Jack Coombs: A Life in Baseball (review)

Jack Coombs was an outstanding major-league pitcher for three years, but only a sub-.500 hurler for the rest of his career. That’s not the sort of resume that would typically presage a book-length biography, but Coombs was not your typical ballplayer. Although he wasn’t the genuine Hall of Fame candidate that his biographer, John P. Tierney, would like him to have been, he was nevertheless a considerable figure in the baseball world during the first half of the last century.

Coombs’s brief period of dominance as a major-league pitcher reflected only part of his impact on the baseball world. He later served with distinction for many years as the baseball coach at Duke University, whose baseball field bears his name to this day. So does the diamond at his alma mater, Colby College in Maine, where Coombs was a chemistry major and a four-sport man. He also authored one of the most prominent instructional books of his time, Baseball: Individual Play and Team Strategy, which went through many printings over several decades.

Immediately after his graduation from Colby in 1906, Coombs joined the defending American League champion Philadelphia Athletics, appearing in his first game a week later. His performance over the next few years was promising but spotty. He hit his stride in 1910, winning 31 games during the regular season and three more in the World Series. After another superlative season in 1911 he seemed well on his way to superstardom, but illnesses and injuries derailed his career. Still, “Colby Jack” Coombs is rightly regarded as one of the key members of Connie Mack’s great 1910–14 A’s teams.

Mack’s release of Coombs following the 1914 season was something of a mystery at the time, and it remains so despite the efforts of a number of researchers, Tierney among them, to clear it up. Various ailments had limited Coombs to a grand total of 13 innings in the previous two seasons combined, but he was still considered a valuable property. Tierney attributes the release to the fact that Coombs had gone on what he terms a “politically incorrect” (118) hunting trip with Danny Murphy, a longtime Athletic who had secretly scouted for the Braves prior to the 1914 World Series. A more likely explanation was that Mack didn’t want to gamble his diminishing funds on a rickety Coombs, particularly given his stable of young hurlers at that time. However, that view, although plausible, is not necessarily accurate. As Tierney notes, Mack told Charles Ebbets, the owner of the Brooklyn team that ultimately signed Coombs, that Colby Jack’s arm was sound. He appears to have been correct, as Coombs gave the Robins a couple of good seasons, helping them to the National League pennant in 1916 before undergoing his final decline as a hurler.

The relationship between Coombs and Mack was notable, and Tierney duly notes it. Mack and Coombs continued to have cordial and supportive relations after the release, as evidenced in part by Mack’s letter to Ebbets on Colby Jack’s behalf. That fact speaks well of both men, particularly given that Mack was an arch-conservative while Coombs was a Quaker and a member of the Progressive Party.

Tierney is an able writer, and the material he has selected for this book is generally well-chosen. He makes occasional gaffes with respect to word choice, for example when he states that at one point Colby Jack was “literally carrying his team.” Sounds painful. Tierney was especially fortunate in the timing of Norman Macht’s splendid volume on Connie Mack’s early years, published a year before the Coombs bio went to press.

At times, Tierney tries to make a case for Coombs’s enshrinement in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, ultimately settling for Lee Allen’s assessment that his subject “almost certainly would have made the grade . . . had not injury and illness shortened his career” (186). Of more interest is Tierney...