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Who Was Ty Cobb? The History We Know That's Wrong

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Machiavelli:
Charles Leerhsen
Imprimis -- Hillsdale College
March 2016


--- Quote ---Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. He played in the major leagues--mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics--from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person--a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run. Indeed, many think of him as a murderer. Ron Shelton, the director of the 1995 movie Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones in the title role, told me it was "well known" that Cobb had killed "as many as" three people.

It is easy to understand why this is the prevailing view. People have been told that Cobb was a bad man over and over, all of their lives. The repetition felt like evidence. It started soon after Cobb's death in 1961, with the publication of an article by a man named Al Stump, one of several articles and books he would write about Cobb. Among other things, Stump claimed that when children wrote to Cobb asking for an autographed picture, he steamed the stamps off the return envelopes and never wrote back. In another book--this one about Cobb's contemporary Tris Speaker--baseball historian Timothy Gay wrote (implausibly, if you think about it) that Cobb would pistol-whip any black person he saw on the sidewalk. And then there were the stories about how Cobb sharpened his spikes: before every game, numerous sources claim, he would hone his cleats with a file. In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson says that Cobb wasn't invited to the ghostly cornfield reunion of old-time ballplayers because "No one liked that son of a bitch." The line always gets a knowing laugh.
--- End quote ---
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EasyAce:
That article has just convinced me to read the author's book.

rangerrebew:
I found it interesting Ken Burns failed to adequately research Cobb before he maligned Cobb in his schlockumentary. :tongue2:

EasyAce:

--- Quote from: rangerrebew on April 16, 2016, 02:20:56 pm ---I found it interesting Ken Burns failed to adequately research Cobb before he maligned Cobb in his schlockumentary. :tongue2:

--- End quote ---

I suspect it's much like Mr. Leerhsen said: the formerly prevailing view had become so entrenched by the
time Ken Burns put his documentary together. Just as had been, once upon a time, the Abner Doubleday
myth.

Hell, there are still people who think Curt Flood created free agency. (He didn't. He kicked one big door
ajar by standing up for players, but he lost in the Supreme Court. It took Andy Messersmith to blow open
the door Curt Flood kicked ajar.)

There are still people who think free agency "ruined" baseball. (It didn't. You can look it up. Baseball---the
team sport without the salary cap---has had more different World Series winners in the free agency
era than the NFL has had Super Bowl winners, the NHL has had Stanley Cup champions, or the NBA has
had Naismith Trophy winners, and baseball has also had more different World Series winners in the free
agency era than it had in the reserve era.)

Or, that the Yankees buy championships. (They don't. You can look this up too: in all the seasons of the
free agency era for which the Yankees spent like drunken navies, they didn't win; in all those seasons in
which they did win, they didn't spend half as much on player payroll. Hate them to your heart's content---
perhaps the best reason is because both they and their fans think they're entitled, mind you, to
win World Series---but don't do it over a myth.)

Or, that Walter O'Malley had nothing more than riches in mind when he moved the Dodgers west. (He
wasn't exactly ignorant of the prospects, but the real reason O'Malley left Brooklyn had to do with
New York building/planning fuehrer Robert Moses, who thwarted O'Malley's effort to build what
would have been the world's first retractable-roof stadium in Brooklyn when the Dodgers could no
longer expand Ebbets Field or its parking in the wake of Brooklyn's exponential postwar growth. Moses
also said, and you can look that up too, that nobody would ever again build a privately-owned sports
facility in New York, city or state---which is just what the new Dodger ballpark would have been---so
long as he had anything to say about New York building or planning. You can get the full story
in two books, Neil Sullivan's The Dodgers Move West, and Michael Shapiro's The Last Good
Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together. Including the affirmation
that Moses hoped to jam down O'Malley's throat a planned multipurpose stadium in Queens---which
eventually became Shea Stadium when opened in 1964.)

Or, that the 1919 Cincinnati Reds couldn't have beaten the 1919 White Sox in the World Series if
the Series had been played straight. (Yes, you can look that up, too: the White Sox were potent
enough but the 1919 Reds were a very formidable team in their own right. There is simply no
statistical evidence to suggest that, entering the 1919 Series, the Reds couldn't have held their
own and prevailed at least as strongly as the White Sox could.)

Or, that Herb Score's pitching career was finished when Gil McDougald hit the line drive off his face
in 1957. (It wasn't. Score did sit out the rest of the 1957 and returned in 1958. But he blew his
elbow out pitching in bad weather against Washington and missed another season. When he returned
in 1959, Score shifted his pitching motion hoping to avoid another elbow injury---and it messed him
up completely enough that that, not the liner in the face two years earlier, was why he'd never
be the same pitcher again that he was in 1955-56, when he was, essentially, Sandy Koufax before
Koufax became Koufax. Score lingered a few more years with the Indians and the White Sox, up
and down from the minors, until he gave it up for good in 1964 and was invited to join the Indians'
broadcast team---where he stayed for most of the rest of his life, until health problems forced his
retirement. He died in 2008.)

Or, thanks to A League of Their Own, that the Racine Belles beat the Rockford Peaches to win
the first All-American Girls Professional Baseball League championship. (Yep, you can look that
up---the Peaches finished dead last in the league in 1943, while the Belles, led by 33-game winner
Joanne Winter, beat the Kenosha Comets three straight in a best-of-five championship set. The
Peaches did eventually win a few titles [four, including three straight in 1948-50] and were one of the
only two teams---the South Bend Blue Sox was the other---to stay the distance for the entire twelve-
year life of the AAGPBL.)

Just to name a few. ;)

By the way, Rockford, Illinois has never forgotten the Peaches. The old ticket booth rig from their
old park still stands:

A-Lert:
The sports world is littered with myths  and misconceptions. That helps to keep it interesting. King Felix isn't pitching well today, uncharacteristically  wild, but has held the hated Yankees to one run through 5 innings. He just tied Randy Johnson's Mariners strikeout record.

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