More than any other professional
sport, baseball has always cared more about the perception of the game then the
reality. During the 20th century Major League Baseball went out of
its way to preserve the image of its players were no more imperfect then their
plaques in Cooperstown.
They did everything to make sure
no one knew what Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio were like when they were playing.
When Ball Four was published Commissioner Bowie Kuhn knew the best way
to make sure that the truth about the dirty secrets were hidden was to argue
that it produced a slanted picture of
Mickey Mantle – the most idolized player for twenty years – and that author Jim Bouton was burned in
effigy as opposed to baseball’s practiced. And when Jose Canseco tried to blow
the whistle on what was going on with steroids in the early 2000s, baseball
essentially turned on the messenger even though it was an open secret what was
going on to anyone with eyes.
The sole exception to that rule
during this period was Ty Cobb, arguably the greatest single hitter to ever
play the game and without question the most controversial for his behavior on
and off the field. Baseball has always gone out of its way to have its players
be good for the image of the game and Cobb always made that difficult. This was
the common view while he was an active player though the press did what it
usually did to cover it up. Once he was gone from the game they could just have
him show up for certain occasions and it wasn’t much of a problem. But after he
died in June of 1961, more than any other legend to that point the writers and
his contemporaries did more to lay bare the idea of just how hard it had been
to play around Cobb.
Well before Al Stump’s
unvarnished biography came out in 1994, the majority of the games greatest
historians had made it very clear that, despite being one of the greatest
players in history, Cobb was very close to the devil. Daniel Okrent would write
in his classic book Baseball Anecdotes that he was having trouble
squaring the great player with the personality and when he was interviewed for
Ken Burns’ documentary in 1993 he made it clear he thought Cobb was ‘the great
black mark on baseball” and that “in his totality, I think Ty Cobb is an
embarrassment to baseball.” This was the strongest comment by the scholars
Burns and Ward gathered but it was an opinion shared by such historians as
George Will and John Thorn. Bill James had done his own research on the subject
and Charles Alexander had dealt with the majority of the issues well before
Stump’s version came out.
Almost every story that Stump
related in his biography was independently verified by one or more of these
scholars during the filming of Burns’s documentary. Most of them do involve the
more racist incidents of his career but there are countless other stories told
in other books that don’t directly deal with Cobb. Donald Honig make it clear
in many of his histories of the game (much of which were based on interviews
with men who played with or against Cobb at the time) just how much trouble
Cobb could be when he was playing exclusively against white men and Robert
Creamer has verified some of his worst aspects in his own biography of Babe
Ruth in 1975.
It’s hard for anyone to look at
this evidence and try to say that Ty Cobb was just misunderstood. And yet that
seems to be what Charles Leershen has done in his 2016 biography of Cobb titled
A Terrible Beauty. I haven’t read this book (nor, I should add, have I
read Stump’s) but based on glancing at its pages in a book store and some of
his own articles written on it Leershen has apparently gone out of his way to
try and argue that Cobb wasn’t as bad as everyone said he was.
To be more specific, his big villain
is Al Stump who he goes out of his way is the author of the most prominent distortions
of Cobb as we see him today in his 1994 biography. I can’t say for sure if he’s
decided that every single person who did independent research decades earlier,
and came to the same conclusion as Stump (much of it well before it was published)
but I’m inclined to think that’s the revisionist in their natural habitat.
Much of those who try to argue
that Stump is the villain for making Cobb’s perception in history base it on
the fact that not long after it was published Ron Shelton made a film called Cobb
and that officially made it canon. The fact that the film received mixed
reviews and grossed less than a million dollars domestically would seem to
argue against the idea that America’s perception changed with that film but
Hollywood has always been an easy scapegoat for professional sports and I
suspect that’s what Leershen and fellow Cobb apologists base this on. I’ve seen
the film a few times and as either a work of art or a work of baseball history
is a sorely lacking; if anything it paints a better perception of Cobb that
what I’d previously read about him.
The kindest view of Cobb’s
attitude towards African-Americans that even the best apologists can come up
with is that it was the accepted view at the time. That is true as far as so
many of his contemporaries and major league baseball’s attitude in particular
towards blacks. However it should be added Cobb held to those views well past
the time they were held and while he said certain things about players in
public, he generally denounced both integration and all the major changes in
the game from the day he left it and while he was still playing it.
It doesn’t excuse the horrible
things he did on the field including nearly beating a disabled fan who called
him a racial epitaph during a 1912 game. This is the kind of behavior, I should
mention, that the world accused Allan Iverson of having gone too far when he
did it during an NBA game. Cobb almost certainly should have been banned for
that alone. And when Leershen tries to argue that his teammates supported him
by going on a one-day player strike, it says far more about their own racial
attitudes than the fact that they supported Cobb. Leershen seems to want to
have it both ways on this, and he doesn’t seem willing to do that. This is the
traditional mindset of the revisionist.
And its worth noting Leershen’s
book has no formal bibliography and only two paragraphs on secondary sources.
The first includes works on Cobb (with further bashing of Stump); the latter
just shows other books he consulted. His endnotes are argued as a historian as
a single paragraph of text with page numbers and brief commentary with a very
brief comment where material came from. Considering that Leershen is writing
his book a full half-century after Stump’s book and all previous witnesses are
dead, he bears an added responsibility to have done his due diligence on his
work. If you’re going to argue you have radical evidence deconstructing the history
of Cobb you have an obligation to show your work and you can’t just argue your
predecessors were wrong simply because you disagree with them. Otherwise you’re
just doing the kind of cherry picking that Leershen is accusing Stump is doing
but for a different end.
But perhaps the most telling
argument that Cobb doesn’t deserve to be looked at in a kindly light comes from
a book that was, in many ways, inspired by Cobb’s passing. In 1961 when Ty Cobb
died Lawrence Ritter thought it was important that someone “should do something
and do it quickly” to record for history the story of baseball:
“Ty Cobb symbolized America from
the turn of the century until World War I,” he writes in the forward to The
Glory of Their Times in 1966 “perhaps better than any other single
figure, just like Babe Ruth symbolized America between the wars and, in so many
ways, Mantle, Mays and Koufax do today. It was obvious the only way to do this
was to take a tape recorder and go and talk to as many old-time players as one
could find and ask them what it was like.”
So in what is still one of the
most ambitious historical projects of all time Ritter traveled more than 75,000
miles across the United States and Canada to do just that. The project took
nearly four years to complete and during that period Ritter talked to
twenty-six former ballplayers who had played from the turn of the century until
World War II. There were a few Hall-of-Famers in this group and a few
ballplayers became Hall-of-Famers (some of whom were very marginal cases) but
by and large he spent more time talking with the more obscure ones who even the
oldest inhabitant would not have heard of and those today would do well to look
up. And in 1966 The Glory of Their Times was published and very quickly
became one of the landmark books about baseball as well as one of the best ever
written. (Quite a bit of the material, I should add, is quoted in Baseball in
some forms.)
And decades after they had left
the field, these men were more than willing to talk about what they had done
and seen. And a lot of them had things to say about the men they played with
and against. And almost to a man, they are as best conflicted about Ty Cobb and
in many ways the grudges they held against him never went away. This is best
expressed by men who played with him.
Davy Jones actually played in the
Tigers Outfield with Cobb for seven years, including the three consecutive
seasons, 1907-1909, that the Tigers won American League Pennants. Here is what
he said about Cobb:
“Trouble was he had such a
rotten disposition that it was damn hard to be his friend. I was probably his best
friend on the club. I used to stick up for him, sit and talk with him on long
train trips, try to understand the man.”
Ty didn’t have a sense of humor,
you see. Especially, he could never laugh at himself. Consequently he took a
lot of things the wrong way…He was one of the greatest players who ever lived
and yet he had so few friends. I always felt sorry of him.
Arguing about his disposition and
why so few people liked him Jones is honest enough to admit “he brought a lot
of it on himself. A lot of times it just seems he was asking for trouble.”
Indeed on one occasion when Cobb
was in a slump and missed the hit and run sign, Cobb was so angry “I’m not
going to play with him.” The next day he went to Frank Navin, the President of
the club, and demanded Jones be traded. Navin set him straight and told Jones
later. “Well that shows what kind of person Cobb could be. Picking on me of
all people! Practically his only friend on the club.” He didn’t hold it against
Cobb but you can just see an eighty-year old Jones shaking his head in wonder
at this.
The next chapter deals with the
third man in that outfield Sam Crawford. Crawford, it should be mentioned, was one
of the greatest men to ever play the game. He had a lifetime batting average of
.309, managed 2961 hits (it was harder to find records of how many hits a
player got back then and drove in 1523 runs. But he also holds a record that
will surely never be broken: the most triples by a major league player with
309. He played his entire career in the deadball era (he retired in 1917) so
hitting home runs was never a necessary strength. That said he was one of the
best of that era averaging 97 in his career and once leading the National League
with 16. Cobb once said that if Crawford had played his career in the 1920s, he
would have hit at least four hundred home runs.
Crawford’s entry alone is worth
purchasing the book, as he talks about how he played against such greats as Wee
Willie Keeler, with the eccentric pitcher Rube Waddell in the minors, facing
off against Ed Walsh and Walter Johnson and namechecks such memorable figures
as Robert Ingersoll and Santayana. He played twelve years in the same outfield
as Cobb. But it says something that he thinks the greatest player of all time
was Honus Wagner.
He goes out of his way not to run
down Cobb, makes it clear he never tried to spike anybody and just how great a
hitter he was. But he’s very clear on his issues with Cobb, particularly his
argument about the hazing he claimed he took as a rookie:
Every rookie takes a little
hazing, but most of them just take it and laugh. Cobb took it the wrong way.
He came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any
little razzing into a life-or-death struggle. He came up from the South you
know, and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we
were all damn Yankees before he even met us.”
And this is the attitude of Cobb’s
teammates years after the fact. During his rookie season Cobb was
playing center field and the leftfield Matty McIntyre wasn’t playing deep
enough. The next ball was in the gap and to prove a point Cobb didn’t budge and
the ball went for a home run against Ed Siever, another tormentor and they
nearly came to blows. Mcintyre made it clear that they were planning to run
Cobb of the team.
During the 1908 Pennant race, he
was bloody in a brawl with catcher Charley Schmidt the Tiger Catcher. At the
end of the 1907 season, despite having won his first batting title and the
Tigers their first pennant, the management considered trading him. During the
1908 season, in the midst of a pennant race, he left the team for a week in
August to get married and his teammates were annoyed that he wasn’t penalized
for it. They let it go after he won his second batting title and the second straight
pennant, but it never stopped his being a one-man unit of disharmony.
Leershen acknowledges this in the
book but seems willing to excuse this, saying that by having fought with Cobb
that makes him wrong by default. He tries to argue that he was in favor of integration
because he said good things about it, once, in 1952, a quarter of a century
after he retired. As I recall during
that same period a lot of people in the South said that there were ‘plenty of
good Negroes” but that didn’t mean they personally wanted them in their lunch
counters and schools. Besides that just means he said it for the press. This is
a man who had no problem called Ruth the N-word when the two of them were
playing together.
I will acknowledge Ty Cobb is one
of the greatest players of all time: the statistics just don’t seem to do him
justice even in the record book. I don’t know how long it’s been since we’ve
seen a player win a batting title with a .366 average, which is Cobb’s lifetime
average, a mark that is safe to say will stand forever. He adds up to one of
the four or five greatest hitters to ever play the game.
But I will never accept, no
matter how many revisionists or apologists try to tell me otherwise, that he
wasn’t also one of the most horrible men to ever play any professional sport or
that if he’d played in any other era that he would have been allowed to get
away with the horrible things he did on and off the field. Unlike Okrent and
his colleagues I don’t think he’s a disgrace to the national pastime. But that
still doesn’t excuse his horrific attitude towards his opposition, his teammates
and often the game he played. He definitely deserves a better film made about
him then the one he got, but it’s not the reason so many people think horrible
things about him. We need to keep thinking about him the way his own teammates:
an extraordinary ballplayer and an impossible man. The latter will never fully
negate the former.
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