Jim Leyland is the first to admit it: You can’t place a lot of stock in what happens, good or bad, during the spring training games. “Spring training can be very deceiving,” the Tigers’ manager says.
        So why have it?
        Well, for one thing, it gets me out of Michigan for the worst part of winter. That’s reason enough for me, right there.
        Spring training was originally created, back in the late 1800s, to give ballplayers, many of whom were not exactly model citizens in those early days, if you know what I mean, a chance to dry out after a winter of over-indulgence. That’s why teams went south, often to Hot Springs, Ark., New Orleans, Georgia or Florida _ where the players could soak in the spas and sweat.
        The Washington Senators, with a catcher named Connie Mack, were the first  team to get into shape in Florida when they traveled by train south to Jacksonville in 1888.
        Years later, Mack recalled that only four of the 14  Senators reported to camp reasonably sober.
        In 1907, the Tigers trained in Augusta, Ga., already a popular resort destination for the rich that 27 years later would be renown world-wide as the home of The Masters.
        It was in Augusta, in 1905, that the Tigers first discovered a feisty young fellow named Ty Cobb.
        In the spring of ‘07, Cobb attacked a black groundskeeper who had the audacity to talk back to him when Ty complained about the condition of the field.
        Cobb chased the man into his cabin and choked the man’s wife when she tried to intervene. When Tigers’ catcher Boss Schmidt told Cobb to leave the man alone, Ty attacked his teammate.
        The attitude in the Deep South being what it was in those days, most of the townspeople sided with Cobb.
        After the Tigers broke camp and began barnstorming their way north, Cobb engaged Schmidt in battle again. Schmidt, who weighed 200 pounds, had boxed professionally and sometimes entertained teammates by driving nails into the clubhouse floor with his fist,  beat the younger, smaller Cobb to a pulp, breaking his nose and pounding both eyes shut.
        Schmidt might have killed Cobb if Tigers’ pitcher Wild Bill Donovan, also a former prize fighter, hadn’t pulled the two men apart.
        By the time the Tigers’ train reached Detroit, Ty’s wounds had healed. And on the first open date on the Tigers’ schedule, Cobb and Schmidt went fishing together on Lake St. Clair.