Several years ago my ex-girlfriend (who at that time wasn’t sporting the “ex” prefix) asked me who I thought was the greatest ballplayer of all time.
No great sports fan herself, it came as no surprise when, in response to my answer, she raised her eyebrows and said, “Ty Cobb? Never heard of him.”
I told her that was because Cobb had started his illustrious career before my father was born─ my father was eight years old when Cobb hung up his spikes for the last time.
“How can you consider him the greatest of all time if you’ve never seen him play?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “You didn’t ask me who was the greatest ballplayer I’ve ever seen. That would be Kaline─the last Tiger elected to the Hall of Fame and the first to have his number retired.”
“If Cobb was so great, why didn’t he have his number retired?”
“Players didn’t wear numbers in Cobb’s time.”
“Oh. So what makes him the greatest?”
“Well,” I said, “for starters, he set no fewer than ninety major league records, several still stand today, including highest career batting average (.367) and most batting titles (eleven, nine of them consecutively). Those two records alone will likely never be bested. He stole home fifty-four times, and four times, after reaching first base, he stole second, third and home on successive attempts, often after telling the battery of his intention.
I went on to tell her that Cobb once scored from second base on a sacrifice bunt and from first base on a routine single to right field.
Cobb was a field general, endeavoring to force the opposition to make a play by doing the unexpected. He once stole home while the third baseman and pitcher were discussing a defensive alignment. This was before timeouts were called between pitches.
In 1909 he led the league with nine homeruns (remember, Cobb played in the dead ball era)─all inside the park, becoming the only player to lead his league in homeruns for a season without hitting a ball over the fence.
He revolutionized base stealing as an offensive weapon, perfecting the hook slide and, yes, sharpening his spikes before games; he was as apt to hook slide as put a defender in the hospital.
He reviled Ruth and the homerun, saying his sister could hit homeruns in Yankee Stadium, with its 297-foot right field fence. The Babe may have called his shot, but Cobb once announced that for the next two games he would hit only for power. In the first game he went six for six, hitting three homeruns, driving in seven runs, scoring four and amassing sixteen total bases. In the next game Cobb went three for four and hit two more homeruns.
In 1936 he was the first player elected to the Hall of Fame, amassing 98.2 percent of the votes. That, too, was a record, until Tom Seaver received 98.8 percent of the vote in 1992.
The Sporting News in 1998 ranked Cobb as the third greatest ballplayer of all time, behind Ruth and Mays respectively, which in my mind is a sham. Ruth may have been more popular with the fans and Mays’ skills better than Cobb’s, but no one has had a greater impact on the game than Cobb. He forever changed the way the game is played and could win a game by himself, coaxing a walk, stealing first, second and home, to beat a team 1-0.
Shortly after this discussion with my then girlfriend, we watched Cobb, Ron Shelton’s 1994 film starring Tommy Lee Jones based on the Al Stump biography. The film depicts Ty Cobb as mean-spirited and racist. Make no mistake, racism of any sort is wrong, but consider that Cobb was born a mere twenty years after the Civil War. He grew up working alongside blacks on his father’s farm in Georgia.
While the Civil War won freedom for blacks, blacks still had, in Cobb’s time, a long way to go before winning any semblance of equality. Cobb’s perception of blacks as inferior, while inarguably wrong, was common in his era.
The truth is Cobb had many run-ins with a lot of people─black and white─whom he perceived as “uppity.”
Major league baseball was, in Cobb’s time, segregated, and Cobb was the first player from the south ever to play in the bigs. A Baptist with a southern accent, he was estranged, viewed as an outsider, hazed mercilessly by his own team mates, who sawed his bats in half, locked him out of hotel bathrooms, cut up his clothes, put horse manure in his shoes, and threw at his feet during batting practice.
In Cobb’s own words: “These old-timers turned me into a snarling wildcat.”
Cobb was also not a good father or husband. His wife divorced him over repeated abuse and his children wanted little to do with him.
He once pistol-whipped to death a man in an alley who, so Cobb claimed, tried to rob him.
Yes, Cobb was a monster both on and off the field, a monster in part created by his team mates as well as by the fans who accepted his behavior in deference to his talent, driven by many demons, not the least of which was the supposedly accidental shooting death of his father by his mother. It was rumored that his father suspected his wife of an affair and that she shot him when she had been caught with her lover. She claimed her husband was away on business that night, and that she thought he was an intruder. A jury found her not guilty of manslaughter.
Cobb’s father never approved of Ty playing baseball, and when it became apparent that he could not influence his son to pursue a more respectable career, he told Ty not to come home a failure.
Cobb’s father was killed a week before the Tigers called up Cobb to the big leagues, and so he never got to see his son play, a fact Ty lamented: “He never got to see me play. Not one game, not an inning. But I knew he was watching me... and I never let him down. Never.”
It’s true, what Ernest Hemingway, who for a time hung out with Cobb in the 1930s, wrote of Cobb: “The greatest of all ballplayers, and an absolute sh-t.”
So when my girlfriend, after having watched the movie with me, turned to me and asked, “So why is this terrible human being in the Hall of Fame?” I could only say: “Sometimes greatness has little to do with goodness.”
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