Beartooth Range
of the Rockies and his home outside of Chicago.
One of the last vestiges of the Cochrane family in Montana is the Archie
Cochrane Ford dealership in Billings.
The twin nicknames symbolized Cochrane’s dual nature,
where he was tough on the ball field but gentle off it, sort of hard on the
outside but soft on the inside. “Mickey”
Cochrane was renowned for his on-field tenacity, playing baseball with a take-no-prisoners attitude. This was
exemplified by the oft-reprinted photograph of his leaping through the air to
tag a runner out at home plate – a feat that occurred during a 1933 exhibition
game that had no impact in the league standings. “Mike” Cochrane loved music, dancing, playing
the saxophone, and helping friends and associates, especially financially,
during the tough times of the Great Depression (although his generosity
with money was often repaid by its recipients).
These two aspects of Cochrane’s personality clashed
several times in very public ways. In
his later Detroit years, he picked up the less-than-esteemed nickname “Black
Mike,” which in a positive way related to the gritty image of a diligent
catcher but also hinted at the dark side of the man. Cochrane had a difficult time coping with
stressful situations where failure seemed imminent. In the 1931 World Series, after losing money
in a bank failure, he was embarrassed that Pepper Martin stole so many
bases. In the 1934 World Series, he was
hospitalized after the sixth game when the Cardinals rallied to overtake the
Tigers who had been on the verge of winning the series. He came back for the seventh game, but the
Tigers were already whipped and lost 11-0 in a game best remembered for the
disappointed Detroit fans showering garbage on St. Louis left fielder Ducky
Medwick, forcing Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to remove him
from the game. Of course, the 1936
regular season breakdown was telling, after he assumed the general manager duties in addition to his player-manager responsibilities. This element of his character likely resulted
in his being left out of organized baseball following his 1938 firing in
Detroit.
In the late 1950s, Cochrane developed lymphatic
cancer, which claimed his life prematurely at age 59 on June 28, 1962, in Lake
Forest, Illinois. His body was cremated. His wife Mary survived him by nearly 37
years, dying on June 16, 1999, in Scottdale, Arizona.
Unfortunately, many people perceive Cochrane as subsisting on handouts in his later years from his old friend Ty Cobb, thanks
to Al Stump’s 1994 biography of Cobb.
Cochrane’s wife and daughter have denied the allegation, which was
likely due to Cobb’s failing memory in his last years. A Cochrane biographer believes that Cobb
remembered lending Cochrane some money, but apparently failed to recall its
repayment after Cochrane sold his Montana ranch in the late 1950s.
Whether Cochrane is the greatest catcher in baseball
history is of course subject to intense debate.
Yogi Berra, Bill Dickey, and Roy Campanella are often
selected to all-time teams although Cochrane has had his share of such honors,
including the 1969 baseball centennial team.
Cochrane is one of just 15 catchers enshrined in the Hall of Fame
(following the 2003 induction of Gary Carter) and one of only eight
elected by the baseball writers, so he is certainly one of the game’s greatest
catchers – if not the best in the minds of some observers.
This biography is included in the book “Detroit the Unconquerable: The 1935 World Champion Tigers” (SABR, 2014), edited by Scott Ferkovich.
Sources
1. Bevis, Charlie. Mickey Cochrane: The Life of a
Baseball Hall of Fame Catcher. Jefferson, North
Carolina: McFarland, 1998.
2. Cochrane family interviews, 1991-1996.
3. Dooly, Bill. “How Cochrane, Who Disliked
Catching, Became One of the Game’s Best
Backstops.” The Sporting News, February 7,
1929.
4. Duncan, C. William. “Mickey Cochrane, Always
a Fighter, Should Bring Back to Detroit Tigers
Scrappy Ways of Ty Cobb.” The Sporting News,
December 21, 1933.
5. Graham, Frank. “The Mickey Cochrane Story.”
Sport, December 1955.
6. Kieran, John. “The Man in the Iron Mask.”
New York Times, April 22, 1931.
7. Lane, F.C. “All the World Calls Him Mickey.”
Baseball Magazine, August 1929.
8. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library,
Cochrane subject file.
9. Newcombe, Jack. “Black Mike of the Tigers.”
Sport, April 1960.
10. Salinger, H.G. “What Price a Pennant?”
Detroit News, September 26, 1934.
11. Temple University Library, Urban Archives,
Philadelphia newspaper clipping file on
Cochrane.
Full Name: Gordon Stanley Cochrane.
Born: April 6, 1903, at Bridgewater, MA (USA).
Died: June 28, 1962, at Lake Forest, IL (USA).
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